And if there are ancient alien intelligences out there who seek our doom, it will be the big ships that marshal the power to stop them, defeat them, and-should they not agree to go quietly into that good night-blow them to Kingdom Come. These are the big ships of the future, the powerful ships that will allow us to face a harsh universe toe-to-toe. It isn’t so much that they destroy stars, as that when such a ship speaks with her guns, the stars themselves might be seen to quiver. When manned by a trained crew under skilled officers, they are not mere objects. They are the first cyborgs in a very real sense, for men are a component of the weapon. It is not only the sheer power of such ships that speaks to the warrior soul, however. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships-a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea.” This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. “Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. Herman Wouk states it beautifully in his World War II masterpiece, The Winds of War: The allure goes beyond sheer power and gets at the intricacy of men inhabiting what amounts to a small world-a world dedicated to one purpose. It matches (and is probably derived from) battleship nostalgia in the world’s saltwater navies.
There’s an allure to the battleship, the destroyer, and other big ships of war, going back to the earliest days of science fiction.
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