Re: Class names for starships?
- From: DouhetSukd@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 25 May 2007 23:37:35 -0700
On May 25, 7:11 am, v$af$pp...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ("ppint. at IMT")
wrote:
never-operational aircraft carrier - Graf Zeppelin - some dead
politician
- er, no; count von zeppelin's best remembered for the rigid
lighter-than-air dirigible balloons ...
Err (*cough*, *cough*) , my bad, I really shouldn't have missed that
one. I guess I was tired when I researched my posting. That, and
Foch, who also deserved better. I was just staying away from
systematically wikipedia/google-ing famous historical figures.
So, my guess is that ships are usually named after either
a) famous politicians / military men
b) impressive sounding names - Entreprise/Daring/Endeavour/Triumphant/
Victory...
- abstractions resonant of "laudable martial qualities" -
including success, and luckiness;
Just what I trying to convey.
c) previous famous ships - Victory/Entreprise...
- the examples you've given both fall into the previous
category; perhaps a better british example'd be "Ark Royal";
Yes, I was aware that those 2 lists tend to overlap. However, the
list of previously used names overlaps with pretty much any other
naming convention, by definition.
d) battles - would help naming conventions if the French had won
some...
- Austerlitz? - Jena? - Verdun?
I know, I am hard on the French. But, like I mentioned before,
usually navies like to name after sea, not land, battles. Or at least
I thought so before my error was pointed out. The French navy rarely
won anything, probably because it was mostly going against the Royal
Navy. Had it been fighting other European navies, things might have
been different.
Verdun was just a clumsy butcher's bloodbath, I dunno if anybody can
really be said to have won it. Atrocious and really the worst level
warfare was ever brought to, until WW2 civilian bombings at least.
The French army had several mutinies in 1917, I'm sure Verdun had
something to do with it.
e) numbers for "unimportant disposable vessels likely to be lost" -
PT109, U-47.
- it could be just that the numbers in which these boats were
produced overwhelmed the nautical minds responsible for gener-
ating approriate names - or, that these precluded organisation
of formal individual launching ceremonies; certainly there was
no equivalent de-emphasising of the importance of destroyers
by numbering instead of naming themn in the war-time royal navy,
though these were lost, and i think were expected to be lost,
in considerable numbers.
I guess having too many boats does mean difficulty in choosing names.
And navies are probably too uptight to allow the crews to choose
names, like some air forces (Memphis Belle, Enola Gay, Le Grand
Charles, etc...). But my original explanation was more to my cynical
liking ;-)
The Germans could have made an effort to name their U-boats,
considering that they were by far the best contribution of the
Kriegsmarine to the war effort. The rest of the fleet was almost
comically useless, PQ-17 excepted (or included really). In fact, if
the rest of the navy hadn't always hogged all the resources, more,
better U-boats earlier on might have won the Battle of the Atlantic.
Another, lucky, bad call by the Nazis.
BTW, to get back to our sci-fi theme, I really really recommend Glen
Cook's Passage at Arms, which is so very hauntingly evocative of U-
boat warfare. I absolutely loved it and so would anyone who liked Das
Boot.
Wonder if anybody can contribute Chinese naming conventions?
- i do not believe the chinese had much of a navy during
the first, or the second, world war. it's quite possible
the names of the more important ships in admiral cheng
kuo [sp./translit?] 's fleet are on record - but that's
going back a bit.
Actually, I was more interested in _modern_ Chinese names. They are
building up their blue water navy quite aggressively right now,
AFAIK. Too bad Taiwan didn't decide what it wanted to do back in the
days when mainland China couldn't have done anything about it ;-) I
expect lots of "Glorious Revolution", "Long March", "Mao",
"Proletariat Revenge", etc... Probably not "Cao Bang" though.
.
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