Do any of you actually name your ships?

[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.

[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).]

[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.

[Magnum357]

I don't name specific names to my ships (or classes). I use a number system similar to what you see in Star Trek (similar to the shows Hull regestry numbers). I know, kinda corney, but they really help in large PBEM games with your ships.

Their are basically type of Indicators on my hull regester system. The "Construction" Label is first, followed by a dash, then the actual Specific hull number. The Construction Label describes what the vessels role is in the fleet (ex. CV would be carrier). The first letter is always "C" which means construction. The second letter descibes the role of the vessel...

V= Carrier
W= Warship
m= Minelayer/Sweeper (I make these ships use both components)
S= Scout
J= Auxilary Vessel (Basically freighter hulls converted to be used in the Fleet)
etc...etc...etc...

The Regestry number describes the ships actual count in the fleet. The first number describes the ships size with the fleet. Since ship hulls that are close to one another have only a slight edge in combat, I divide my the number group between 4 types ... light hulls "1", Standard Hulls "2" (work horses of the fleet, usually CL's and Destroyers), Heavy Hulls "3" (big ships like Crusiers mostly), and finally Massive Hulls "4" (Battleships, Dreadnoughts etc.). So a Battleship would have this type of hull regestry....

CW-423-a

The "23" indicate how many vessels of its size in the fleet (hehe... Doesn't nessesarly mean that their are only "23" Massive vessels within my fleet! This is another number system that is considered "classified" under my system.). The "a" letter indicates that it received a refit. It may also be applied to class designs to indicate a refit to a designs hull as well.