StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Hello fellow would-be-bestsellers,
Just wanted to get your opinion about something. I am having to create ships designs for my own personal scifiverse so I wanted to ask what kind of naming convention you prefer. i.e. shoud ship classes be names (as in Nimitz class, etc.) or numbers (as in Project 1145.1, etc).

Personally, I prefer the project # convention.

Thanks.

Names are easier to remember.

I find it a hell of a lot easier to remember that Romulus' Ascension is a Veritas class destroyer than I do to remember that it's a : Type 4 Destroyer, Project 131, {Build number 231-135/a.} though both are equally true.

Use names rather than numbers, unless it's for a Borg-style society where names don't exist.

Readers will make more of a connection with a ship with a name. It's easier to develop a certain attachment to a name than a number.

Not to mention, actual names are just easier to remember.

Names and numbers. Every ship should have a number for identification purposes.

Why numbers? It's not like we would know it's the 1701 Enterprise etc. His ships are his own. If he would add numbers it would mean he would have to put it in a list into a prelogue to know what ships he's talking about.

The id number 111 Pussy Fucker class Suckerpunch......meh.

Cyaround,
JAson

All modern military ships have numbers as well as names. It isn't like you have to bring up the number every time the ship is mentioned.

Yes but why even bother? I know the USS Enterprise is a carrier and know what one would look like. That's enough description there or we can even add the carrier class that it is. Numbers especially in a fanfic will be meaningless regardless if used in real world. I don't recall ships called ISD Mark I Chimaera Operating # 102 b or things like that.

Numbers is just too minor a detail to include.~Jason

I think you should use names. Giving a ship a name that has conotations or alludes to something else is far greater to the reader who can put two and two together.

I'd give them names unless I had a reason not to. The name of the first ship in the class becomes the class name. IRL, ideally, the names follow some kind of theme (i.e., states first for U.S. battleships, and later ballistic missile submarines, or cities for cruisers) but not necessarily (the Nimitz class carriers, had they followed a theme, would have been named for admirals, but politics has gotten them named after presidents, the majority of them Republicans).

IRL, the ships would also be assigned a hull number. The U.S. navy uses an alphabetic prefix to designate the type of hull and a number. Ships are assigned numbers in chronological order (so the BB-62 U.S.S. New Jersey is the sixty-second battleship built by the Navy). Other navies use different systems (the Russians, IIRC, gnerally just assigned numbers at random. In fiction, Starfleet's NCC numbers seem roughly chronological, but there are odd gaps, like the Constituiton class U.S.S. Constellation being numbered NCC-1017 instead of a nice, logical NCC-17xx number). You don't have to specifically mention a number, but it seems ridiculous that a space navy wouldn't number its ships in some way.

Supreme_Warlord wrote:Hello fellow would-be-bestsellers,
Just wanted to get your opinion about something. I am having to create ships designs for my own personal scifiverse so I wanted to ask what kind of naming convention you prefer. i.e. shoud ship classes be names (as in Nimitz class, etc.) or numbers (as in Project 1145.1, etc).

Personally, I prefer the project # convention.

The flaw with the question is that the Russians also named their classes and the USN gave and gives ship designs numbers.

Sea Skimmer wrote:

Supreme_Warlord wrote:Hello fellow would-be-bestsellers,
Just wanted to get your opinion about something. I am having to create ships designs for my own personal scifiverse so I wanted to ask what kind of naming convention you prefer. i.e. shoud ship classes be names (as in Nimitz class, etc.) or numbers (as in Project 1145.1, etc).

Personally, I prefer the project # convention.

The flaw with the question is that the Russians also named their classes and the USN gave and gives ship designs numbers.

I was trying to avoid doing both to reduce the amount of background detail that I would have to create as quite a few ships of various kinds are involved throughout the story.

As for the confusion on whether ships should be named or not, I think the question was a bit misunderstood. The individual ships themselves have names (for obvious reasons), but I wanted to ask your opinion on what would be better for the class that the ship belongs to.

In any instance when a ship is mentioned in the story, it will obviously be referred to by its name, although it will also have a registry number. In the very rare instances when its class also needs to be referred to, I wanted to use numbers (i.e. Project ####, etc.).