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What's in a (starship class) name? Breaking it down..

Mark_Nguyen

Mark_Nguyen

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
The recent introduction of the Obena-class starship took me back, and starting me thinking. When "Discovery" premiered, I was surprised / slightly annoyed that basically all the starship classes introduced in the only-slightly-pre-TOS-era were named for human people, mostly 20th century aviators. That got me thinking about how starship CLASSES have been named over the years in Trek, and if there were any specific patterns that could be discerned. One visit to Memory Alpha later, I came up with this VERY BROAD categorization of known Starfleet or Federation ship classes into groups. This is for screen-seen ships, but notably includes the Franz Joseph designs because of their appearance on monitors of TMP et. al.

There's a lot of interpretation to be had here, but I tried to use the intended / most likely definition of a given name, so there's plenty of room for discussion. Dissect away:

Real-Life People

Akira (unless it's referring to the manga/movie)
Bradbury
Cardenas
Crossfield
Eisenberg
Engle
Hoover
Korolev
Magee
Malachowski
Nimitz
Obena
Oberth
Ptolemy
Saladin
Shepard
Walker
Wallenberg
Wells

(Aside - TWELVE of these were introduced in the current era of Star Trek production!)

Mythological / Fictional Entities

Apollo
Daedalus
Hermes
Miranda (from "The Tempest")
Prometheus


Stellar Phenomena

Constellation
Galaxy
Nebula
Nova
(Protostar)
Universe


Specific Heavenly Bodies

Antares (star)
Luna (Earth's Moon)


Planetary Places (manmade / natural)

California
Danube
Merced
New Orleans
Niagara
Norway
Sydney
Springfield
Yellowstone


Concepts / Philosophical / Esoteria

Challenger
Curiosity
Defiant
Excelsior ("Higher", as in the NY State motto)
Freedom
Inquiry
Intrepid


Governmental

Ambassador
Constitution
Federation
Parliament
Sovereign


Miscellaneous

Aeon (Unit of time)
Dreadnought (ship type)
Erewon (misspelled novel title)
Olympic (Games)
Peregrine (Animal)
Renaissance (Period)
Saber (Weapon)
Soyuz (Soviet/Russian spacecraft)
 
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Backs up my contention that Starfleet is and always was a primarily Earth organization. Other polities in the Federation have their own fleets (probably usually smaller) but have close enough relations to allow for transfers from one service laterally to the other, like that outbursty Vulcan in the recent episode of Lower Decks with the Klingon name.

--Alex
 
Or then the Universal Translator covers it all, and every ship in fact has at least a dozen different names in a dozen languages. "Primarily Earth" only applies to the rowers drafted to make the ships move.

Of the above division, are we describing the sources of the names in our universe, or theirs? In theirs, Obena or Eisenberg aren't "Real-Life People", as their "fame" comes from television shows that were never made! OTOH, in ours, "Constellation" or "Challenger" aren't named after what the words stand for, but how they were previously applied: they're actually part of the category "Earlier Ships/Spacecraft".

...Why is the Niagara so often spelled Niagra?

Timo Saloniemi
 
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On the Aeon, it's model number HB-88. This alpha-numerical combo was used elsewhere in DS9 and VOY, making it easy to read the schematics in "Future's End".

And Ebona should read as Obena.
 
Hah! Thanks for the spelling catches, fixed. And I used to live a couple towns over from the falls. :)

And I would argue that the name meaning would still be a factor regardless of the lineage of a predecessor ship. We don't really know if the Constitution class was named for the US sailing ship, the document, or the state of health for that matter. Or all three! But I went with the document for its plural meaning and likely intention by the American showrunner.

OTOH, "soyuz" is the Russian word for "Union", as in Soviet, which is from the era in which the real spacecraft was first designed. An argument could be made to have the word be in the governmental sense, but IMO then it would be called "Union-class" in Federation standard; and so it therefore makes sense to me that it's named after the spacecraft.

Mark
 
Again, we can guess in two categories: what were TPTB going for, and what was Starfleet?

Some of the steps from the TPTB dance are well documented, and so the hero ship was first the Yorktown and then the Constitution. "First-generation", direct War of Independence references, or "second-generation" USN ones? We can't tell for certain. But with Starfleet, we're better off, as the sister ships all have "naval" names as the common theme even when they are deliberately from all over the world (British, Russian, and we almost got a Japanese name, even).

In the end, though, nobody in either category sticks to thematic naming, for any starship class or category. So our pigeonholing isn't beholden to theirs, thankfully enough.

Timo Saloniemi
 
This is an area where FASA did better than modern attempts to generate a believable universe.

First, we have Starfleet classes with names that primarily Earth people could appreciate, as was already mentioned above in several posts. But, then, we also have the Andorian subdivision within Starfleet with names that are Andorian but translated to English (for obvious real-world commercial reasons).

FASA also brought us Klingon-language and Romulan-language names for a multitude of ship classes, all translated to English, of course. The original language names/descriptions were kept and published along with the English class name. In some cases, it was just the name that Starfleet gave the ship class regardless of the meaning of the Klingon or Romulan words. In some cases, the translation to English-language was a close approximation of the original meaning.

In this area, the FASA team did well.

In reality, though, simple English names sit better with viewers and casual fans who represent the majority of dollars.
 
It's a tough call sometimes, especially when lineage and history can span several centuries.
I suspect quite a bit of overlap and confusion.

For example... USS Phoenix.

Named after:
mythical creature?
Arizona city?
Cochrane's warp vessel?
WWII US Navy light cruiser?
Some other 22nd century starship?
Any and all?
 
Dr. San Guinary said:
Okay, now you lost me.

What does Sherlock Holmes have to do with any of this? :confused:
Click to expand...

"Doylist" is a real-world explanation from the perspective of the author/creator/production team/etc; "Watsonian" is an in-universe explanation. As you note, the terms originated with Sherlock Holmes reviews and analysis, but they can be applied to all fiction. There's more information here.

In the case of the Akira class, we know that the real-world explanation is that it's named after the manga; but the in-universe explanation is likely to be rather different ;)
 
Well, if we want to think that Star Trek is real, we might argue that reality does not typically entail naming naval vessels after comic book characters.

Then again...

Timo Saloniemi
 
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