In universe-I think that when a class of ship is approved a block of registry numbers is assigned to that class. But once they run through that block of numbers if they need more ships of that class, either as replacements for lost ships or simply due to underestimating the need, said ships are simply assigned whatever number is up next. This theory accounts for both close numbers and widely varying ones.
My personal fanwanky explanation for out of sequence registry numbers, such as Constellation NCC-1017, that I concocted years ago, is that some ships were refitted and upgraded from earlier classes to Constitution class. A variation on this idea might be that some retired names and registries were reused verbatim before the convention of appending letter suffixes was introduced.
Dat's me. Yup, I used the date of the ship's sinking. I was a little more on the "bloody obvious" side with this one, though: http://www.inpayne.com/models/kitbash/trekpage_columbus.html
^that Columbus looks a lot like a class i invented for my fan-fic called the Traveller class, aside from you've used the FJ-esque deflector-on-a-pole that i so despise. cool model though.
Here's some ships I'd like to see: USS Berringer. NCC-41796. I chose that number because it corresponds to the last full day that he was alive. With that number, it would probably be Excelsior class. ENT era: Y-class cargo freighter, ECS Mychal Judge. ECS-51133. In this case, it's his birth date. Probably ships like this didn't actually have registries this high, but I say, #)(%* that. Besides, I can't think of any other number to use that didn't shamelessly evoke 9/11.
How about 533 (May 1933) or 115 (May 11th)? If you wanted to go really low you could do 91 (September 2001) or 20 (9+11)? dJE
My most recent bash, the Chaffee, uses the year of the Apollo 1 fire, in which astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee perished. The name also ties in with the USS Grissom, whose pod I stole for the bash: http://www.inpayne.com/models/kitbash/trekpage_chaffee.html The Sultana's number is the date of the riverboat Sultana's catastrophic sinking: http://www.inpayne.com/models/kitbash/trekpage_sultana.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Sultana USS Saipan's number is the date of the invasion of Saipan in WWII: http://www.inpayne.com/models/kitbash/trekpage_saipan.html The Preble was built to bust on a coworker who served on the destroyer USS Preble in the 1980s. Preble was DD 46: http://www.inpayne.com/models/kitbash/trekpage_preble.html The Artemis' number is.. the year I built the model:http://www.inpayne.com/models/kitbash/trekpage_artemis.html
Like I said, I would prefer not to involve 9/11 at all - i.e. not use any registry number that contained it. 533 is a good idea, though. So I'll go with that.
if you're referring to the Everest disaster, that was May 10th. surely it'd be better to commerate Everest being succesfully scaled the first time with NCC 52953 or 29553
51096, then. And those men who died on the mountain deserve to be commemorated. That's why I picked this disaster rather than the successful summit(s).
Why commemorate fools? So that nobody else would follow in their footsteps? Generally, success is the thing to receive a subtle nod like this; even the Sullivans died for what might be argued to have been a good cause. Commemoration of the "never again" sort is classically conducted on very different venues. Timo Saloniemi
I thought about that, but I admit I had the disaster fresh in my mind because I'd just watched the IMAX film about it. If it's a better idea to celebrate a successful summit, then that's fine. Perhaps those dates you mentioned would be better attached to the actual names of the climbers? USS Edmund Hillary, USS Tenzing Norgay... (if there were to be a ship named after Hillary, I got a great motto for the dedication plaque: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off." )
Yeah. Fuck those whose spirit beckons them to go off into the unknown, boldly going where they've never gone before! J-balls to the Wizzalls.