McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
What about this beaming thing? Is it safe?!
LizW65:
Birds, fish, and annoying stinging insects all are fair game when naming a ship. How about the USS Turducken, loving nicknamed The Turd by its crew, of course?
Paynesgrey:
In human history at least, ship names depend on their class. The United States named it's battleships after states, the Iowa, The Missouri, etc. You could have a class of ship named after political leaders of your civilization, another class named after rivers, another class after military heroes. If you're consistent, you won't have to tell your readers each time what class a ship is, you can let the name tell them. This lets them have the fun of saying "Hah! That's must be a carrier, because they were all named after root vegetables!" Readers seem to get a little jolt of pleasure by picking up on that sort of detail.
In my WiP's mythology, the old T'ren Empire troopships were named after prominent military figures; a HMSS Carlos Hathcock (A USMC sniper and All Around Big Damn Hero) and the HMSS Paddy Mayne (after SAS officer LtC Robert Blair Mayne DSO & 3 Bars who was the terror of Afrika as far as the Germans were concerned. The guy personally demolished, burned or just smashed the hell up around a hundred German aircraft on hit & run raids.) And my dreadnoughts had a different nomenclature, drawing back to pre-Jump mythology, with names like HMSS Avalon Invicta or HMSS Breath of Scheherazade.
But I suggest swapping things up when you're dealing with multiple species, races, nations. My Te' Etta Dainan Empire named their ships like the Valorous Daughter or Ascent Into Glory, based on concepts and ideals important in their own culture.
And fighter pilots? You can have some fun there. "The Blazing Brat" or "Sassy Bandersnatch" for example.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on November 19, 2012, 11:36:18 PM ---In human history at least, ship names depend on their class. The United States named it's battleships after states, the Iowa, The Missouri, etc. You could have a class of ship named after political leaders of your civilization, another class named after rivers, another class after military heroes. If you're consistent, you won't have to tell your readers each time what class a ship is, you can let the name tell them.
--- End quote ---
Indeed, I'm certainly trying to do that in TIWTBWO, and I think it will be pretty clear that the Briareus, the Perfect Cherry Blossom and the Occam's Hammer come from different cultures. The main culture in TISBWO names major ships after people who at some point in their careers had near-absolute power and relinquished it for the greater good, so while they have ships named after Washington and Churchill, they're not necessarily for the same reasons a contemporary navy would use those names.
Speaking of ship classes, though, am I the only one who thinks that the number of SF works that keep the same old frigate/cruiser/destroyer/battleship distinctions in space are a bit naff ? They've been done to death, there's not that I can see any immediate reason to assume the same functional distinctions for interstellar warfare as in a Napoleonic navy, and while I can see the use in having the ship functions be intuitively obvious for a game like EVE Online or Sins of a Solar Empire and using familiar names thereby, it really seems kind of contrived if you are building an original world from scratch. (I particularly dislike seeing "battlecruiser" used in this context by people who think it's a cool name but seem not to know what a terrible idea the things were.)
Paynesgrey:
If you're building a culture from scratch, and whatever narration is not based on a human perspective then it would make sense to come up with original classifications. Be a handy way to illustrate the social and cultural differences from the reader's human-centric viewpoint. I'm sure that there's a proper word for "human-centric", but I can't recall what it is...
As for categories of ships though, I expect that unless it's a truly and utterly alien race, with utterly alien technology, (Borg Cubes, Hive Ships, etc) then you'll always have some equivalent in categories of ships if not names for those categories. Capital ships take more time and resources to build and crew, so you wouldn't waste them on routine patrols, destroyers and cruisers are vastly cheaper so you'd build swarms of them you could use to screen your expensive capital ships as well as smaller, routine missions. Your systems/planets/colonies with a lighter industrial base might not be able to produce anything heavy, but they can free up the big shipyards by taking up the slack in light units while the more industrialized locals focus on the big stuff that only they can build efficiently.
This is of course assuming that the story's universe is not a super-science post-scarcity setting with unlimited resources, manpower, training, logistic capacity, all that jazz... I'm thinking in terms more like BSG, B5, etc.
As for battlecruisers, I've seen some SF where they were a good idea. Basically long range, missile platforms that could be deployed and positioned rapidly to put fire where it's needed. They were cheaper, lighter on crewing demands, and had throw weight approaching that of the big heavy sluggers, but not the armor so they had to keep at a distance. Basically the same way modern, self-propelled artillery works. Keep it safe, it's a rain of unholy death, but toe to toe, it's breakfast.
What really bugs me is when someone has a "destroyer" that's going toe to toe with a heavy cruiser, dreadnought, etc because the writer never bothered to look up even the basics of ship classes. It's like the ground-warfare version of thinking a platoon can handle a division or corp. (Barring of course a ridiculous technological advantage. The US's old Spruance class destroyers, the last of which was decommissioned a few years ago, would have had no difficulty butchering both the Bismark and Tirpitz at the same time without mussing it's metaphorical hair.)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Paynesgrey on November 21, 2012, 02:01:22 AM ---If you're building a culture from scratch, and whatever narration is not based on a human perspective then it would make sense to come up with original classifications. Be a handy way to illustrate the social and cultural differences from the reader's human-centric viewpoint. I'm sure that there's a proper word for "human-centric", but I can't recall what it is...
--- End quote ---
Anthropocentric I think may be the word you are looking for.
--- Quote ---This is of course assuming that the story's universe is not a super-science post-scarcity setting with unlimited resources, manpower, training, logistic capacity, all that jazz... I'm thinking in terms more like BSG, B5, etc.
--- End quote ---
Even on that scale, it seems to me it's a very different domain, and it would seem to me not very plausible that the paradigms that work there would be that similar; when I think of changes in paradigms through naval history on a longer scale, from the Roman corvus and breaking the pirate presence in the Mediterranean, to Lepanto demonstrating that galley slaves are obsolete, to the difference between an early 20th century battleship and a present-day carrier group, the "capital ships pounding on each other with big iron like Napoleonic ships' broadsides" model - or even ramming, as I recall one sequence in B5 - just doesn't work for me.
--- Quote ---As for battlecruisers, I've seen some SF where they were a good idea. Basically long range, missile platforms that could be deployed and positioned rapidly to put fire where it's needed. They were cheaper, lighter on crewing demands, and had throw weight approaching that of the big heavy sluggers, but not the armor so they had to keep at a distance. Basically the same way modern, self-propelled artillery works. Keep it safe, it's a rain of unholy death, but toe to toe, it's breakfast.
--- End quote ---
I wouldn't argue with that, but if anything, I think that's not going far enough.
Presuming for a moment no handwavium, and working with the laws of physics we understand, I think pretty much any spaceship has to be a glass cannon, in much the same way as any plausible 1940s battleship doesn't well endure being at ground zero of a multi-megaton thermonuclear explosion; the sort of offensive weaponry that seems plausible at a tech level of sizable interplanetary presences, starting from where we have now, seems to make armour a lost cause, and I really don't think many people writing space battles really grasp either how big space is, or just how much of a scale difference that makes between physical missiles and energy weapons acting at or near lightspeed. Also, annoyingly few people seem to grasp that there is no stealth in space, full stop; the space-warfare-as-submarine-warfare paradigm doesn't work.
I'm having an absolute devil of a time trying to come up with any logical basis at all for human-piloted small fighters in a setting like that, considering how much more manoeuvrable it's plausible to make a drone that does not have to worry about the effects of high gravity on squishy organic bodies, and how much faster a reaction time you can get from hardware than nervous systems.
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