Do any of you actually name your ships?

[Will]

For my big games, I usually will have after a short time three kinds of ships (sometimes four): All-purpose Attack/Defense ship, All-purpose Transport ship, Carrier, and (sometimes) Point-Defense ship. I'll just use normal SEIV naming conventions (ie Ship XII 0042, meaning it's the 12th revision on the basic design, and the 42nd ship constructed on that design).

For more "intimate" games, like SJ plays, I name my ships. My most recent one was playing with his P&N mod, I had at the end, 5 BBs (Victory, Privateer, Protector, Bucaneer, Thief), 3 DSs (Skull, Crossbones, Eyes), 2 LCs (Eliminator, Vengance), 1 CR (Refueler), 1 DN (Miner), 4 SS (Shredder 1 through 4), 1 BS (Shredder 5), and I at various points used captured enemy DNs in battle before analyzing/scrapping them, they were temporarily named "Bounty X", with X being whichever number it was in order. There were fifteen, I believe. The BBs were all of the same general design, heavy shielding, PPB Vs, a few PDLasers. Victory had a small SY, and reached 50% experience, Privateer reached 35%. Skull and Crossbones are twins, moderate shielding, HBM V, SD V, PPB V, BP V. Eyes had SD V, 3x PPB V, and HyperOptics III. Eliminator was a better shielded Skull/Crossbones. Vengance was a heavily shielded delivery vehicle for a Plague Bomb V. Refueler was all engines, supply storage, and solar collectors. Miner was a captured DN retrofitted to do mining work on asteroids. Shredders 1 thru 5 were mining bases.

For you to think, "I'm sending Victory into battle against three enemy DNs," it is so much more fun than "I'm sending BLaster XV 0174 into battle against three enemy DNs." But it's really impossible to do that for larger games except for special cases (ie, ships that have reached Legendary). Makes for good story writing in small games too

[CaptSpoogy]

I always name ALL of my ships - from little escorts to bulky transports - every one of them has a name.

I could never live them just numbered.

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[Atrocities]

yes

[Possum]

Yes, each class will all have names starting with the same letter, that way I can sort by name, and in the process sort by class

[henk brouwer]

I name my ships after their ship class: when I have a 'guardian' ship class ships will be named:

Dark Guardian
Black Guardian
Red Guardian

and so on..

[Dragonswrd]

I usually open a design name file and use names out of that for my ships.

[pathfinder]

the custom shipset I use is one named after my gaming squad, so I use the names of my squadmates plus roman numerals for upgraded Versions. these are all in a design_name file and are part of the empire flie.

[This message has been edited by pathfinder (edited 19 May 2001).]

[ZzZ]

I name ALL my ships (not only the design). It is great fun and it's nice to watch how long a single ship serves the entire fleet.

But I think I'm only doing this because I'm playing by e-mail ... I also name all planets.

ZzZ

[Aristoi]

I usually play large games, so it's hard to name the amount of ships in my Navy. Really impressive ships with great service usually merit a special name, though.

[Barnacle Bill]

There is what I do now, and what I wish the game had a feature to let me do.

What I do now is to name the class using a naming convention which is in three parts: a type designator, a name & a Roman numeral.

The type designator for warships is ES, FF, DD, CL, CA, BC, BB, DN & SD (I like calling Baseships "Superdreadnoughts"). For carriers I use CVL, CV & CVA. For anything not a warship I use a three letter designator beginning with A (for Auxilliary, following USN practice). For example small, medium & large transports are AKS, AKM & AKL, respectively. Mostly after the A comes something to remind me what the ship is for, for example AML is a mine layer.

For the class name I have a set of them I like to use over & over for ships of a given type. For example, by my great uncle was a Chief Petty Officer on a minesweeper in WWII, so I always name my minesweeper class Hobson after him.

The Roman numerals are assigned sequentially as I retrofit the class. I tend to do that when I have the tech to add 1 to the ship's speed. If I have an upgrade which does not increase speed, I'll append a lower case letter after the Roman numeral.

For individual ships, I just let the program append those 4 digit sequential numbers to the class name. The exception is CVA's, since I don't build very many of them. They get individual names, generally after real world carriers.

What I wish the game would do is let me specify a separate name file for each class when I design the class. The way this would work is every time you build a ship of that class it will use the next name in the file - falling back on the current class name plus 4 digit number if it runs out of names in the file. Then I'd go through the trouble to create the files for all my standard classes once and use them over & over.



[This message has been edited by Barnacle Bill (edited 19 May 2001).]