Talk:French frigate Georges Leygues

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Frigate/Destroyer confusion

This sentence in the leade isn't clear, I also noticed it in other articles, so I think it needs clarifying :

The French Navy does not use the term "destroyer" for its ships; hence some large ships, referred to as "frigates", are registered as destroyers.

If "destroyer" doesn't exist, then surely the ship is registered as a frigate ?

With some research I figured it out, but I think the article needs some change : the ship is registered as D641, basically so that foreign navies know it's a "destroyer sized" ship and not a mere frigate. So the French navy calls it a frigate, but by one letter in the registration, hints that it's a destroyer.

D641 isn't mentioned in the article at all. Aesma (talk) 16:06, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect it's just a factor of when they were built, which was a time when pennant numbers were in flux, notably with the United States Navy 1975 ship reclassification. But broadly since then the NATO convention has been to refer to ship types by function rather than size, indeed the Type 26 frigate is bigger than pretty much every European destroyer but it's called a frigate because its main mission is against submarines. And in similar fashion the French government now refers to the Leygues class as the F70 frigate which would fit modern NATO practice. So I suspect the D pennant numbers are a legacy of the 1970s that never got changed unlike eg the Ticonderoga-class cruiser. But the French are studiously inconsistent about these things, like referring to their Horizons as frigates even though Italy refers to the same class as destroyers, in line with NATO practice.FlagSteward (talk) 23:50, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]