Over the last week, EG to Warfare author Jason Fry has been releasing notes from the book’s development. The trend continues this week as he posts a third batch of end notes.

Whenever an author is working on a comprehensive guide that has to seamlessly fuse together numerous eras and writings from other countless authors and publishers, things tend to go sideways as far as canon continuity goes. One area where the canon often contradicted itself was the tricky subject of just what constitutes a capitol ship in the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

All the systems agreed that capital ships began with corvettes (100m-200m), after which came frigates (200m-400m) and then cruisers. Above cruiser, things were fluid in terms of which names to use and where to divide the classes.

My first stab at the Anaxes War College System divided cruisers into three subclasses:light (400m-600m), medium (600m-900m) and heavy (900m-1,600m), followed by battlecruisers and dreadnoughts (4,000m and longer). In addition, I proposed a shorthand system of three generic classes – gunships, cruisers and battleships – that I imagined would be used by officers in the heat of battle. The generic classifcations were good cover for a host of contradictions from the movies and books (lots of things are called “battleships” in lots of sources), made the all-over-the-map use of “cruiser” slightly more sensible, and meant I could stop writing things like “big capital ships” in Warfare.

As a self-professed fleet junkie, I was thrilled to see Fry put together such a clear and concise classification system. Sure, this might trump some obscure canon in already-written books, but authors finally have a reference to go to moving forward.

For more tidbits from the third batch of notes, hop on over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.