Something I find a little surprising, since Kantai Collection and some other games involving shipgirls have been relatively popular in the website for years, is that there's no consistency on what to call their battle equipment. Some posts tag it as rigging, some call it machinery, and, of course, some do both.. Now, I don't know if anything can or should be done about this. There are much more results for machinery kantai_collection than there are for rigging, so I wonder if the tag is redundant and it could all be filed under machinery for consistency, but most of the posts don't fit very well on its wiki page description of "detailed depictions of heavy mechanical equipment that is given visual emphasis in the picture".

This came up in topic #10396 but nobody seemed interested in the subject.

I thought this case was of the machinery tag having existed for much longer than rigging (2008 vs. 2014) but the oldest tagged KC post with machinery was 4 years ago so it's more of the fact that rigging wasn't tagged much until at least 2016 (610 tagged posts that year). As for the OP I don't really mind either way but it should be made clear somewhere if we reach a conclusion as to avoid future mistakes.

I’ve been using only rigging because some of the equipment doesn’t look like machinery, such as bows and scrolls.

If you want to be technical, rigging only refers to cables and ropes used to support masts and whatnot - unless there are actual sails, then it includes the ropes used to manipulate those, too.

Using it to refer to smokestacks, guns, searchlights and whatnot is not, and has never been, correct.

I use rigging to refer to parts supporting the machinery, and machinery for the machinery itself.

The more I look at machinery, the less I understand what is it for. On one hand, you have portable rigging used by shipgirls, and on the other hand, you have some Gundam mecha thingy.

I feel the confusion stems from the vague term "heavy mechanical equipment".

"Heavy equipment" in itself would imply some sort of industrial vehicle / mecha.

But because we're in nippon-land, the word "equipment" gave the impression of equippable stuff i.e. RPG equipment, which would fit with the shipgirls' rigging.

And if you think about it, the word "machinery" doesn't really imply either in the first place! Surely one's first impression of "machinery" would be a network of gears / contraptions rather than a mecha or a shipgirl's rigging.

And thus, the best course of action here is obviously to nuke the tag ;D.

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On a more serious note, rigging is definitely preferable to machinery since rigging limits the scope to shipgirl-only, making it a much more useful tag than machinery

Maybe there should be a naval gun tag?

There definitely needs to be a catch all tag for a kanmusu's equipment. Rigging is unsuitable for this job as, as stated previously, a lot of the equipment is not rigging.

"Machinery" passes the test of gathering it all together, but is also rather ambiguous, and the very earliest uses of the tag seem to be a duplicate of the machine tag. On the other hand it has the advantage of the fact that it's already well-established.

If there's a better name then I'd be okay with a name change despite this, but rigging is not what should be chosen as it has its own meaning which probably wants its own tag, and which doesn't come close to encompasing everything currently covered by machinery - and thus is unquestionably worse for the role than the existing tag, and neither tag should be nuked. ("Naval gun" of course also only encompasses a small proportion of the equipment concerned - many kanmusu don't actually have guns in their equipment at all, and plenty of those that do are often drawn with their gear but with no guns shown in the image)

We already have a perfectly good catch-all tag for "girl wearing a bunch of military equipment". It's called mecha musume.

But it was previously decided that mecha musume shouldn't apply to shipgirls, which I don't really agree with. All it does is move the tagging to other tags. Rigging and machinery are effectively the same thing as mecha musume, just under a different name, and limited to shipgirls for no real reason.

skylightcrystal said:

There definitely needs to be a catch all tag for a kanmusu's equipment.

This one sentence left me stumped for a long while: The vague term 'equipment' have been thrown around, but what exactly is the definition of this hypothetically new tag? What exactly are we trying to tag?

Does a Saratoga with her battle rigging but without her flight deck counts? A Fubuki without her cannon?

What about a Ryuujou with her scroll, but without her battle rigging attached to her back? Fubuki with only her cannon?

Shipgirls with seemingly no rigging e.g. Akagi and Kaga from Azur Lane? Minimal rigging e.g. Shimakaze from Kancolle or Inazuma from Azur Lane? They're practically backpack torpedo tubes.

evazion said:

But it was previously decided that mecha musume shouldn't apply to shipgirls, which I don't really agree with. All it does is move the tagging to other tags. Rigging and machinery are effectively the same thing as mecha musume, just under a different name, and limited to shipgirls for no real reason.

You could probably tell from my examples above, but I see rigging as a game community term that simply refers to the sizeable object attached to the shipgirl (usually to the back) regardless of what it is (Shimakaze's practically a backpack torpedo, Warspite's a chair) or has (carriers have AA gun, battleships have turrets, destroyers have smokestacks).

In other words, a rigging is an equipment and thus can be detached from the shipgirl and could be in any form, including a chair, whereas mecha musume should always refer to full body mecha suit.

skylightcrystal said:

There definitely needs to be a catch all tag for a kanmusu's equipment. Rigging is unsuitable for this job as, as stated previously, a lot of the equipment is not rigging.

I don't understand how anyone can be so quick to write off rigging as incorrect but still be willing to accept the use of machinery for completely non-mechanical things like smokestacks and masts and flight decks. If one tag is inaccurate, then so is the other. At least the rigging tag has the advantage of being used almost exclusively for this purpose, whereas machinery can be construed to mean actual machinery, like post #899285 and post #2895545.

Headgear is also used for the characters, in addition to and without the rigging and machinery tags.