Ship names and Numbers

Do you make a point of naming your ships, and if so do you stick/abide by the listed ships/naming conventions for federation ships, or just go with your own, only avoiding the names and numbers of the more famous ships unless you are using that ship.
And just who decided the names? Most figures from ancient mythology and history are stuck as destroyers, which don't even have a model and wouldn't be that impressive, whilst we have some ships such as the war destroyer named after Tony Blair or the Taliban :?
Personally, I give my ships there own names, not usually sticking to the "themes" of each class, and just calling them stuff that sounds cool (or in the case of my heavy cruisers, the amount of time and pain they were to put together).I do intend on honouring the Mars class naming system to a degree though.
 
All my ships use the 'historic' Star Fleet names (thank you Tennshington Decals) except the War Destroyers and their drone variants, for those I use the name of medal winners from Iraq and Afghanistan, US and UK.
 
My Fed ships are urrent;ly being painted, but they will all have individual names and numbers...
But with 12 Fed CAs and even more CLs, FFs, etc - anyone and everyone should be able to find a name that satisfies them.

And I have an inside connection with the guys at Tenneshington, so decals are no problem. 8)
 
I do a mix of official and self-generated names. The opportunity to have a police cutter named the "Samuel Vimes" was too good to miss ;)
 
I don't name my minis but I do like to write a name on the card (or SSD if I'm playing SFB). It adds a bit of 'roleplayishness' to an otherwise technical game. I tend to use a mix of official and made-up names, as well. Whatever sounds nice at the time.

I do agree about the general crummy-ness of the Fed DW names, too. Believe me, this isn't the first time it's come up. In the SFU, Fed small ships (DDs, FFs, DWs etc) are named after historical figures. By the time the DW was introduced I think they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Come to think of it, the Fed Medium Cruisers have some names that aren't great either.
 
Have to agree about the lack of good Federation DW names. I chose names from the American Revolutionary War, instead of the "official" ones. :wink:
 
Personally, I follow the listed names for most of my ships, even to the point of converting a Ward Destroyer into a commando variant to use as the USS Johnson Beharry. The DWs are hard to find good names for, but there is a second section of names in the NCC-12xx series whihc are less... politically-fraught, shall we say?

The only ships I have to come up with names for are my police cutters, which only have a few names listed... so I've named mine based on fictional policemen and detectives. Thus, the squadron includes the FPC Emile Javert (PCC-24601, of course!), FPC Samuel Vimes, FPC Wendell Urth and FPC Richard Castle (with the Joseph Dredd and Nicholas Angel on my list for the next fleet expansion)
 
Most of mine are original names. I roughly followed the general theme of each class. I tried to pay attention to one of the lists at ADB to ensure no number conflicts, though there's two versions of that list, so according to the one I used I'm fine, but the other says I've got conflicts all over the place (which a guy on the ADB Facebook page likes to point out every time Jean posts a picture of one of my ships :P).

I think the biggest deviation is my war destroyer, the Mary Helen, being named after an STO friend's lady-friend. I figured why not. :P

As for my Klingon ships, I've completely ignored the normal schemes for those and given them TNG-era Klingon names (B'rel, Ki'tang, K'tanco, Vo'quv, Norgh, Somraw, etc.).

I guess I should start thinking up names for my new Gorn ships...
 
Just out of interest, what's the naming convention for the Gettysburg? I'm going to stick with the ones for the Mars class and Stat tiger classes (I'm thinking either Horus or Anubis for the formet) but have no idea on that of the Getysburg, the name I'm thinking is the Elendil :P
 
Personally, I wonder if any of the other member planets feel short-changed by the "unified" Star Fleet's naming conventions; it's hard to find any names to do with Vulcan, Andoria, Alpha-Centauri, or other such planets, amidst the sheer number of Terran names used in their place.
 
I dunno about SFU, but in the Franchise it's repeatedly established Starfleet is a human built, led, and run organization, and it just happens to be big enough to provide virtually all the security and exploration the Federation needs.
 
Would be interesting to see some fics from the other member races perspective, especially any unease they feel over the power earth could wield over them, and possibly with some trying to set up rivals to starfleet.
 
Star Fleet Universe the Civil War expansion what a novel idea. One side has standard Federation vessels and the other has a mix from other races retooled to use Federation technology.
 
The SFU version of Star Fleet was intended to be a unified navy, superseding the various planetary fleets during the course of its creation. There were certain political compromises during the course of integration, as various member planets kept "training squadrons" which were eventually formalised into the various National Guards.

(Indeed, the previous generation of unified Star Fleet ships were transferred to the National Guard fleets when the current crop of ships started to enter service back in the Y120s.)

Earth has had a disproportionate impact on the Federation, even in the SFU; the first tactical warp drive was pioneered at Earth, the primary fleet shipyard is in Earth orbit, and the only pre-unified ship class to survive the transition to the modern era is the Terran light cruiser. (The Fed police ship looks the same as the old Terran destroyer on the outside, but has a different internal configuration; whereas the CLs have been the same hull type throughout its long service history.)


The Inter-Stellar Concordium had their own process of integration, too. Each of the pre-ISC planetary fleets (as shown in SFB Modules Y2 and Y3) have their own names and designs; while the standardized hulls of the unified ISC Navy and Police have a more "neutral" set of names. (In their case, the "two-prong" hulls which served the ISC in the Early Years were transferred to the Local Defence forces, the ISC equivalent to the Fed National Guard, when the modern three-prong ships entered service.) The early Concordium had a sustained effort to try and develop a balance between the five founding species, but it seems that the humanoid Veltressai have become the leaders of the ISC by the modern era.


The main issue with Fed "civil war" scenarios is that, while they are viable with the Early Years planetary fleets, there isn't a lot of technological variety between them. Since most of the major planets were already members of the Federation by the onset of tactical warp, most of their warp-refitted ships adopted the same types of phasers-2 and photons. Only the Vulcans and Andorians did things differently; the Vulcans were early adopters of phasers-1 and special sensors, while the Andorians went instead with a home-grown version of drones.

The pre-ISC fleets are different, in that their warp-driven planetary ships were built before the Concordium came into being. Since the five planets were still rivals back then, they each developed their own heavy weapons to mount on those ships. It was only when they first started to field unified hulls, a few decades after the ISC was founded, that they went fully into the process of combining their efforts into a new generation of weapon systems.


If we ever get into the Early Years in ACtA:SF, the planetary fleets would be neat to see fleshed out. But even so, the early ISC might end up being a more fertile ground for inter-planetary conflict than the early UFP.
 
For those familiar with the adb naming/numbering mess, why do they not have the canonical USS Defiant NCC-1764 listed in the registry? The Constellation is also missing. Those ships were both seen on-screen in the original run of the show. They also have most of the other Constitution-class ships paired with the wrong names/numbers. And several of those were seen on-screen as well. That should at least have formed the basis for the beginning of the list.

Since they can't even get one class of ships correct, I would think ships can be named however one wants...maybe my little pony characters lol.
 
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