Source for Enterprise's designation as 'Heavy Cruiser'

[publiusr]

Another thing that's interesting to me is the lack of ship-killer weapons in Star Wars.


It seems like the only thing the small craft can do against a capital ship is swarm them in great numbers. There doesn't seem to be much chance of a single X- or Y-wing putting a star destroyer out of action.

REBELS souped up the early Mon Cal B-wings to be ship killers…before they were nerfed…though that honor should have gone to Skipray Blast-boats or Marauders

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/GAT-12_Skipray_Blastboat
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Marauder-class_corvette

The Falcon just had light ack-ack, as it were..with some merculite type concussion missiles

 

[WAMTNG]

DS9 showed Federation fighters.

If those count, you could say the same of "Best of Both Worlds Part 2", right...? I mean, they get popped like balloons, but still.

 

[WAMTNG]

Fighters in space don't make any real sense at all... In short, there's nothing a fighter can do that can't be done better by a computerized drone

Aye, but a drone fighter is still a fighter to me - the point was about size of the hull (at least for me it was). And in the context of Federation ethics, autonomous combat vehicles ought to be a serious issue...

 

[WAMTNG]

Very early TNG used naval designations, but that didn’t last past the first season:
...
USS Horatio - heavy cruiser
USS Renegade - frigate
USS Thomas Paine - frigate

All three of those designations occur in a single script, in two consecutive lines. Although the other two are from different episodes.
What seems to be happening here is that in scripts where you do not see a model of the ship, the writers inserted naval designations to add some gravitas to the mention of the ships. But as you say: only in season one TNG... I think after that, we don't get many off-screen ships, though.

 

[Dukhat]

All season one, that's interesting. Has a "destroyer" ever been mentioned?

Not to my knowledge, at least not in TNG.

 

[Christopher]

Has a "destroyer" ever been mentioned?

I searched Chakoteya's transcript site for the word. There were a number of references to non-Starfleet destroyers, e.g. Klingon, Cardassian, Yridian, and Lysian -- and a WWII American destroyer ship was alluded to in ENT: "Storm Front." The only reference to Starfleet destroyers was in DS9: "Sacrifice of Angels": "Mister O'Brien, have destroyer units two and six move in closer."

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Fighters in space don't make any real sense at all

Perhaps not. But they look cool, and that's all that really matters in the end.