Warship designation

[uk 75]

Back in the 60s as a kid reading Janes Fighting ships I remember being puzzled by the fact that navies had different ideas of what to call a ship. The US Navy were calling its big missile ships frigates. The Royal Navy had destroyers which were nearly as big as old light cruisers. But its future frigates and destroyers in the 70s were a similar size.
Today with the US Zumwalt being cruiser size and talk of the Aegis cruisers (the CG47s started life as Spruance DDG47s) being replaced by destroyers reminds me that I am as baffled by these terms as I was at 12.

 

[Hood]

When gun-armed ships went out of vogue there was less sense of what constituted a classification based on firepower and a shift towards ratings on capabilities. Generally these have merged over time.
I always thought the Russian/Soviet classifications made more sense in being more descriptive of the actual role.

 

[johnpjones1775]

Since the topic has sprung up elsewhere threatening to derail those discussions, figured I’d just necro an old thread on the topic.

For reference the discussion involved cruisers having flag spaces and destroyers not having them.

Personally I’m partial to an old school rating system like we saw in the age of sail returning, based on battle force missile count(ESSM equivalents and up for SAMs, full sized ASMs, ASROC and land attack missiles)
>/= 7 unrated/sloop/whatever
8-16 corvette
17-36 frigate
37-100 destroyer
101-150 cruiser
151+ battleship

So by this metric FFX batch 1 would fall into the corvette category, while the batch 2s would likely fall into the lower end of frigate.

And my personal concept ship that where I have cruiser in the name would actually fall into the middle of the destroyer range.

Edit
I am also generalizing 1VLS cell=1 BFM, so ESSM quad packing would increase the overall actual missile count.