Ship class

In some cases this has resulted in different class names being used in European and U.S. references; for example, European sources record the Colorado-class battleships of the United States Navy as the "Maryland class", as USS Maryland was commissioned before USS Colorado.

[citation needed][contradictory] The West German Navy (Bundesmarine) used a three-digit type number for every class in service or in advanced project state.

In addition, the ships of the class would have a number prefixed by a letter indicating the role of that type of vessel.

Russia has its own classification system for these ships: The British Royal Navy (RN) has used several methods of naming classes.

Classification by letter also helped to conflate similar smaller classes of ships as in the case of the A-class destroyers of 1913 whose names spread across the alphabet.

[5] However, naval historians and scholars retro-apply the current convention to historical naval vessels sharing similarities, such as those of the American Civil War, where the Union Navy built several vessels in series, which can be termed "classes" as presently understood.

Generally accepted by military historians and widely used in the more recent books, webpages and papers on the subject matter (most notably the releases of Osprey Publishing), these latter-day classifications are sometimes considered "semi-official" (although they are not).

[citation needed] By the time the United States entered World War II, the current naming convention was in place, though it remains unclear as to exactly how and when the practice originated.

These vessels are said to be in class when their hull, structures, machinery, and equipment conform to International Maritime Organization and MARPOL standards.