USS Cortez? Really?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

BolianAdmiral wrote:

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How about a Starfleet ship named after an ALIEN pioneer, like the first Bolian who flew faster than light, or the Andorian who was first to make first contact with another race, or the first Tellarite to circumnavigate their globe? As I stated before, the UFP's ship naming system is way too Terra-centric. No more Earth history names for ships!

Perhaps a Starfleet ship is named based on the race represented by the largest proportion in its crew. Remember the USS T'Kumbra? Its crew was all Vulcan, so naturally it got a Vulcan name...

[Nerys Myk]

And when the crew changes?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Nerys Myk wrote:

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And when the crew changes?

Maybe it's up to the captain?

[UssGlenn]

names and crew complement would be tied to the shipyard. Ships built in Vulcan shipyards would get Vulcan names and crews. Crew complement would be unlikely to change due to planet specific atmospheric and temperature calibrations, so new crew would be of mostly the same species. We mostly see sol system ships and crews.

[6079SmithW]

For Andoria, USS Shran would make my day.

[T'Girl]

Star Trek, of course, plays on stations all over the world. Do the names of the various ships get their names changes when the show gets dubbed into a new language? Maybe into something that more familiar to the local viewers and their culture. Anyone ever seen (heard) something like this?

[Timo]

Never here in Finland, no. IIRC, they tried something like that in "Relics", probably out of ignorance: they had Picard saying that the bridge simulation there looked like it came from one of the old "Perustuslaki-luokka" (lit. "Constitution Class") ships. But that was an isolated incident, and for example "Excelsior class" stays "Excelsior-luokka", without clumsy attempts at translation.

Character and location names stay unchanged, too. Although they play a cute trick with "Borg" here, deliberately using it as singular rather than plural all the way. "The Borg is on its way to Earth" is a nice way to convey their collective nature, dontcha think? It's like Mother Nature came to visit whenever there's a lone storm.

Timo Saloniemi

[StarryEyed]

The names of vessels could change with changes in command, only the registry numbers remaining constant. It's not something we do in our current military but Starfleet is NOT the U.S. (or any other) military.

[newtype_alpha]

Timo wrote:

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Character and location names stay unchanged, too. Although they play a cute trick with "Borg" here, deliberately using it as singular rather than plural all the way. "The Borg is on its way to Earth" is a nice way to convey their collective nature, dontcha think?

That's what I always do when writing fanfiction. "A Borg" refers to an individual ship, not to an individual drone.

StarryEyed wrote:

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The names of vessels could change with changes in command, only the registry numbers remaining constant. It's not something we do in our current military but Starfleet is NOT the U.S. (or any other) military.

The Russian military does that, IIRC. Not with changes of commands necessarily but I think they change the names periodically with refits and changes of mission.

[Timo]

Yet the driving force usually was and is that the holders of the previous names had become politically unpalatable... There was no taboo against naming ships after living people in the Soviet navy, and some of those red stars were ascending, some were descending.

Changing of names was a relatively rare occurrence, really. What may confuse the casual observer at first is that the ships changed pennant codes when they changed missions or homeports. USN ships have changed pennant numbers at times, too, even though they are intended to identify an individual ship rather than a mission - the changes were rare things, such as when the USN couldn't immediately decide on how to number the Kidd class, surplus from a failed export sale.

Starfleet need not be the Soviet Navy nor the USN, of course. We've seen some changing registries, including the rather blatant case of USS Yamato, a few honest errors in DS9, and the hull-differs-from-interior numbers of USS Prometheus in VOY. Perhaps there actually is a Starfleet tradition on such things?

As for changing the name when the crew changes... It's pretty absurd today to think of changing "the crew" when one expects only a certain percentage of it to change, and to change basically every week. But Starfleet may do things differently, NASA fashion: training a thousand people to act as a single unit for a years-long mission, and training another thousand as a backup unit, and never mixing the two. We never really see this in practice, but one might argue it is alluded to in ST2, and through the fact of the TOS or TNG heroes sticking together so tightly.

FWIW, the dedication plaque for the Captain's Yacht of the E-E included the name of the Captain. Obviously, the plaque would have to be changed whenever there was a change of command - and the implication is that Picard named his Yacht personally, so the name would probably change as well. Certainly Sisko appeared to name his runabouts, which probably came from the factory with a pre-assigned registry and a guideline for choosing the name (apparently containing the single phrase "Pick from this list an Earth river name not yet taken."). Such practices are a bit unlikely to extend to big starships... An officer may "own" an auxiliary craft, but it's more like a starship "owns" her officers. But one never knows.

Timo Saloniemi

[USS KG5]

Myasishchev wrote:

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Then again, I think it'd be neat to see a runabout called the USS Enola Gay, so I might be somewhat insensitive.

But then it could be because the music of OMD was crucial in the founding of the Federation?