Nike-class

The Nike-class Battlecruiser is a fictional class of spaceship in David Weber's Honorverse, a series of science fiction novels which depict space warfare in the 41st Century.

In the Honorverse, Battlecruisers (BC) are hyperspace capable warships used for both commerce protection and commerce raiding; their offensive power allows battlecruisers to destroy any ship fast enough to catch them, while their acceleration allows them to outrun any ship capable of destroying them.

Thanks to technological advances originated in the Manticoran Alliance (one of two factions engaged in a long and brutal war) in longer ranged multi-drive missiles, battlecruiser design is in a period of flux. Some newer designs opted for a missile pod based format, a kind of scaled down pod Laying superdreadnaught, but without the massive armor or large missile capacities of a superdreadnaught. The Nike class design is closer to a conventional battlecruiser. Instead of hollowing out the core for missile pods, it uses smaller dual drive missiles fired from internal launchers. Due to the Manticoran's off-boresight missile capability the Nike class is capable of firing missiles from both broadsides simultaneously at the same target. This allows the battlecruiser to fire heavy salvos without having to resort to a pod layer design.