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Names for future Luna class ships

There are some of those names that Starfleet might like to avoid for diplomatic reasons...

"This is the USS Phobos. We come in peace."
"We welcome you in peace, Phobos. by the way, what does your ship's name mean?"
"Ahhh.... fear. Sorry about that. It's just the name of a moon."
"What's the name of the planet that moon orbits?"
"That's Mars. Named after an ancient god of War... Look, can we start again?"
 
diankra said:
There are some of those names that Starfleet might like to avoid for diplomatic reasons...

"This is the USS Phobos. We come in peace."
"We welcome you in peace, Phobos. by the way, what does your ship's name mean?"
"Ahhh.... fear. Sorry about that. It's just the name of a moon."
"What's the name of the planet that moon orbits?"
"That's Mars. Named after an ancient god of War... Look, can we start again?"
Click to expand...

:lol:. Good point, diankra. :)
 
Christopher said:
The name "Pandora" has cultural resonances stretching far, far back before Avatar, although of course those resonances are somewhat infamous (the person who unleashed the evils of the world). And Sycorax was the mother of Caliban in The Tempest; both the moon and the Doctor Who aliens were named for her. Again, though, it's an inauspicious name, since Sycorax was an evil witch. And Trinculo was a comic-relief drunkard in the same play, again not an ideal namesake.
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Actually, the Shakespeare character was named for the Doctor Who aliens. ;)
 
Paris said:
I'd like to see the USS Endor.:devil:
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USS Forest Moon. Endor was the planet.:p

Switching a letter, though, the USS Andor could be a contender.

iguana_tonante said:
They already finished that. The names for Uranus' moons are taken from Shakespeare's and Pope's works, and many recently discovered moons have been named using different pantheons, as the Norse, Inuit and Gallic giants for Saturn's moons and Hawaiian deities for Haumea's moons.
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And they really oughtn't. Crap snowballs and bundles of silica and iron are an awfully lame thing to blow our load of cool, mythological names on, when--already even--we need all the cool, mythological names we can find, for the thousands of celestial objects worthy of the dignity in other solar systems. Taking Pandora for an example, it might well have been called Alpha Centauri A a-III or something similar without an available name from mythology.* This is not a good name. I want to see more planets like Osiris or Bellerophon; I want to see a super-jovian called Yahweh.

*I'm not sure if there's a generic system of nomenclature for exomoons yet, but the old intrasolar designations of I, II, III, etc. would probably work. Honestly, it pisses me off that they don't do that with extrasolar planets ala Star Trek, ostensibly because it would be annoying to rename--well, in my opinion it's a much bigger pain in the ass to try to memorize orbital sequence when there aren't even proper names, like with Gliese 876 c actually being the closest planet to its sun.

Edit: it's actually 876 d. This goes to the point, really.
 
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diankra said:
There are some of those names that Starfleet might like to avoid for diplomatic reasons...

"This is the USS Phobos. We come in peace."
"We welcome you in peace, Phobos. by the way, what does your ship's name mean?"
"Ahhh.... fear. Sorry about that. It's just the name of a moon."
"What's the name of the planet that moon orbits?"
"That's Mars. Named after an ancient god of War... Look, can we start again?"
Click to expand...

why'd you even need to say that? just say, 'dunno mate, it's Greek, innit? I don't speak Greek. It's just a moon to me, pal.'

hell, who even bothers asking what the ship's name means anyway?

are you the same person who trots this one out when people talk about Lexington and Yorktown being battle-sites?
 
Christopher said:
Epsilon IX said:
...as well as the two already lost (the Luna, and the Charon)...
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Why does everyone seem to think the Luna was lost? It was damaged in an accident during shakedowns and a number of engineers were killed, but the ship survived, was repaired, and is "currently" in service. The Charon is the only Luna-Class ship that's actually been destroyed.



iguana_tonante said:
Dysnomia, for the whole Pluto debate.
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Not really a good name for a Starfleet vessel, since it means "lawlessness." (It was a consolation prize when the dwarf planet nicknamed "Xena" got the official name Eris instead; they obliquely named its moon after Lucy Lawless.)
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well naming a ship charon might not have been the best idea either.
;)
 
pookha said:
well naming a ship charon might not have been the best idea either.
;)
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At least I hope they had Dante's Inferno as ship's motto:

"Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia, Loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie; Batte col remo qualunque s'adagia."

(Charon the demon, with the eyes of glede, Beckoning to them, collects them all together, Beats with his oar whoever lags behind. - Longfellow's translation). :)
 
captcalhoun said:
diankra said:
There are some of those names that Starfleet might like to avoid for diplomatic reasons...

"This is the USS Phobos. We come in peace."
"We welcome you in peace, Phobos. by the way, what does your ship's name mean?"
"Ahhh.... fear. Sorry about that. It's just the name of a moon."
"What's the name of the planet that moon orbits?"
"That's Mars. Named after an ancient god of War... Look, can we start again?"
Click to expand...

why'd you even need to say that? just say, 'dunno mate, it's Greek, innit? I don't speak Greek. It's just a moon to me, pal.'

hell, who even bothers asking what the ship's name means anyway?

are you the same person who trots this one out when people talk about Lexington and Yorktown being battle-sites?
Click to expand...

A culture that puts an importance on names would bother to ask - within Treklit, at least, that includes Diane Duane's Romulans (it's somewhere in My Enemy My Ally that Ael asks about 'Enterprise').
 
I know this thread ended some time ago, but something just recently occured to me. When it would come to naming future Luna Class ships, having looked at the existing ship names, it seems that the shipwrights take into account that the required minimum diameter for the moon to receive a namesake ship be 100-250 km (Amalthea and Galatea fall into this category), and the maximum diameter be 4000-6000 km (Titan, Ganymede and Callisto fall into this category), and with regularity of shape (ie. spheroid) being desireable.

With this in mind, the most likely names the shipwrights will come up with in future would be:

Titania,
Iapetus,
Dione,
Tethys,
Umbriel,
Ariel,
Enceladus,
Mimas,
Hyperion,
Miranda,
Proteus,
Nereid,
Hi'iaka,
Himalia,
Thebe,
Phoebe,
Janus,
Epimetheus,
Sycorax,
Puck,
Portia,
Larissa,
Despina,
Namaka,
Dysnomia.

After which I imagine they'll move onto moons of other Federation member worlds, to give the impression that the Federation isn't the Homo Sapiens club as much as people believe it to be.

Simon
 
^They didn't. I misinterpreted it. There was an accident which killed a good number of the engineering staff. However, the ship was repaired and returned to active service. It's mentioned in all the Titan novels, however we're still in the dark about the details, which I thought would be good for the subject of a short story.
 
Epsilon IX said:
^They didn't. I misinterpreted it. There was an accident which killed a good number of the engineering staff. However, the ship was repaired and returned to active service. It's mentioned in all the Titan novels, however we're still in the dark about the details, which I thought would be good for the subject of a short story.
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Yes I'd lI've to see that.
 
Christopher said:
(It was a consolation prize when the dwarf planet nicknamed "Xena" got the official name Eris instead; they obliquely named its moon after Lucy Lawless.)
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Weellll... and Eris had a child named Dysnomia, so it works on two levels.

Sci said:
Lame. They should have just had some fun and named it Planet Xena. Why does every planet or dwarf planet have to have some stuffy old Greek or Roman name?
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Err... Xena is Greek. A variant of Xenia, to be precise, which was the Ancient Greek concept of hospitality and also the name of some saints. And a disturbingly exciting James Bond villain, of course. :shifty:
 
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