Originally intended as an all electric cruiser, the British press collectively decided that guns that big automatically made it a battleship, and the Royal Navy eventually compromised by commissioning them as battlecruisers. Built using Generation One rail gun technology, the complex maintenance the guns required in the field quickly dashed hopes of them being a war winning weapon, and various options were looked into for reincorporating VLS silos into the design. Much to the amusement of the RAF, who remembered having the opposite problem not that many decades prior.

The fortunes of the class were reversed upon the adoption of the B-WACS shell, a small recon system the railguns can put anywhere the ship needs, granting localized Stare-Down IR capability when EDI satellite support is not available. Capability that was put to good use in EDI peace keeping operations in former Saudiland during the 2050s.

Armament:
2x 64MJ railguns
6x 25MW pulse laser turrets
4x 40mm rapid fire turrets
2x Beehive/CRV8 Phalanx
2x Dual-300kW AP lasers (integrated into Phalanx)
2x medium helicopters.
4x Atlantic-42 RIBs.

Following refit:
32 Cells Sylver VLS (Mix of Aster-30/45, CAMM-III, Minnow, Perseaus)
32 Cells Cuive VLS (128 quad packed N54)