Help with some poetical starship names - and more!

[rgard]

Twilight's Last Gleaming
Pro Patria
Pleasure Dome
Slithy Toves
Darkest Evening
Tasted of Desire
Destroyer of Worlds

Which come respectively from:

The Star Spangled Banner
Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorem Est
Coleridge's Kubla Khan
Jabberwocky
Frost's Stopping By Woods
Frost's Fire and Ice
(Some Indian poem whose title I forget)

Here you go for the Indian scripture: Bhagavad Gita

 

[Dirigible]

That's great, dewds and dewdinas.

First post has been edited significantly. Take a gooesy.

 

[Jack of Shadows]

Hmmm...

Check out Ian Banks. He has some interesting ship names in his Culture novels. The only one I can remember is "Really Not Much Gravitas" or something like that.

Jack

 

[Fieari]

I know you lost your list of names for "The New", but could you give us at least one example that we can then play off of?

 

[Allandaros]

By a coincidence of cosmic proportions, I was just flipping through Fred Saberhagen's The Berserker Wars today. Might I suggest adding some more succinct Berserker names in?

Stuff like "Hell," "Death's Head," "Destructor," etc. ect.

 

[Andor]

Couple of observations. Ship names tend to be along the same lines in a given class. I.E. Battleships were named for States. Not to say you can't swipe from poetry, but there might be a unifying theme by Class. Oh. And don't forget Dylan Thomas, Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.

Also I should think the campaign would end up themed more like Crusade than Andromeda. The reason being that you cannot rebuild civilization while the Berserkers remain a threat. Oh they might try early in the game. It would be an exercise in horror when they rebuild enough to attract the Berserkers. So the game is more likely to end up a quest to find a way to deal with the berserkers and to grant what aid they can along the way.

Possible solutions. An ancient anti-berserker weapons from the old wars. Development of a reliable zero-point warhead. (Try to use in uninhabited systems.) Find help. Lure them elsewhere. Develop a technology base that doesn't attract them. Learn to mimic their ancient masters. Find a way to move whole systems into the Otherspace the ship went to. Etc.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

How about Stellar Surfer?

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Sword of Indomitable Righteousness
Scepter of Unbearable Pain
Pride of the Invicible Overlord
Relentless
Invincible
...
Moniker of Insufferable Arrogance
Post Dated Check Loan
Predictably Damaged

Toenail
Serial Peacemaker

Check out Schlock Mercenary...there's plenty of good inspiration for ship names from the pretentious to mocking. And it's a darn good web comic too.

Otherwise, Babylon 5 had a pretty nifty naming scheme for Earth Force destroyers: they were mostly named after Greek heroes:
Aggamemnon
Achilles
Hector
Diomedes
Odysseus
Theseus
etc.

That sounds dignified and powerful (as long as you're not on the Oedipus .

You could also take a bit more modern tack and just name them after famous leaders:
USS John Paul Jones
USS Abraham Lincoln
USS Karol Wotylja
USS Ronald Reagan
USS Hillary Clinton
etc.

Such names can also be either a blatant or a subtle political commentary depending upon how they're used.

CMS [Confederate Martian Ship] Matthew Dyment--who's he? Oh, he was the first president of Mars Colony and wrote their Declaration of Independence in 2113. It can also be a way of introducing your alternate history for the campaign world to the players in a subtle and organic way.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Here is a link to a thread on the Traveller RPG boards in which people have posted lots of ship names, some poetic, some not. It's 29 pages long, but periodically someone compiles the names into a single, handy dandy list.

The link

 

[Aaron L]

I'd take the Stellar Surfer a step further and go the full Silver Surfer. Perhaps even go a Superman Kal El (interesitingly enough, Kal El translated into Sindarin is Green Star)