Help with some poetical starship names - and more!

[Mark]

First post has been edited significantly. Take a gooesy.

Still the understatement of the year...


Nevertheless, here's a name - Quill

 

[Dirigible]

Maybe name some of the Muse class ships after muses?

Well spotted that anthropoid. In fact, the nine decks of each ship are named after the muses.

"Captain! Hull breach on Terpsichore! All sensor modules on Melpomene off-line!"

Eh. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

 

[Pbartender]

Some of my absolute favoites that have continually resurfaced in my Star Wars and other Scifi games are:

The Pilogar Badge, a privateering vessel whose crew was awarded an Imperial Citation for their conduct at the Battle of Pilogar.

The Ice Ore, a deep-space mining ship that specializes primarily in exotic mineral extraction from comets.

The Redline, previously a championship racing yacht, now commandeered by the Imperial Navy for use as a special fast courier.

The Prime Meridian, a state-of-the-art scout ship commisioned by the Galactic Astrographic Society to survey newly discovered planetry systems on the frontier.

Don't forget that people's names and places are both popular for both military and commercial vessels.

Also, just take a look around you. Often you can find good ship names staring you right in the face from common household labels and signs. Sitting here at work, I see the following ship's names:

Cerberus
American Standard
Kimberly Clark
Fort James
Hamamatsu
Dakota Gold

Virtues are also good names for ships. I once built a starship task force whose ships were named: Reliant, Defiant, Valiant and Gallant

Remember... As far as humans are concerned, a ship's name doesn't have to be dramatic to be poetic or inspirational.

Oh... I almost forgot... check up on ship names used during the Napleonic Era. The ships present at the Battle of Trafalgar, for exampe, were named:

Britain: Victory, Brittania, Temeraire, Neptune, Conqueror, Leviathan, Ajax, Orion, Minotaur, Spartiate, Agamemnon, Africa, Royal Sovereign, Prince of Wales, Dreadnought, Tonnant, Mars, Belle Isle, Bellerophon, Colossus, Achilles, Revenge, Swiftsure, Defence, Thunderer, Defiance, Polyphemus

French: Bucentaure, Formidable, Algeciras, Neptune, Indomitable, Pluton, Mont Blanc, Intrepide, Swiftsure, Aigle, Scipion, Duguay-Trouin, Berwick, Argonaute, Achille, Redoubtable, Fougeux, Heros

Spanish: Santissima-Trinidad, Principe de Asturias, Santa Anna, Rayo, Neptuno, Argonauta, Bahama, Montanez, San Augustino, San Ildefonso, San Juan de Nepomuceno, Monarca, San Francisco de Asis, San Justo, San Leandro

 

[Kesh]

I think everyone else has covered the ship names, so I'll stick to these two points:

* 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?

To wipe out all life on a planet, you've got a few options. It really comes down to one major consideration: does the planet have an atmosphere?

If so, you can wreak havoc simply by disrupting the climate and/or destroying the atmosphere. For instance, introducing significant quantities of another material (such as nitrous oxide) to aid in burning oxygen, then dropping a single conventional bomb.

On a more realistic scale, you mentioned mass drivers. That's useful since you simply drop a few asteroids from orbit and let the dust clouds blot out sunlight. Takes a while, but it would render the planet unlivable after a period of time. More large rocks would let you simply pummel the planet into the stone age.

Nukes are the most direct way. Conventional damage, massive atmospheric disturbance, radiation fallout and nuclear winter.

Without an atmosphere, it's difficult to affect the entire planet in a short time. All impact weapons will have a relatively small area of effect, and you can't spread gaseous or biological agents. Short of stressing the continental plates themselves to break the planet apart, it's difficult to do widespread damage.

On a more magical note, drop a kind of artifact bomb that tears a rift between the Prime Material and another plane (such as the Negative Energy Plane, for killing off all life while leaving structures intact; or the Elemental Plane of Fire for torching the place).

For a stranger technological end: rip off the Replicators from Stargate: SG-1. They're small, insect-like machines who only exist to process raw materials and turn them into more (and better) Replicators. Drop a small canister of Replicators into a major city on the planet, and watch them slowly devour everything as they multiply and spread across the planet. You can't kill them, since each individual "cell" of the machine is an independent nanomachine itself, all of them capable of rejoining with the others to form a new insect-body. An exponentially growing number of these little menaces could strip a planet bare in a matter of months/weeks, if placed strategically.

* One of the technolgies I want to emphasise in this setting is ubiquitous computing. Basically, everything on UN ships and colonies has a chip, from guns to coffee cups to books to appliances; computers are everywhere, including in the PC's uniforms. But what can I do with this?

Some of it is obvious; PC's use their collars to communicate, and their sleeves to type. The ships' computer knows where they are at all times in relation to other chips (allowing doors to open for them, elevators to predict their destinations, coffee to be brewing when the go to their quarters, and countless other creature comforts). Workstations can be more fluid, as you can enter and access data practically anywhere.

But I'm having trouble comming up with much more. Perhaps it's because I'm about five cars behind on the technology train; no palmtop, no iPod, heck, my cellphone doesn't even have vibrate so I'm not au fait with what bleeding edge technology can do to change your behaviour. Thoughts?

Forget about sleeves and collars. You need one of two things: a pair of glasses or an implant in your brain.

Either way, it gives you a computer display in your field of vision (either on the glass, or simple fake sensory information fed to your brain). When you go into a new store, advertisements could be tailored specifically to you... but, like those virtual ads on football & baseball fields, there's nothing physically to see. It's only fed via computer to your display.

The computer itself would either simply be a connection to the global / interstellar network, or to your own computer at home / on the ship (both via some wireless connection). All your information can be stored elsewhere and displayed in your field of vision when you ask for it, appearing as a floating window in front of you, or as information laid overtop of real objects (a price tag hovering under a display, or a ? icon next to a painting so you can learn more about the artist's work).

With the proper sensors, the glasses or implant can sense when you want to input data for, say, querying who manufactured this kitchen appliance. A voice command, or simply reaching out and tapping on a virtual keyboard could accomplish the job. See the movie Minority Report for a good example of that kind of interface (though they had physical screens for the most part).

When you meet another person, your systems can query each other, pull up relevant information and you could then use it to search out more. Like finding a brief synopsis of this professor's latest published scientific paper, and quickly discovering reviews that say he's either a genius or a crackpot.

An implant has advantages that it can also take into account other senses. You could have a phone conversation without the phone, "hearing" the voice sent directly into your brain, and then letting the implant pick up your own voice via your auditory nerves (as you hear yourself talk).

The downside to all of this would be unwanted information, such as pop-up ads (Aqua Teen Hunger Force did a good job of parodying this problem. ) A virus could cause trouble, making it feed incorrect data to you, or overriding your own ID with someone else's (bad for telling those gun emplacements that you don't have the security clearance you should). Any system like this would need extremely good security, and local laws that prevent data hijacking.

To steal a couple more ideas, there's the Smartgun system from Shadowrun, which displays a set of crosshairs in your vision when holding a properly equipped gun. Shooting from the hip is no longer as inaccurate! Not to mention getting range information and visual enhancements at the same time. From Ghost in the Shell, imagine pulling up live information about a car's whereabouts so you can plan an ambush.

Hope those help give you some ideas.

 

[Kesh]

Okay, so I did come up with a couple ship names after all.

Fearful Symmetry
Loser Sore (from Sluggy Freelance)
The Long Dark
Shores of Eternity
Driven By Winds of Fury
Dance of Angels
Fallen From Grace
Solace

... and, this list wouldn't be complete without my favorite ship name, thanks to Larry Niven:

The Lying Bastard

 

[Dirigible]

Without an atmosphere, it's difficult to affect the entire planet in a short time.

That's a good point. I hadn't considered how the atmosphere acts as a medium for practically every destructive effect, except EM radiation, that you could employ.

You need one of two things: a pair of glasses or an implant in your brain.

I want to steer away from cybernetics in this setting; the UN colonial administration considers it unduly invasive, and many tyrants have taken to shipping their populations. Basically, it's unfashionable

Display specs are a good idea; I'll make that an optional extra, so people can choose to have their apparelComps display data on its own amterial, or project it onto holographic lenses infront of the users eyes. Perhaps nerve induction for the truly l33t. This lets technophobes and technophiles set their preferences.

All your information can be stored elsewhere ... information laid overtop of real objects...

Also good. Augmented reality and that 'lifeline' thing DARPA was working on.

Thought of something else that could be done on the practical level... nonchalantly leave your jacket lying around someone's office (ssuming they come form a lower-tech society and don't ahve computer dampners active), and you have an easy bugging device.

Thanks, Kesh. Very thought provoking.

 

[Pbartender]

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?

I'd stick to the simple, straightforward asteroidal impact or massive nuclear strike.

Even without an atmosphere, the planet itself will transmit the vibrations of a large enough impact or explosion globally. With a big enough asteroid, global earthquakes and the resulting possible vulcanism alone would devastate the world.

Another option might be to place one or more high-powered and deeply penetrating radiation sources into orbit over the planet. Kill off all the life on a planet without harming any of the structures... Creepy for whoever runs across the remains.

Here's another thought. What if the berserkers aren't actually war machines, but mobile automated terraforming facilities. Their purpose is to create planetary paradises for a long, lost race of alien who had very different biological requirements than any currently known intelligent species. It doesn't matter to the berserkers whether a planet is already inhabited, they just begin terraforming, destroying the planet's current ecology and population in the process, with the final result being totally inhospitable to humans. At first, the attacks may seem random, but a pattern of planetary requirements (gravity, orbital distance, etc...) may become evident. Colonists could be evacuated from planets most likely to be 'attacked'.

* One of the technolgies I want to emphasise in this setting is ubiquitous computing. Basically, everything on UN ships and colonies has a chip, from guns to coffee cups to books to appliances; computers are everywhere, including in the PC's uniforms. But what can I do with this?

I'd take a look at Spycraft gadgets, if you can get acess to any of the game's books, or look through the free D20 Future SRD (you can find it on the Wizard's website). Both have examples, rules, and options for building gizmos similar to what your thinking of.

 

[Kesh]

Thanks, Kesh. Very thought provoking.

Always glad to help.