Bad Starship Names
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
- Start date
Gagarin, Tereshkova and Leonov make sense. Lenin, not so much. But then I doubt even a future Earth naval warship would be named after Lenin at this point in real world history.
As left-leaning as the entertainment industry tends to be, even they wouldn't go that far. It'd be like having a USS Stalin.
Already have done. Twice.
Just a bit of nitpicking, Laika died aboard Sputnik 2. That being said, you're right about their significance, and for the same reason, I also think Gagarin's Vostok programme, and its successors Voskhod (featuring the first multi-member crew and Leonov's first spacewalk) and Soyuz, the Salyut and Mir stations as well as the Buran shuttle have all earned their places on Starfleet's naming list. The programmes themselves are important milestones, even if some individual missions involved tragedy or cruelty.
I know. The plan was to launch a second spaceship, with a living passenger, on the anniversary of an important event in Soviet history. With such a ridiculously short timetable, there was no time to create a retrieval plan. Or, sadly, to perfect the mechanics of the capsule's cooling system.
Still, Sputnik I was the first manmade object placed in Earth orbit. So yeah, it rates having a ship or shuttle or something named after it.
There have already been four ships.
And that's not even taking into account that our eurm, historical documents may be far from complete.
I'd name my fictional ship the Flattery, because it gets me nowhere.
I named one of my early kitbashes USS Kirov, 'cause the name sounds cool and the Russian cruiser was a powerful, cool-looking ship, and only later found out who Kirov himself was. And then the Wall fell, and they changed the name of the actual ship, and I realized nobody 300 years in the future would probably name a ship after a prominent Soviet... Oh well.
While I agree with others that there may be some prominent Soviets who get ships named after them, I don't think Kirov would be one of them, no. For whatever it's worth, some of my Star Trek Online ships have included the USS Sputnik and the USS Vostok. There's also the canonical Soyuz class, and I think a USS Mir and a USS Valentina Tereshkova would be appropriate.
Meanwhile: I do think that it's worth bearing in mind that the 24th Century Federation would probably view a lot of prominent Western politicians as being not all that much better than most Soviet politicians. We should either be prepared for the idea that the Federation would probably not respect certain politicians we venerate today (e.g., the Federation rejecting naming anything after George Washington because he was a slaver personally and his administration protected the enslavement of over 700,000 innocent people in the nascent U.S.), or be prepared for the idea that the Federation would be as forgiving of some Soviet politicians as we are of politicians we venerate today (e.g., the Federation naming ships after both George Washington and Vladimir Lenin, in spite of their profound abuses, out of recognition for others of their accomplishments).
Just to stick it to the haters, perhaps there will be a USS Kurtzman. The new flagship of the Federation. 
You know, I never even paused before to consider how tacky that was.
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I think this thread has established one thing above all else – naming things after real people is inherently problematic. Star Trek should probably stop doing that.
I mean it ultimately just depends on what kind of value system the creators of Star Trek want to endorse and what kind of audience they want to attract and retain. I don't think there's anything problematic about, for instance, naming a ship the USS Nelson Mandela or the USS Malcolm X, but you gotta be willing to accept that certain people will object to the value system you're espousing and may stop watching because of it.
USS Kilauea... "she's gonna blow!!!!"
St Petersburg is still called Leningrad in the 23rd century (TVH).
Clearly post-Putin Russia had issues.
