Help with some poetical starship names - and more!

[Wild Gazebo]

The Not So Gentle Good Night

 

[Dirigible]

Fred Saberhagen's The Berserker Wars

Ahh, thanks. I knew I'd seen a sci fi book yonks ago that I stole the idea from, but I couldn't for the life of me remember it.

Not to say you can't swipe from poetry, but there might be a unifying theme by Class.

Well, all the Muse-class ships are named after poetry... isn't that unified enough? Plus, naming conventions change over time.

Rage against the dying of the light.

Perfect.

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.

Very true. The overall aim of the campaign would, of course, be to get rid of the Serks. Great solution ideas, too.

Thanks for the link, Shadowdancer. Here's one for a list of Culture-style names.

http://nift.firedrake.org/The_Fleet.htm

 

[Aesmael]

I know offhand one of the Culture ships called itself the Eschatologist, but I have only read Consider Phlebas and not for quite some time.

You might want to check out the novels of Alastair Reynolds. He names his ships for paintings (or was it songs - got the idea from someone else whose name I don't recall), such as the Nostalgia for Infinity. There are also a few things in those stories which help in your scenario, such as sterilising a planet by bathing it in plasma from its star's core -

Spoiler

isn't it amazing what sentience exterminating machines can do?

Or I could just come back later with some sample names and maybe some genocide suggestions. One of my projects from a few years back was to collect methods of destroying stars, I may as well extend that to planets and civilisations.

 

[Synchronicity]

How about somthing like 'Unceasingly Righteous Endeavour'? I was in a game where one of the space-faring empires was a hard-line, no compromises theocracy - bring true religions to the pagans with fire and sword, yadda yadda. That was the name of the ship we kept running into. (well, away from - it was much bigger than we were! ) I always liked the way it rolled off the tongue.

 

[ironmani]

The Sword of Vengence.
The God Hammer.
The Void Reaper.
The Nova Star.
The B.M.F.?

 

[Mallus]

Random thoughts:

1) When you start using lines of verse as starship names, everything starts to sound like a Culture ship.

2) It really should be the Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Don't split the line.

3) Its amazing how many good names can be found in Yeat's "The Second Coming".

4) Here's a few more; Finale of Seem, This Busy Monster, A Time to Reap, The Wealth of Nations, Oppourtunity Costs, Dismal Science, The Culture-Logic of Late Capitalism.

 

[OurManMute]

* The weapon the Berserkers use to cleanse planets. At the moment, I'm thinking of an energy beam that causes a disruption in the strong nuclear force. Fired from orbit, the beams causes some atoms to disintegrate and others to fuse with their neighbours, sending a shockwave of ever-increasing energy around the planet that burns the whole thing to a cinder. Underground facilities and shelters tend to survive, however; this is why there are still some people left.

Other ideas are kinetic harpoons or mass drivers, so beloved of the modern sci-fi writer, or good old fashioned antimatter bombs. What do you think?

A favorite of mine is the technique used in Greg Bear's The forge of god:

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS*

Step 1: send a few AI probes down the planet bearing news of intergalactic peace, brotherhood and understanding. Make some vague references to some distant enemies who might some day also come here. FUD abounds.

Step 2: plant nano-replicators along the planet's geological fault lines, whose only purpose is to convert matter there to high explosives (I think the book used sea water to make H-bombs) and severely weaken the planet's crust.

Step 3: fire two clumps of material at the planet: one is neutronium (ultra-dense matter, basically), the other is anti-neutronium. Being very heavy and very small, these clumps will have little interaction with the planet. They will settle into a subterranean orbit around the planets core, the orbit will slowly decay because there's always some friction.

The fun starts when the orbit of both clumps is completely decayed: suddenly the anti-neutronium sees a large clump of neutronium and they annihilate, relasing an enormous amount of energy in the planetary core. At the same time the explosives along the fault lines go off, converting the planet's crust to something like a cracked egg shell. The energy released in the planets core starts an enromous explosion which the crust is unable to contain. Basically the whole planet goes splat.

In the mean time your AI probes have kept the planet's population so busy they can't do a thing about it until it's too late.

Damn, but blowing up planets feels good. I can now imagine what made Darth Vader go to the dark side.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

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.

Drat!

I was hoping to be the first to suggest the Ob'enn ship names from www.schlockmercenary.com ...

There's also:

Polysyllabic Designation
Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance

You can find some good ones in this storyline: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20010408.html

And especially in the Schlocktoberfest part of it: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20011001.html

 

[Steverooo]

New-Ship Names

(All translated from Binary, of course!)

Emitter-of-Radiances
Manifesting Destiny
Multiaural Perceptor (AKA "Good Listener")
Universal Cogitator
Voder-with-Pre-Techs (AKA "Speaker with Humans")
Multioculars (AKA "Many Eyes")
Revolution
Over-RAMmer (AKA "Overcopier" or "Overwriter")
Null Circuit
Aeon Flux
Strange Aeons
Singularity-Negator
Triumphant Destiny
Destroyer-of-Death
Universal Meta-beginning
Klein-Bottle-of-Time
Mobius Sequence

 

[Ashrum the Black]

There's just no beating schlock's mightiest vessel.

The Post-Dated Check Loan!



-Ashrum