Characters / Ambience A Fleet Symphony One

Main Character Page | Ship girls in general | Destroyers (Kamikaze-class to Hatsuharu-class)| Destroyers(Shiratsuyu-class) | Destroyers (Asashio-class to Shimakaze-class) | Light and Heavy Cruisers | Battleships, Carriers, Submarines, and Auxiliaries | Ship Girls of Other Nations

As per Handling Spoilers, no trope names will be spoiler-marked. In addition, the very presence of certain names on this list may constitute spoilers by itself. You Have Been Warned!

Due to the tons of characters, many of whom can be found on the character pages for KanColle and Warship Girls, only tropes relevant to how they are different here should be listed.

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Ship girls in general

• Achilles' Heel: electromagnetic pulse weapons and technology. Throughout the first half of the story, none of the ship girls come equipped with any sort of anti-EMP countermeasures, meaning that electromagnetic pulse tech is their one huge weakness that their human enemies do exploit at a few intervals. However, as chapter 378 demonstrates, now that the ship girls are equipped with Anti-EMP Field augmentations, this particular weakness is now subverted.
  • still played straight when it comes to bullet weapons: the eyes are the ship girls' universal weak spot and are the only places where the ship girls can get shot and be quite drastically affected - but good luck trying to shoot them there if you're not another ship girl with perfect aim.
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: definitely a stretch on this trope and certainly an unusual example, but many times in the story, the carriers, owing to their roles as the snipers of the fleet, are flown into combat on the sides of helicopters and can technically still launch their planes from their crossbows.
• Alternate Self: inevitably the case when ship girls from Kantai Collection start to meet themselves from other ship girl games like Warship Girls, Pacific, and Victory Belles.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: if any ship girl is armed with a melee or bladed weapon, you can be sure that they're made out of Smartsteel as well, which means they can pierce the armor of other enemy ship girls or Abyssals.
• Backpack Cannon: technically what the gearboxes are. They carry the ship girls' weapons in a compact box on their backs and deploy them when it's time to fight.
• Berserk Button: Several of them have very hard feelings about the Pacific War and strongly express displeasure about serving or working with Americans. Naturally, this also extends to Damon.
• Big Eater: played with. The story makes it clear that while resources are still important, they don't tremendously impede the capital ships' ability to sortie because of how much they need to consume. In addition, while human food is perhaps optional for the ship girls' well-being, it's certainly very nice for them to have three meals a day just like normal, and the capital ships have proven on multiple occasions that they can utterly trash Damon's wallet if they tried.
• Bilingual Bonus: In-universe. All Japanese ship girls have been programmed to know how to speak both English and Japanese due to their unfulfilled service to the United States Navy prior to World War III, allowing Damon to conveniently communicate with them without having to overcome a tricky language barrier when he begins acquiring them. The German ship girls are also bilingual, speaking both fluent German and English. Strangely enough, the American ship girls whom Damon runs into later in the story appear to be fluent in both Japanese and English for reasons unknown, though he speculates that not only did his father have a hand in their creation, but presumes that Deimos programmed them with knowledge of the Japanese language for the purpose of being able work together with their Japanese counterparts should that eventuality come to pass.
• Cute Bruiser: as Damon observes, the ship girls maintain an extraordinary level of beauty. All the ship girls also demonstrate some degree of proficiency in unarmed combat in addition to their knowledge of naval warfare as ship girls.
• Deader than Dead:
  • A persistently pressing point of concern for all ship girls, not just the ones in the fleet: while ship girls can be repaired back to life over and over, this is only assuming their main processing units, or their brains, are preserved and are unharmed (or at least their memory files), but it must be noted that most of the developers behind the F.L.E.E.T. Project are now few and far between, and the blueprints for the ship girls are now practically hopelessly inaccessible. So just like a real human, if a ship girl's brain is destroyed, that ship girl is gone forever; her body can be repaired and she can still be rebuilt, sure, but without her original memories, that ship girl will not be the same as the one she's replacing.
  • This is an issue of contention that Shoukaku is dealing with, because she believes that her "original" self has already suffered this with her full conversion into Water Demon.
• Death Is Cheap: Ship girls in this story can be repaired back to full health assuming that their main processing units (a.k.a. their brains) are not damaged and that their bodies, when sunk, are repaired within seven days of the time of death, since that's how long it takes for ship girls' brains to decay to the point of no return. Several ship girls have already cut it close...
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: mainly with the destroyers, who, due to their weaker emotional stabilities compared to other ship types, can get very passionate about their feelings whenever they're talking to Damon and end up manhandling him harder than they need to, which usually ends up in a broken bone somewhere on Damon's body.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: ship girls can deploy their ship guns on land, but if they choose to do so, they suffer severe limitations to their movement and mobility; typically the most they can do is simply stand where they've deployed their guns and act as stationary artillery platforms, as the ship girls actually do in the opening phase of Operation Norfolk to perform an opening artillery salvo on enemy positions. However, the Kai remodel can remove this restriction, as demonstrated by Yuudachi and later Shigure when they use their ship guns on land just as they're able to on the water.
• Emotional Powers: it appears that, as magic powers and protocols reveal themselves over the course of the story, frequently they are heavily influenced by the user's emotions - for example, the Shiratsuyu-Class's protocols.
• Epiphanic Prison: Beyond the Berserk Button regarding Americans, a number of the girls are holding themselves back because of attitudes birthed from either their Past-Life Memories or trauma due to their experiences under the Coalition that they refuse to move on or at the very least seek and accept help to do so, from even though they could if they really wanted to.
• Fantasy Character Classes: except for modern warfare rather than fantasy, even though many of the ship girls do gain fantastical powers thanks to Damon's YRC. Ship type usually determines the kinds of firearms ship girls use: submarines use suppressed weapons to compliment their stealth capabilities, destroyers and light cruisers use closer-range firearms like submachine guns, shotguns, and assault rifles, heavy cruisers use battle rifles or designated marksman rifles, battleships use machine guns, light carriers use semi-automatic marksman or squad support rifles, and standard carriers use bolt-action, oftentimes high-caliber sniper rifles.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: the story trivializes some of the more concerning mechanics that the game establishes, such as the capital ships' ravenous rates at which they burn through resources and completely does away with others, such as the inability of carriers to fight at night.
• Girls with Guns: over the course of the story, the ship girls in the fleet have run the gauntlet in the number of unique firearms wielded in combat. This isn't counting their actual ship guns that they're supposed to use, by the way.
• Glass Cannon: it seems to be a recurring theme for those ship girls who have sharp tongues and disagreeable personalities to be this, with high attack ratings but low defense ratings in exchange.
• Guns Akimbo: many of the destroyers in the story wind up having a dual-wielding cannon setup with their equipment. See Our Mages Are Different below for more details.
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: In chapter 299, Sanford says that a self-destructing shipgirl would blow up with the force of Fat Man.
• Human Weapon: the ship girls are treated as such by the more antagonistic factions of the story, referred to as "fleet personnel" or "naval personnel" or worse. This is also a pet peeve of Damon's, if he hears ship girls being called something less than human, though he's fine with the aforementioned.
• Inhumanly Beautiful Race: Shipgirls are described as generally being better-looking than human women. Also deconstructed, as various unsavoury types male and female alike take advantage of them for that very reason.
• Japanese Honorifics: interestingly, it appears that the ship girls go so far as to keep all of the honorifics they speak intact even as they talk in English.
• Limit Break: many ship girls have abilities that would be considered "ultimate" abilities or attacks in other games, with their own variety of conditions that must be fulfilled before they can be used.
• Long-Lived: as demonstrated by Kitakami, Furutaka, and Fusou, who've lived with Mr. Araki in the United States for thirteen years prior to the start of the story, ship girls definitely enjoy the benefits of genetically enhanced lifespans thanks to their Smartsteel constructs. They are most likely not The Ageless, because multiple ship girls have alluded to the fact that most warships' fates, if not sunk at sea, are scrapping, implying that the same may still hold true even for them once they themselves reach the end of their service lives.
• Long-Range Fighter: heavy cruisers, battleships, and carriers are this, as their preferred firearms are battle rifles, designated marksman rifles, or sniper rifles (machine guns for the battleships) to compliment their usual combat positions in a naval engagement.
• Meaningful Name: for the girls who've received powers from Damon through his Yellow Reality Cancel, their powers oftentimes correlate with the meanings of their names. Kagerou's name, for example, means "heat haze", and her power allows her to release a deadly heat wave from her body that severely burns and incapacitates victims.
• Not the Intended Use: In-universe. Ship girls are designed to fight targets at sea, but because of Damon's decision out of necessity to teach his first few ship girls how to shoot firearms, much of the story's focus emphasizes the ship girls' terrestrial combat capabilities due to their superhuman bodies, strength, and abilities that lend themselves just as well to Urban Warfare as they do to naval combat. Essentially, the ship girls of the fleet are a formidable military company that realistically can't be beaten by a human ground army unless the humans themselves have some serious explosive firepower to combat the ship girls, as heavy explosive damage is the most reliable way to weaken ship girls.
• Our Mages Are Different: in many ways compared to the game. While the core design and role of a ship girl are the same, teenage girls with the power to sail on water and fight xenomorphic enemies out at sea, ship girls in this story merge the role of augmented infantry with their original role. Ship girls in this story are also explicitly built as human machines, and they enjoy cybernetic enhancements like a heads-up display, a minimap detailing the immediate surroundings and beyond, torrenting, file download and transfer, photographic memory whose data can be copied, shared, and viewed by other ship girls, and private radio communication channels, not unlike those featured in first person shooters. On a more trivial note, the story makes a point to give all ship girls actual boots or shoes.
  • Naval equipment used by ship girls are modified in this story: each ship girl's loadout is carried in a steel box with rigging to secure it to its owner, called a "gearbox", from which a ship girl's guns emerge to attack. For destroyers and cruisers, the gearboxes deploy their guns in such a way that ship girls do not have to hold them with their hands, as frequently depicted in the game, and instead attach themselves with rigging to the ship girls' arms like arm cannons. This is how ship girls are depicted in the story to be able to carry infantry weapons into naval battle and use them in conjunction with their standard naval gear.
    • There are notable exceptions, the two most prominent being Shimakaze and Amatsukaze, who instead rely on their turret buddies for artillery shelling and utilize their own physical power and superior speed in battle instead.
  • Battleships, according to a F.L.E.E.T. Project document, are explicitly mentioned to be able to wield the Yamato Cannon, a devastating nuclear-powered and navitasium-powered artillery strike that practically are miniature nukes in themselves. Several battleship girls are already retrofitted to wield it, like Musashi and Amagi.
  • In Warship Girls at least, ship girls could only go as fast as their historical counterparts. Here, even the "slowest" ship girls are capable of exceeding 200km/h (approx. 107 knots) while cruising (and can go even faster at flank speed), which is more than twice as fast as the historical Shimakaze's maximum speed.
  • Aircraft carriers are armed with scoped pump-action crossbows instead of their traditional Japanese bows that fire crossbow bolts that release a set number of planes, depending on what type of plane they're deploying. The crossbows themselves can even be used as anti-infantry weapons, and the bolts, too, are sturdy enough to be recovered after being used this way to recycled and used the way they were intended. While the carriers retain their flight decks, the idea of fairies piloting the planes is abandoned, as the planes themselves are automated. The planes also can remotely communicate with their home carriers and can even be controlled individually if the home carriers so choose, and the scout planes have dedicated cameras that provide live feeds of whatever the scout planes see that the carriers themselves can not only view for themselves but also share with the rest of the fleet so that the fleet as a whole can see what the scout planes see to come up with the best strategies possible.
  • All submarine girls have the ability to Cloak, accentuating their roles in the fleet as stealth fighters both at sea and on land.
  • Resources in this story are also slightly different. Properly prepared fuel comes in six-pack 8-ounce cans, bauxite comes in the form of "bauxite bars" that, when consumed, increases a ship girl's damage resistance, and steel comes in the form of "steel patches" that work a little like heat packs in that a ship girl's wound consumes steel from a patch to heal itself when a patch is applied. Ammo is the only resource that is seldom mentioned and is thus assumed to be unchanged, other than the mention that ship girl ammo employs size-reduction technology for convenient packing and reloading.
    • Related to the topic of resources is repairing. In the story, instead of having docks in which ship girls can enter to take baths that repair their wounds, there exist repair stations called "operating chambers" in the story that are like automated surgery tables that handle more intensive repair procedures for wounds that can't be healed by simply applying steel patches on them. In addition, these operating chambers can perform other auxiliary tasks like running diagnostics on ship girls' bodies and systems and provide Kai remodels. They do consume resources to perform the more intensive tasks like repairing and remodeling, though simple diagnostic scans and the like don't seem to require them.
  • Protocols. Not all of the ship girls have them, but if they do for whatever reason, they're sure to be the heavy hitters of the fleet. Not that they're required to be any less badass. As demonstrated constantly whenever a ship girl procks hers, protocols give their owners a terrifying combat edge by directly enhancing their strength, accuracy, damage tolerance, or concentration, or any combination of the aforementioned. And for some, protocols give their owners powers that can only be described as supernatural.
    • Some examples are Shiranui vs. Kongou, though Kongou's battleship strength proves too much in the end, Shigure and Yuudachi vs. the Abyssals, etc.
  • Kai remodels are very arbitrary in terms of exactly how much resources need to be invested into them, but the story makes it clear that the stronger the ship type, the more expensive the remodels will get. They are also the work of a single former F.L.E.E.T. Project developer, Kiyoshi Araki, who worked on them for some thirteen years while looking after three ship girls of his own. But when ship girls undergo these remodels, they are significantly strengthened in terms of overall physical power, are given a "Kai shield" not unlike the ones seen in the anime (when these shields take hits, blue hexagons linger to show the damage), and are even granted new abilities that complement whatever powers they had originally (e.g. Amatsukaze, post-Kai, is now able to generate flames with her legs to complement her Ignition Glove). In addition, even their fuel consumption rates and reload speeds in between cannon shots are improved. It's also greatly implied that Kai remodels strengthen the mental and psychological conditions of the ship girls who undergo them, as are the cases with Shigure and Zuikaku.
  • Like the game, the story offers statistics in chapter 169, called the stat sheet that will be referenced throughout this page, though they're more theoretical game statistics and parameters. The stat sheet offers greatly differing statistics than the game, keeping only a few core ones like hit points and armor points while changing and introducing other categories of statistics.
    • Health and armor parameters are more expansive. Ingame, for example, Murakumo has 15 hit points and 5 armor points (19 max) in her base form; in the story, she has 1050 hit points and 300 armor points. Kai shields in the story also have a health rating of their own, adding a third layer of defense for a remodeled ship girl that must be destroyed first before her health can be attacked, giving all remodeled ship girls 300 shield points.
    • Evasion and speed from the game are replaced by speed (its role is changed), agility, and reflex ratings. Speed denotes how fast a ship girl can accelerate to her maximum speeds, how well her agility and reflex ratings are modified, how fast she receives natural health regeneration after taking damage, etc. Agility denotes how nimble and acrobatic a ship girl is, and reflex denotes how fast a ship girl can react to an incoming attack and how well she can parry enemy attacks.
    • All ingame combat stats like firepower, torpedo, AA, ASW, and LOS are replaced by attack, defense, intelligence, endurance, bullet accuracy, shell accuracy, critical damage resist, and perception ratings. Weapons in the story have their own set damage parameters, so the stats given to ship girls denote their personal strength.
    • Morale is divided to endurance, will, fatigue, and insanity ratings. Endurance is combat-related and denotes how long and how hard a ship girl can fight in all circumstances, and will, also combat-related, denotes how well a ship girl can handle herself under extreme duress, both physical and psychological. Fatigue is the most traditional ingame stat that shows how close a ship girl is to being unfit for combat due to exhaustion, and a ship girl will refuse or be unable to sortie if her fatigue hits 100%. Insanity is the psychological version of fatigue, showing how much mental stress a ship girl is accruing, and at 100%, a ship girl will break mentally and turn rogue.
    • Luck is removed entirely in the story, and there are no fixed consumption rates for the ship girls in the story. There are no build times either, since the story states that all ship girls in existence have already been constructed, and it is highly unlikely that any more will be built.
    • The story also adds an affection rating for all of the ship girls in the story in regards for their Admiral, Damon, that go as follows: Hatred, Dislike, Neutral, Friendly, Like, and Love. The ones listed currently in the stat sheet denote each ship girl's affection at the time of their respective entries into the fleet.
• Parrying Bullets: Parrying cannon shots, more realistically. Demonstrated by more than a few ship girls and heavily implied by the stat sheet provided by the author, this is able to be done by any ship girl so long as she's prepared for it or has good enough reflexes, either with a sword or just her bare hands. The stat sheet takes this further and claims that ship girls can even parry individually fired bullets from infantry firearms, though the stat sheet also specifies that realistically, if a ship girl does manage to parry a bullet, it's probably going to be from a sniper rifle, DMR, or other firearms with slow enough rates of fire that make parrying their shots in succession possible.
• Past-Life Memories: it's explicitly established early on in the story that all ship girls have been built with not only their personal memories and sentiments from the war (though this is limited to what written history has covered so far), but they all know the full history of the Pacific theatre in general.
• Powers as Programs: augmentations count as this, as they can freely be installed, uninstalled, and transferred in ship girl augmentation slots just like normal programs for computers. The submarines' smartphones that are meant to carry extra augmentations for the fleet's use further reinforces this trope in the story.
• Repressed Memories: zigzagged heavily in the fleet. The ship girls' sentiments about their wartime memories usually can be categorized into three mindsets on the spectrum: fond and proud recollection, neutral recognition, and embarrassed and ashamed repression. Below entries for ship girls will list this trope for each girl specifically if their wartime sentiments are mentioned.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: the story makes it clear that ship girls are indeed robots, or at least android in nature, but have fun trying to prove that a ship girl can't act just as human as your average Joe. The line becomes even more blurred with both generations of Shiratsuyu-class destroyers, with the first starting out as magically-capable humans who had every cell short of the brain replaced with Smartsteel, resulting in full-body cyborgs like in Ghost in the Shell, while the second are the daughters by blood of the first and biomechanical lifeforms from birth.
• Sibling Team: the story is quite fond of deploying ship girls of the same class together, which works out in the ship girls' interests.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: now that Damon's YRC has the power to instill new powers into his ship girls, the girls who gain new weapons all seem to do this whenever they elect to equip them.
• Starter Equipment: the vast majority of destroyers in the story only come with their stock 12cm or 12.7cm gun turrets, while only a very select few destroyers happen to come with torpedo launchers. Meanwhile, cruisers, battleships, and carriers come with the starter equipment featured in their ingame renditions, and then some, for a few of them.
• Stealth Expert: all submarines thus featured in the story have personal Cloaking fields and are trained in the basics of stealth warfare; many of them also carry suppressed firearms to help facilitate this role.
• Super Drowning Skills: Ship girls are explicitly mentioned to be unable to swim due to the nature of Smartsteel, the material that their bodies are made of, meaning that if they turn off their ship modes while sailing or take enough damage to begin sinking, they better hope that the water level is shorter than their noses. Averted with the submarine girls, who indeed can swim and thus are the only ones who can immediately begin retrieving the bodies of sunken ship girls to carry them back for repairs.
• Took a Level in Badass: any girl who's usually notorious for being big memebait and a Joke Character can be expected to be more than a few times more effective and badass in this story than her canon self.
• Wetware CPU: what the ship girls' main processing units, or brains, are. See Our Mages Are Different for details.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Quite a few ship girls in the fleet get into arguments and develop hostilities between each other. A few examples include Murasame vs. Kisaragi (and for a brief period of time, the entire Shiratsuyu-Class vs. the Mutsuki-Class because of their incident) and Kaga vs. Takao.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: until Damon is able to secure external logistics support for his fleet, the ship girls he finds and reactivates during the early portions of the story are typically found without any of their ship equipment and must make do with what they have on themselves. Damon also arms them with ordinary firearms and has them fight this way until they can find their proper equipment.