While sitting at work, hungover, bored, inhaling a bacon sandwich AND TOTALLY NOT CRUISING THE LIMIT THEORY FORUM, I had a bit of a muse on ship names. Seen as though most of us have played spaceshippy games, I was wondering what rationale you folks used when naming vessels. Seen as though we're all gonna' have massive fleets within the next few months.

Me? I go with elementals, things like the wind, sometimes mythical creatures, heroes or gods. Oh, and weapons!

Quite liking the idea of a dreadnought called Tempest at the minute.

I don't have a procedure or rationale for it.
Sometimes I don't rename ships at all, sometimes they are beer brands, sometimes silly phrases like "He Was First". No idea what will be next.

In X3 I used a script to auto-generate ship/station names with colour schemes and labels to easier tell their class and function.

When I avidly played on a modded Freelancer server, I was in a Liberty Rogue group where all of our ships were named for ships in Iain Banks' The Culture novels.
Mine were Ethics Gradient and Long View.

I also named a few myself. I had a transport named Common Nonsense and a freighter named Thrusting & Fleeing (which was an obscure joke on one of the dumber server rules at the time).

Our nonexistent flagship was the (Another Fine Product From The) Nonsense Factory.

I think Grumble should be hired for this aspect.

I think it's a good idea to name your ship "The One On The Left" or "That One" or "The Blue One" if you're playing a multiplayer game.

Ever come across the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, Serendipitous? The ships all have pretty funny names.

A naming policy along those lines might be fun.

Look up, ThymineC.

Ah, totally missed that. My mistake.

(edit: Those are pretty awesome names by the way)

In the webcomic Schlock Mercenary there was a rogue AI who controlled a vast fleet of ships. Since they all contained copies of his AI, all the ship names had the initials "P.D."

I once played on some online html-based space game with a guild of people from the Schlock forums, and just about every ship had the P.D. convention. It was pretty entertaining seeing what people came up with given the limitations.

I.e. A fighter might have the name "Pretty Dangerous", a scout/courier ship be the "Priority Delivery", an explorer be "Plentiful Discoveries", and a trader be the "Prosperity Driver", etc.

Just_Ice_au wrote:I.e. A fighter might have the name "Pretty Dangerous", a scout/courier ship be the "Priority Delivery", an explorer be "Plentiful Discoveries", and a trader be the "Prosperity Driver", etc.

Every time I see "i.e." being used in place of "e.g.":
"I.e." for rephrasing a sentence, "e.g." for giving examples.

I'm checking out the comic you linked, it looks neat.

One of my favorite ship names is Thunder Child from H. G. Wells War of the Worlds. Here is the clip from Jeff Wayne's version of the story: http://youtu.be/L-S15IDcQgE

ThymineC wrote:

Just_Ice_au wrote:I.e. A fighter might have the name "Pretty Dangerous", a scout/courier ship be the "Priority Delivery", an explorer be "Plentiful Discoveries", and a trader be the "Prosperity Driver", etc.

Every time I see "i.e." being used in place of "e.g.":
"I.e." for rephrasing a sentence, "e.g." for giving examples.

I'm checking out the comic you linked, it looks neat.

Fair call. I originally had that i.e. in the second paragraph providing clarification, but then I kept thinking up more cool names for ships and the addendum grew enough that I moved down into a separate paragraph of listed examples. Forgot to change the id est to an exempli gratia.

Just don't set Notgazz on me. It's the last time it'll happen, I swear!

Anyhow, you might also enjoy the Webcomic Thread

HowSerendipitous wrote:most of us have played spaceshippy games

I initially misread that as "space hippy games."

Damn space hippies.

I will probably choose names from the ships of A. Bertram Chandler's excellent "John Grimes" novels, such as Far Traveler or Little Sister.

Or possibly ships in the "unlikely -able" line: Expurgatable, Imperturbable, Renegotiable, Execrable, etc.

Also, I can hear the soundtrack to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in my head now. ("Uuuuuullllaaaaaaaa....")

ThymineC wrote:Ever come across the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, Serendipitous? The ships all have pretty funny names.

A naming policy along those lines might be fun.

Yah, one of the guys I used to work with was pretty obsessed with them! Annoyingly enough, I'm already neck deep in books so I'm not going to get to them until at least 2030 at this rate.

Gunther Haldan wrote:One of my favorite ship names is Thunder Child from H. G. Wells War of the Worlds. Here is the clip from Jeff Wayne's version of the story: http://youtu.be/L-S15IDcQgE

Ever seen the live show? I, um, wore War of the Worlds out on tape as a child. Twice.

Generally, when I need ship names, I go to the order of battle for the battle of Jutland in WWI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_battle_at_Jutland I tend to use the German ship names first, and then move on the British. Though the Germans didn't tend to name their destroyers, they just gave them hull numbers.