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Napoloni: Where's the propellers? For going under the water!.
Hynkel: Under water?.
Napoloni: You never heard of tanks that go under the water and fly up-a stairs?.
Garbitsh: What's that?.
Hynkel: Under the water and in the air.
Wot's faster than a warbuggy, more killy than a warbike, and flies through da air like a bird? I got no bleedin' idea, but I'm gonna find out.
In the military, innovation has driven military conquest as someone found new ways to do something that was better than what came before. However, in Speculative Fiction, it seems that a lot of people have decided combining previous concepts into one uber-machine is easier than coming up with something original.
Enter the Military Mashup Machine. In reality, some of these would be far more expensive than practical, with other existing military technologies being much easier to get the same results from, but if it looks cool, why not present it as worthwhile?
While generally members of Speculative Fiction or Science Fiction, these can also show up in Steam Punk as well. See Airborne Aircraft Carrier and The Battlestar for specific Sub Tropes.
See My Tank is Fight! before going on to any of the following examples. It's okay, we'll wait.
Land Battleship
The Land Battleship is a landgoing vehicle bristling with heavy artillery, generally the equivalent of a battleship's guns only on land, or rather, a really big tank. Often used in deserts.
Anime and Manga
- Gundam has a slight love affair with these, which have featured from the beginning to the more recent Gundam SEED Destiny. Perhaps the most bizarre version was the Battleships of the Zanscare Empire's land forces, such as the ''Adrastea''-class◊, which were essentially naval ships on enormous motorcycle wheels.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann goes typically overboard, by making the featured land battleship◊ a literal battleship on legs and a Humongous Mecha to boot (ironically, it requires special adjustments to cross water). General Guame's Dai-Gundo is more typical of this kind of thing. Ignore the phallic connotations of it's design.
- The Rhinoceros-class ships in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation.
Literature
- The titular Land Leviathan from Michael Moorcock's 1974 novel "The Land Leviathan".
- The original land battleship, from the story "The Land Ironclads," by H.G. Wells, is possibly the earliest example, predating actual tanks.
- Keith Laumer's Bolos: automated (and eventually artificially intelligent) land battleships of the Dinochrome Brigade (called "continental seige units" in early stories) which grew to have more firepower than the space battleships that transported them. The largest models are capable of defending or conquering an entire planet, solo, and they, rather than their commanders, are the de facto protagonists of the stories where they appear.
- The SheVa and Tiger III class tanks from John Ringo's Posleen War Series. The SheVa's are 170ft tall, 468ft long, 385ft wide tanks with a 200ft long 16" gun that are powered by four uranium/helium pebblebed nuclear reactors. They are so huge that their treads (all four of them, each) alone are bigger than most average houses. One of them, SheVa 9 "Bunbun" gets six Metal Storm turrets welded ontop with half a dozen claymore mines embedded under the front armor. The SheVas were actually created specifically because of an even in the first novel, where a battleship kills a Posleen lander by shooting it point-blank with a full broadside. The specs for the Tiger III are never given, but judging by its crew size (8 plus commander) is probably about the same scale. The Tiger IIIB model is actually capable of shooting down spacecraft in low earth orbit.
- Robert A Heinlein's short novel If This Goes On— has the major land force of the USA be Land Battleships.
Tabletop Games
- The Imperial Baneblade in Warhammer 40000 is a tank the size of a large house and mounts no fewer than 11 separate weapons ranging from high explosive cannon rounds, laser cannons and bolter (fully automatic armoured-piercing RPG) turrets. It should also be noted that the Baneblade is the smallest, most common Imperial super-heavy tank: as well as a whole slew of variants on the Baneblade chassis, larger examples include the "Ordinatus" (tracked Wave Motion Gun) "Leviathan" (mobile command centre, basically a castle on tracks) and "Capitol Imperialis" (APC for tanks). And let's not get started on the Imperium's Humongous Mecha, the Titans, which are often referred to as "walking battleships."
- Though, to a certain extent, anything built by Orks qualifies.
- Not to mention Chaos has daemonically possessed/traitorous versions of all the above, sporting screaming mouths the size of houses and bladed tentacles the size of trains.
- The Ogre, one of several classes of autonomous robotic moving fortresses from the game of the same name (and its successor, G.E.V.) from Steve Jackson Games. The concept is derived from Keith Laumer's Bolos (see below), and scenarios pit one ogre against a varying force of heavy tanks, assault hovercraft, infantry and artillery. The ogre's size is measured in acres, and it bristles with all manner of weapons capable of servicing multiple targets at various ranges during each combat phase.
Video Games
- The Landcarrier from the PS3-exclusive first-person shooter Haze is what its name suggests: rather than a Land Battleship, it is best described as a dedicated Land Aircraft Carrier (used to trudge through the jungles of South America, no less!). It is where the game begins and ends. Additionally, the aircraft it primarily carries are also Military Mashup Machines: troop carriers with the firepower, silhouette, speed, and armor of attack gunships.
- The Big Shiee, the boss of mission 4, from Metal Slug 2.
- The Fatboy from RTS game Supreme Commander actually mounts battleship calibre guns on rotating turrets. Taking it even farther are the Salem Class destroyers of the Cybran Nation which are actual warships which sprout spider legs when they reach land in order to render them amphibious (this troper always thinks of them as the SHIPS ON LEGS, capitals inclusive).
- Also arguably the Cybran Megalith, which is armed with weapons that wouldn't be out of place on a warship.
- Command And Conquer's Global Defense Initiative is in love with Land Battleships, typically in the form of their Mammoth Tanks, which are so huge and durable they can run over other tanks. In the Kane's Wrath expansion, GDI also gains the MARV, which is an even bigger mobile treaded deathmobile with three railguns, garrissionable infantry bunkers, and the ability to consume entire Tiberium fields instantly.
- Red Alert 3 does one better, with amphibious battleships. Not a battleship-sized tank on treads, but a literal battleship on treads.
Western Animation
- GI Joe has had a number of these in toy form, although they rarely appeared in the cartoons.
Real Life
- Truth In Television, as both the British and Germans considered building these during World War II. The Germans prototyped at least one, with several more designs in the works before the war's end prevented their construction. By contrast, the British eventually gave up on the concept due to it being more expensive than it would be worth. One proposed German design featured a pair of battlecruiser cannon.
- The Soviet T-35 probably qualifies - a veritable Games Workshop Tank with five turrets, but about as much use as you might expect.
- The Americans, Canadians, and British also spent a disproportionate amount of money on researching an aircraft carrier made of ice that would be impervious to any attack short of a direct nuclear strike.. Named Project Habakkuk, it used a mixture of ice and wood pulp (dubbed "Pykrete") in large blocks 40 feet thick. The aircraft carrier would have been 2,000 feet long, capable of launching heavy bombers, and able to reach speeds of 6 knots. The project was cancelled due to problems of refrigeration, scarcity of materials, and the fact that the Allies acquired bases that removed the need for the Habakkuk.
Submersible Carrier
Submersible Carriers are essentially your standard aircraft carrier, only submersible.
Anime and Manga
- The ''Area 88'' manga features one of these, albeit on land: The land carrier moves on tracks, launches unmanned fighters, and hides itself by burrowing under the desert sand. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is very difficult to cool.
- Gundam and its multiple continuities had several of these serving to launch both aerial and amphibious mobile suits.
- Macross Zero had the Auerstadt as the Anti-UN forces' home base, launching both variable fighters and transforming mini-sub OCTOS.
- The Tuatha de Danaan from Full Metal Panic.
- The Dai-Gunkai of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Notable for being one of the few capable of creating its own ocean when it needs to travel over land.
- The Killer Whale-class subs in Super Robot Wars Original Generation.
- UNS Daedalus from Super Dimension Fortress Macross is a submersible Humongous Mecha carrier.
Comic Books
Literature
Tabletop Games
- The USS Ticonderoga and NGR Poseidon in Rifts.
- The "arsenal subs" of Transhuman Space, though it helps that the aircraft are unmanned.
Video Games
- Supreme Commander has the Atlantis-class submersible carrier for the UEF.
- Ace Combat 5 had a pair of these on the Yuktobanian side, although they were actually ballistic missile platforms that happened to be able to launch their own fighters for air defense. The first one, Scinfaxi, had a rear takeoff area for Harriers and F-35s, while the Hrimfaxi had unmanned aircraft in vertical launch tubes (it can even launch them while submerged!).
Truth In Television
- Truth in Television once again. Everyone from the United States to Japan has toyed with making these at one point. Japan actually deployed at least two dozen such subs of three different designs by the end of World War II. Several were tasked with "doomsday" attacks on the American mainland using biological weapons, but these were never successfully developed and the subs were reassigned to attack the Panama Canal. Before they could actually act on these orders, the war ended and they were seized by the United States. Rather than allow the then-revolutionary technology to fall into Russian hands per war alliance treaties, the Navy chose to scuttle the subs instead. One of these subs became part of the plot for the Clive Cussler novel Black Wind, in which it actually was carrying biological weapons.
Amphibious Tanks
Aren't just tanks that can travel in water, but often are entirely submersible until they surface on the beach.
Literature
Video Games
- The Fatboy from Supreme Commander is also this. Ditto the Cybran Monkeylord spiderbot (which is more of a Humongous Mecha). Supreme Commander loves this trope, with many more amphibious tanks and mecha to choose from. The UEF Percival, the Cybran Wagner, Brick, and Megalith, the Seraphim Othuum and Ythotha, and the Aeon Galactic Colossus are all perfectly happy going scuba diving. And if you count amphibious hovertanks, you get to count the UEF Riptide, the Seraphim Fobo, and the Aeon Aurora, Ascendant, Asylum, and Blaze.
- Preceding the Fatboy were the "Crock" and "Triton" tanks of Total Annihilation, which also had hovercraft of its own.
- The Cybrans even have a battleship that sprouts legs and walks onto land.
- Metal Gear RAY
- The Empire Of The Rising Sun in the upcoming RTS Red Alert 3 will have one such unit, the Tsunami Tank.
Western Animation
- On GI Joe, Cobra had a couple, the most notable being the Hammerhead◊, which was not only a submersible tank, but also a submersible carrier for its own mini-fleet of smaller vehicles.
- The first Season Finale of SWAT Kats had the Kats use one of these against the alliance of Dark Kat, Dr. Viper, and the Metallikats.
Truth In Television
- Truth In Television yet again; several sorts of amphibious tanks were designed, built and deployed in World War II.
- A more extreme example is the German "Tauchpanzer" variant of the Panzer IV: a tank capable of driving under 15 meters of water.
- More extreme still was the gargantuan proposal Midgardsschlange for a 60,000 ton armoured, articulated train that could run on land, the bottom of the sea or even drill underground. It was designed by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and got to the vital asking for funding stage before the engineers involved were forced to go work on something sensible.
- Likewise, a number of modern armored vehicles include amphibious capability, and most tanks can ford rivers using snorkels.
- The PT-76 is probably the most successful of modern amphibious tanks.
- Arguably, it's biggest success is in being cheap, lightweight, and armored enough to serve as an universal chassis for the whole lot of other Soviet vehicles, from self-propelled artillery to SAM launchers, adding more to its Military Mashup Machine status.
Amphibious Jet Fighter
The Amphibious Jet Fighter can fight equally well in the air or in the water.
Anime and Manga
- The VF-0s in Macross Zero can, apperently, fly underwater. For short periods, at least.
Comic Books
Film
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow did this with submersible propeller planes.
- Though not explicitly armed, the automated transports used by Syndrome in The Incredibles get to Nomanisan Island by air... then go under water to dock.
Literature
Live Action TV
- The "SkyDiver" from UFO was a submarine whose entire front end was a JATO-boosted rocket plane. At need, the SkyDiver would flood its rear ballast tanks until its bow pointed upward, and then the plane would launch - from under water.
- And the KingFisher in the Doctor Who novel The Indestructible Man, a Captain Ersatz of everything Gerry Anderson ever did.
- The Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the coolest thing on the show.
Tabletop Games
- A number of vehicles in the Rifts Underseas sourcebook.
- The system defence boats of Traveller are capable of flying in space and in atmosphere and can go underwater, at least in the GURPS version. It helps that the vehicle rules of GURPS practically invite people to design vehicles that fit this trope.
Video Games
- Almost all scrolling shooters allow the player's air or spacecraft to fly underwater without consequence.
- The Empire Of The Rising Sun, will again, have this kid of unit in their arsenal, the The Sea-Wing/Sky-Wing.
- Although Star Fox 64 had a separate submarine for the underwater mission, Arwings and other starfighters in Star Fox Command can do this.
- Red Alert 3's Sea-Wing is a submersible ambush jet fighter.
- XCOM: Terror from the Deep, the second XCOM game, had the player fighting Unidentified Submersible Objects (ie, UFOs that could go underwater) with a small fleet of their own submarine-jets.
Western Animation
- GI Joe had the S.H.A.R.K. aircraft.
- The New Adventures of He-Man had a vehicle capable of submersion, atomspheric flight and space flight called Astrosub.
Real Life
- Truth in Television again (to a degree),
- The Soviet Union designed a flying submarine in the 1930s, but it was never actually built.
Mobile Factory
The Mobile Factory is exactly what it sounds like. A factory capable of pumping out mass-produced (often robotic drone) war machines, combat-ready right off the assembly line. This is usually its primary purpose, though it may have other weapons.
Literature
- The World Devastators from Star Wars' Expanded Universe not only did this, but ate the planets they were attacking to get the raw materials.
Live Action TV
- The Cylon Resurrection Ship in the new Battlestar Galactica is a mobile people factory.
- More Galactica: Tyrol actually had his crew build a whole Viper out of spare parts onboard the Galactica, and a damn good one at that. In fact, due to the availability of pretty much any material but metal, it was also their only stealth ship.
- And again: It's All There In The Manual that the Battlestar Pegasus has Viper factories onboard, allowing both ships to shore up their numbers.
- Voyager in Star Trek had to have this, incompetent writers, or both to have as many shuttle craft as it did.
Video Games
- Supreme Commander's Fatboy is able to construct military units as well. (For those keeping score, that makes the Fatboy a Submersible Land Battleship that can construct its own support force. And it mounts heavy-duty shield generators. Though it's so enormous it occupies most of the shielded area, leaving little room for its support force.)
- As well as all of its carriers building aircraft, Supreme Commander also has: the Tempest, a Submersible Battleship that constructs smaller ships, although it can't travel on land; the Cybran Megalith, a carrier that can build select Cybran land units, and the Aeon Czar, which is a flying mobile factory and airborne aircraft carrier armed with a quantum beam generator, quantum flak cannons, and depth charges.
- The Protoss Carrier in StarCraft manufactures and launches its own robotic interceptors. The Reaver similarly builds Scarab drones that are used as self-guided bombs.
- The GDI and Brotherhood of Nod both possess mobile factory units in the Firestorm expansion for Command And Conquer: Tiberian Sun.
- Aircraft carriers in many Real Time Strategy games usually operate like this.
- All capital ships (and the carrier-class non-capital ships) are capable of constructing their own fighter escorts in Sins Of A Solar Empire. This is subverted (or averted?) for the Advent faction, as their fighters are merely psionic constructs.
- The mothership in Homeworld games can construct any other type of warship up to and including a destroyer. It can also construct a shipyard, which can then be used to manufacture even larger ships (cruisers and carriers). Carriers themselves are capable of constructing small and medium-sized craft (up to frigates). The downside is that the mothership has no maneuverability to speak of, and its own weaponry is in the peashooter range.
Real Life
- While not a factory, real naval ships have machine tools on board to fix broken equipment. You can do quite a lot of work on a real aircraft carrier.
Starships in most Space Opera series, including Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Battlestar Galactica, tend to be a space-borne hybrid of a modern naval battleship and a carrier, possessing heavy armor and lots of large guns as well as a sizeable fighter compliment. This is probably more realistic than most of the examples in this article, as launching and landing fighters from a spaceborne platform would require much less "runway" space than a planet-based carrier, and a sufficiently large ship could handle both tasks. Besides, having two ships would violate The Law of Conservation of Detail.
Anime
- Uchuu Senkan Yamato takes this to its logical conclusion, by taking the World War II battleship Yamato, fixing it, adding a (the) Wave Motion Gun, and putting it in space. It still works on water too.
- The Nautilus in Nadia The Secret Of Blue Water turns out to be a spacecraft that just incidentally happens to make a dandy submarine as well.
- Similarly, many spaceships in anime, especially ones featuring Humongous Mecha, are often capable of operating in the air as well as in space, effectively making them a combination of space ships (see above) plus an Airborne Aircraft Carrier.
Literature
- Averted occasionally in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, though such over-specialized ships usually don't do well - for example, the escort carrier, which can carry as many fighters as a Star Destroyer in a much smaller and less-expensive ship, is pitifully under-gunned. One could send an escort ship with it... or just send a ship that both carries fighters and can adequately defend itself. This has been a design philosophy that has been common throughout the galaxy for thousands of years, from the ships in the Old Republic to the modern Star Destroyers.
Live Action TV
- As mentioned, Babylon 5 capital ships often carry fighter complements, as does the titular station.
- There were about two ships in Star Trek that fall under this sub-trope that we've seen—one of which was fictitious (even within the context of the series itself). They were the historically inaccurate recreation of Voyager in the episode Living Witness, and the Scimitar in Star Trek: Nemesis. Other ships don't really count for this, as they primarily carry shuttle craft, which aren't particularly good at combat, nor is the compliment in any way considered "considerable" (usually half a dozen at most on the largest ships).
- Stargate SG-1 began introducing these with the Prometheus, a small flying space carrier with eight fighters and a notable array of its own weapons, designed to be capable of challenging Goa'uld motherships. The larger Daedalus class ramps it all up further, particularly when the Odyssey gets state-of-the-art Asgard beam weapons, fully qualifying it as a battle-carrier.
- The Andromeda Ascendant is a mobile carrier, troop transport, science vessel, capital ship, and planetary siege platform, complete with manufacturing capabilities. All such Glorious Heritage-class heavy cruisers have such capabilities.
- Battlestar Galactica. Though the Galactica and other Battlestar-class ships seem to operate primarily as fighter carriers, the Galactica has demonstrated repeatedly that it is more than capable of taking on a Cylon Basestar in close combat.
Video Games
- Largely averted, then later lampshaded, in Wing Commander, where the carrier is part of a small fleet of offensive, defensive, and support vessels. In Prophecy, when the Midway (an all-purpose battle-carrier fitting the trope) is commissioned, several people complain about the risk of putting all the eggs in one basket.
- Played straight with the Concordia in the second game, however - which was even classified as a dreadnaught rather than a carrier. Phase-Transit Cannon, anyone? Further, cruisers and, on the other side, even Kilrathi destroyers had a "light fighter complement", although the actual strength of this complement is not defined. This troper's impression was that the problem with the Midway was more about its sheer size than its carrier-battleship hybrid status.
- The Ur-Quan Dreadnaughts of the Star Control series are these (and they look suspiciously like villainous Battlestars).
- Many large capital ships in the Freespace series (for example the GTD Aquitaine in Freespace 2) carry dozens, if not hundreds of strikecraft. They're fully fledged warships that make mincemeat out of smaller capitals and have dozens of anti-fighter and anti-warship turrets to boot.
- In Sins Of A Solar Empire, direct combat capital craft, whilst incapable of supporting strikecraft initially (unlike the specialized carrier capital craft), can gain strikecraft support slots as their combat experience increases.
Others
- At some point, most silly works will include efforts to make a flying tank. Sometimes this will be to just slap wings on that ever-so-aerodynamic thing, the main battle tank.
- Real Life: again, see the My Tank is Fight! link.
- Several countries experimented with this in World War II. Some are doubtless included in the book above.
- If any practical real-world aircraft could get away with calling itself a flying tank, the A-10 is it. The AC-130, whose weapons load includes a 105mm howitzer, also deserves an honourable mention.
Anime
- Humongous Mecha in most Real Robot settings seem to be mashups of your average infantry soldier and an armored tank or jet fighter.
Comic Books
- Blackhawks had several, extremely silly examples, most found on Superdickery. Submarines that can fly, airplanes that drill underground, etc.
- Blackhawk comics were in love with this trope. Along with the link to the flying submarine (above), there was an underground fighter plane,tornado-generating helicopter fortresses, combat kites, the obligatory flying aircraft carrier , helicopter pogo-sticks, flying tanks, and some sort of flying on-fire-spinny-thing. And these weren't even all of them! Blackhawk comics had more fuzzy-science-derived plot devices than Star Trek.
Film
- This was the central plot point of The Three Stooges In Orbit: a professor builds a vehicle that's a submarine with tank treads and rotor blades. When it's seized, the military has problems figuring out who should stop it. It lands: 'Call the Army!' It takes off: 'Call the Air Force!' Eventually, it goes over the ocean, to the relief of the commander: 'Call the Navy!'
Literature
- Dale Brown's EB-52 Megafortress and other machines that fall into the Cool Plane category are essentially mash-ups of heavy bombers and fighters. Since in real-life the most difficult changes would involve changing some programming lines in a radar's software and adapting the bomb bay to carry an obscene amount air-to-air missiles, this concept just might become Truth In Television as well.
Live Action TV
- Federation ships in Star Trek tend to be science-vessel/warship hybrids. The sole exception is the Defiant, which despite officially being classified as a "heavy escort vessel", is unofficially admitted to be a warship (though the Prometheus, briefly seen in Voyager, may have been another step in this direction).
Western Animation
- Some Transformers have multiple forms, resulting in things like this. Perhaps most well-known is the Decepticon Triple-Changer Blitzwing, whose alternate modes are a MiG-25 and a Type-74 tank—both Russian models, for extra "Robots In Disguise"itude. The most over-the-top, though, would have to be Sixshot, a Decepticon with six alternate modes who can take on entire teams of enemies single-handedly.
Video Games
- In the Homeworld games, your mothership is a space factory/carrier, able to manufacture everything else in your fleet and house all of its smaller craft, while also able to maneuver(or even make hyperspace jumps) to any part of the battle area like any other ship. However in the original game, on its own, it's still fairly vulnerable.
- The Carrier-class ships from the first game also functioned as factory/carriers, but weren't able to build the larger ships (like Carriers) and were much faster and more maneuverable than the Mothership.
- In the Cataclysm expansion, it's possible to add "battleship" to the number of roles it fills. While still fairly vulnerable, it was much more capable of fending off fighters and small capital ships on its own. With a particular upgrade, they could even wipe out enemy fleets.
- In Homeworld 2, though, the Mothership went back to being vulnerable to pretty much anything, and another factory/carrier ship, the Shipyard, was added. It could build the largest ships in the game, which the regular Mothership couldn't, but was even slower and less maneuverable.
- Final Fantasy VIII features the main protagonists and antagonists using a mash-up of guns and swords. The user would load a cartridge into the "gun" part and "fire," which would cause the blade to vibrate and magnify damage.
- Real Life: There were real examples of Sword-Guns, though they weren't very popular. Commonly, they involved a knife/revolver combination.
- Of course, the rifle bayonet is a somewhat more successful example of a gun/edged weapon hybrid.
- An American gang who called themselves the "Apaches" had weapons that could be used as a dagger, a revolver, or a set of brass knuckles.
- Some upstanding gentlemen in the seventeenth century created cutlery pistols - as in a knife-pistol and a fork pistol.
- The 'gunblade' of Final Fantasy VIII is actually more akin to the vibroblade concept, which is quite popular.
Real Life
- The Russian Topol and Topol M nuclear missiles are Mobile Missile Silos, at least in functionality.
- Arguably, the original aircraft carrier was a working real-life example of this, attempting to combine an airbase with a ship.
- ...and while we're at it: the Airborne Aircraft Carrier in all its many incarnations.
- British carriers of World War One, many of which were conversions of warships already in service, tended towards a different hybrid status. HMS Vindictive, converted from a cruiser, carried five 7.5in guns; the former battleship HMS Furious, meanwhile, witnessed the first successful landing of an aircraft on a moving ship while still mounting a single 18in gun aft. The concept was revived (albeit briefly) in 1940, when lack of carriers and need for airborne protection led to suggestions that battleships under construction should be redesigned to carry ten fighters.
- Also worthy of mention are the M-class submarines, which began as a project to fit a 12in battleship gun on a submarine, and which ended up in one case as a submarine aircraft carrier.
- Partly to get round the Second London Naval Treaty and partly because they just did things differently, the Soviet Union built four "aviation cruisers", essentially VTOL aircraft carriers with anti-shipping missiles built in. The VTOL aircraft, the Yak-38 "Forger" was spectacularly poor. The current sole Russian carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov is also an example, albeit a full-length one with Su-33 fighters on.
- An Amphibious Assault Ship is probably as close as practical towards several mash-ups into a single ship, taking on the functions of aircraft carrier, troop transport/beach assault ship, command ship, and - when some earlier designs still had decent-sized guns - bombardment ship.
- Many battleships carried seaplanes; today, many destroyers and cruisers carry helicopters
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