>>I meant the one from the anime-- one Omega-class weapon and a whole
>>lot of shell firing cannon. But whatever...
>
>Um... IIRC, the UF-universe Yamato is almost identical to the one
>from the show - the Battleship guns on SB Yamato didn't fire shells;
>they were energy weapons too...
>
>Offsides
>
>#include <starblazers.h>

In Star Blazers, they called the three top mounted rotating turrets the "main guns" (in one episode, Captain Avatar said not to use the Wave Motion gun and to go to the main guns). IIRC, UF calls them "Helix cannons". The turrets had three barrels apiece, and the beams from the outboard barrels spiraled around like DNA, while the inboard barrel kept a straight course inside the spirals.

The Yamato class is still a powerful military vessel, one of the best in the business. Keep in mind that things like the Executioner and Wayward Son are not front-line ships, they are obscenely powerful ships, an order of magnitude more powerful than the next best thing.

Modulo these obscenely powerful vessels (of which we've seen three or four, and that may be all there is), the Yamato is a particularly nasty enemy. It mounts a Wave Motion Gun, which is an Omega-class weapon. Even without that WMG, its conventional arms are more than capable of destroying cap ships of similar tonnage to its own; without the WMG, it would still be classified as a decent battleship. Finally, it is a starcraft carrier. Between its guns and its hanger bays, it is two top-of-the-line warships in one.

I'll defer to Ben as to the FTL technology on the UF Yamato; if we built them to original canon spec, they'd have fold drives. If not, I'd suspect that they had hyperdrives, simply because warp nacelles would look silly on them. One technology we would have added to the class beyond the original canon spec would be a shield generator, simply because we think it's stupid to build a ship without one.

--rR