As far as I always knew, it was just because whatever name they felt like/ thought seemed somehow related to the particular ship. I'nm sure Bravo will appear to prove me wrong though.

In other news, I think it's officially time for me to hand in my “young person” card and buy a walker. I just called a group of 18 year-olds “you damn kids” the other day without any hyperbole. Plus, I just can't fathom how a human being could be so immature at the age of 19 years old as to call their boss an asshole to his face for calling them out on a mistake before his boss caught it. I know that even a few years ago when I was that age, I'd have been on my ass in terror being screamed at. Now they just get a “don't do that again” and it's dropped. I'm starting to develop the same attitude as my dad that kids these days are kids a lot longer than they used to be. I still remember when my older sister graduated high school back in the 90's, you were officially a full adult and had to act like it. Now that status doesn't happen till you're 22 and out of college. Makes me feel like I should be drinking prune juice from a sippy straw being surrounded by it all the time.

No, ship naming is extremely traditional, codified and regulated. Plus, they have comitees, not just within the navy, but it can be a wider political thing very often too.
Some of the oldest, most traditional names like Warspite, or Revenge in the British Royal Navy were based on names that were given in a more reckless manner originally, but that was hundreds of years ago…
I think the Warspite was a caputured Spanish ship that hade her spannish name mutated or something? I remember reading somewhere it came from “fire spitter” I think, but the May have been something about “cock sucker” too…

The US navy had a thing where capital ships could only be states. That was back before carriers were captital ships. Even now, certain classes can only be named after states, presidents, military hero's, battles, older ships…

British ships are mainly named after older ships. They pass the names down in a DNA of tradition. But there are exceptions. And classes used to have all names in a theme, like all the same first letter, all named after royalty, al named after big cats, Greek gods… -still being named after older ships.

In most places It's the same- named after older ships, places, battles, heroes, or political figures. Because the British navy has many of the oldest and richest traditions is the reason it has the best names. It's just had more time to collect them.

In the US Navy the tradition was Destroyers were people, Cruisers were cities, Battleships were states and Carriers were battles or the old traditional names like Wasp, Enterprise etc. Go back to the American Civil War it was by class of ship. One class was named after rivers, another after cities and even a few larger ships named for states. When the classes became defined by purpose in the late 19th century the Congress set up the naming tradition when debating the appropriations for the big fleet program based on the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Now it is carriers are named for people, nuclear missile submarines were named for states, cruisers are battles or cities depending on class. Destoryers are named for not as famous people like Forrest Sherman or Farragut whereas Admiral Nimitz gets a carrier. Why didn't Halsey get a carrier? Politics. It took a lot of politicking for Reagan to get a carrier and now George H.W. Bush just got his but then he was a heroic naval aviator. Jimmy Carter got a nuclear submarine so don't think Democrats get slighted. But it's doubtful if Clinton will get anything and now there's an upsurge for Cheney to get a destroyer.

Now it is increasingly by class. “Y” class of assault ships were named for battles, then “A” class of cruisers were named for battles, Trident subs were named for states now a class of assault carriers are named for states. Considering the size and types of aircraft carried by an assault carrier these days they are equal to a fleet carrier in any other navy.

Royal navy names were also often allocated by class of ship. “Town” class cruisers, “H” class destroyers. For battleships look no further than King George V class. Prince of Wales, Duke of York, KG V and two for Admirals; Anson and Howe to match Rodney and Nelson. Meanwhile the Illustrious carriers got “Illustrious” names like Victorious and Glorious.

Yep, and my fave British ships were the WW1 Queen Elizibeth class. They had no theme that I know off… Partly politically chosen names, partly tradition, partly comitee. All very famous ships who served amazingly. Heroic crews:
Queen Elizibeth.
Valiant.
Warspite.
Barham.
Malaya.

And then there was my husband's ship, a dock landing ship. It was named after a president's home. Impressive, ay? And not just any president but one Mr Rutherford B. Hayes.

Rutherford. If I ever have a dog, I think that name would be perfect.

And hey (or hayes *shrug*) - If you ever want to make a room of naval men go nuts, just call one of their ships (that's named after a minor president's private estate) a “boat”

It willy willy works XD

Wow… we went from how I name my ships in Star Trek Online to discussing old ship names in general… to naming our dogs after people for whatever reason… O_O

Oh… and I thought Ozone might be interested in seeing this huge Avenger Class ship that I encountered earlier…



I'd have taken more, but he warped away… :(

Oh… my ship, the Faran Enjeru, is right next to him (just say my ship's name aloud, rolling the letter R and you might see where I went with that name)…

Australia was in one of the later episodes of DS.9 and Voyager as one of the dreadnoughts that took down them Jem'Hadar. Funny, how obvious the origin of that alien name is. Without the apostrophe it's a rank in the Indian army.
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It flowed so simply from Star Fleet naming to terrestrial navy names because Star Fleet names are knowingly borrowed from US Navy names. Roddenberry was US Navy. The Enterprise was originally named Yorktown but it was decided to change it to a serving ship especially since CVN-65 USS Enterprise was grabbing so many headlines as the first nuclear carrier while the classic show was being created. NCC-1701 was a Constitution class heavy cruiser and her sisters included Saratoga, Intrepidand Yorktown? It's a list of US serving carriers when the classic series was produced. Couldn't have been more obvious than if they'd included America,Forrestal and John F. Kennedy, Ranger and Kitty Hawk.

Why would a 23rd Century Federation of Planets chose to name their main ships after American Revolutionary War battles?
The guys who write the series know their naval history and about classic ship names. Look at the fleet lists and you'll see Barham, Malaya and Warspite. In your screen capture you're right next to Bismarck which does appear on the ship lists in the show literature.

@Ayes- yes… “boats” >_<
I bet he had a fantastic uniform! :)

@Lonne- Hah! That's great! Our biggest and only capital ship ever was the Australia… Except she was HMAS Australia not USS. Or maybe just “HMS” in those days since our defence forces were still getting that sorted…
I have many pics of her in a book somewhere, of an arctic cruise she and her crew undertook in the 1910s. The poor ship coated in ice.

And a pic of her final days, after WW1 when she had to be scuttled because the Australian naval force was still considered part of the British navy, purely for purposes of calculation total tonnage of ships.

Basically the Brits were betraying us in this instance and it was pretty underhand from an Aussie and scandalous perspective even if it was coldly pragmatic from theirs:
As part of the infamous naval treaty to restrict construction of capital ships each country was only allowed a certain amount of “tonnage” (total weight, or some silly equation).
Because Australia was included in the British total they decided to force us to just totally get rid of our only capital ship, thus freeing them to have more for themselves.
It was considered an outdated vessel, but it wasn't that old, it was still our flagship, paid for by us, and in an age where having a capital ship was a point of international pride, especially on that carried the name of the country, that was a enormous blow.
Our only Battlecruiser…
Australia and Britain continued to drift further and further apart on the back of incidents like that.

In one of the pics of here visiting the Hobart regatta there's an amusing view of an early 1910's amphibious car cursing along in the bay with to rather proper gents in high stand collars, one in a boater and one in a tophat and their lady friends all dressed very nicely. ^_^

@Bravo- The carrier connection is amusing when you realise that there is no carrier warfare in Star Trek. It's all a combination of submarine/battleship/ManO'War tactics. Which is logical considering the physics and the assumptions they've made for that future scenario.

That U.S.S. Australia that the Faran Enjeru was alongside (their saucer sections were close to touching) is a player owned vessel. I DO NOT want to find myself on the business end of its guns…

Now I'd like to see the pics of that ship you mentioned, Ozone. She must've been impressive…

There was also the HMAS Australia which was a County class cruiser which had a hugely distinguished record and was sister ship to another cruiser with an extremely distiguished career HMS Suffolk.

Somehow I'd rather remember a great cruiser than a poorly designed battlecruiser. Australia with New Zealand were Indefatigable class battlecruisers which I cannot blame the RN for scrapping in 1922. They were poorly designed ships. Without super firing turrets they were undeniably obsolete in 1918. The 1922 Washington treaty was a godsend to navies across the world to scrap obsolete ships and abandon white elephants.
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Now I have to access the market for my mother's collector plate collection. Anyone want a OOAK Princess Cruise lines logo plate handpainted by me? She is moving in with my sister and as she does when ever she moves she is getting rid of anything she figures she doesn't need. Lke the collection of plates she's been accumulting for thirty years. She has the 25th Aniversary commemerative plate for Queen Elizabeth II my brother got for her in England back in the day and the 50th Anniversary plate my wife and I got her at the Royal Porcelin works in Worchester on our trip.

Now if I could just convince my wife to do some of the same things. You know what I found the other day? A receipt for a movie I bought in 2003 and another for a model kit I got in 1998. She was keeping them for insurance purposes. Right keep receipts for things not worth $20 for insurance purposes. The model kit is built now so it is basically irreplaceable.

bravo1102 wrote:
Somehow I'd rather remember a great cruiser than a poorly designed battlecruiser. Australia with New Zealand were Indefatigable class battlecruisers which I cannot blame the RN for scrapping in 1922. They were poorly designed ships. Without super firing turrets they were undeniably obsolete in 1918. The 1922 Washington treaty was a godsend to navies across the world to scrap obsolete ships and abandon white elephants.

For a person with interest in history, that betrays quite a bit of ignorance. You're totally isolating the facts from the context of their time and place in society and applying a filter of idealised military rationalism to give you a pretty false picture.
These sorts of ships were national symbols of pride, relative technical advantages and disadvantages were irrelevant. The value in moral and political popularity was far more significant.
The RN didn't scrap the vessel and didn't have a right to anyway. That decision was made higher up in British political circles. The RAN were the ones who had to implement it, which they did by scuttling her.

If things had gone differently she'd probably be a floating ship museum now, much like the USS Texas. Think of it in those terms; people want to retain such things as symbols, relics…

ozoneocean wrote:

For a person with interest in history, that betrays quite a bit of ignorance. You're totally isolating the facts from the context of their time and place in society and applying a filter of idealised military rationalism to give you a pretty false picture.

If things had gone differently she'd probably be a floating ship museum now, much like the USS Texas. Think of it in those terms; people want to retain such things as symbols, relics…

That's what I get for reading design and service histories rather than social histories. With such an indifferent service record there would be no reason to retain the battlecruiser. She was nothing but puffed up pride with no other substance. A complete and total illusion all style with no substance like much of Jackie Fisher's battlecruiser idea. They were flashy and pretty but couldn't do the job like discovered at Jutland.

It took a major poet getting involved with a national program to save Constitution and that mostly happened because of the huge burgeoning interest in US Naval construction and tradition that grew out of the the American Civil War and Alfred Thayer Mahan. There's my ignorance of time and social interest in saving a national symbol. Austrailia didn't have that after WWI. Australia had every right to be proud of the ANZACs but an indifferent and badly designed battlecruiser that did mostly nothing? An Indefagitable class battlecruiser would hardly be worth the effort. It was a hugely expensive boondoggle. It was too easy to list the reasons NOT to preserve her.

The County class cruiser would have been a much better choice and justly parts of her are deservedly a memorial though it would have been nice to have the whole ship. However, that has been a problem across the world with a few notable exceptions like Mikasa and Potemkin. Preserving naval heritage by saving whole ships has been an exception and takes an awful lot of organization and money. That wasn't there in 1922 to save that batlecruiser unlike it was in Texas in 1945 or New Jersey in the 1980's and again in the 1990's. New Jersey served in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Beirut, Grenada and Desert Storm the only US battleship to do so. Pretty amazing service history. Because of that there were lots of veterans who formed the nucleous of the effort to save her. In fact the commander of one of the turrets in the 1980's worked at my local hobby shop and passed recently. HMAS Australia the battlecruiser wasn't in sercie long enough to gather that kind of momentum or popularity or history. The cruiser was which is why bits of her were preserved. It took nearly 12 years to get everything together to preserve USS New Jersey. Did Australia have that kind of time in 1922? The battle to beat the clock to preserve a ship was also what lost CV-6 Enterprise to the breaker's torch in the 1950's which is probably the biggest disaster as far as preserving a ship goes. Talk about a ship with a great service history.

You've missed hings again ^_^
-The local feeling was of course to keep the ship that was owned and paid for by the Australian people. If it had been kept it would have kept serving in an active role, although not front-line, only THEN, after more years of service she would have been naturally retired (instead of dying before her time), either being scrapped or becoming a floating museum. ;)

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Still haven't finished musicalising the DD soap. It's a fricken SLOG turning straight written stuff into verse, rhyme, lyrics etc. My eyes have gone funny from staring at the screen, I'm gonna quit for the night and play Mass Effect 3 again instead.

Ugh, I am thinking in rhyming fricken couplets! Dammit! >_<
How in the world are we going to make a tune for this thing? I have no idea… Banes will have to exercise all his musicianship skills!

Have you Australians thought of creating a replica? Then again, it's not really the same thing…

Plunked down some money into this game AGAIN! I guess this is how the “free to play” model works… the game entices you to spendmoney even though you really don't have to…

I'd name this new character's ship the “OzoneOcean” as it sounds like a great ship name…. but I won't. Better if Ozone gets that name if he decides to go play Star Trek Online. :)

As for ship names, There have been 3 ships named after Guam (my home). One was a gunboat in China, but it got renamed to “Wake” and was captured by the Japanese during WWII. The second was a cruiser that did its service, then got sold for scrap. The third was an amphibious assault craft, and it was sunk when the navy was done with her. OR SO WIKIPEDIA SAYS. T_T

The HMS New Zealand had a similar fate to the Australia, also being scrapped in 1922 to our disgust. The most annoying thing for New Zealanders is that we were still paying the British for the cost of building the damn thing when WWII broke out. It was a very sore point. (A friend of mine did his M.A. on the social and political history of the HMS New Zealand, which I had to proof read for him).

MEOW MEOW MEW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEEOOOOW MEOW MEW MEOW MEOW
i have a lot i need to do and get done right now and am rather jealous of my cats

Being druck is not the same as being dunk…. or was it the other way around…

gullas wrote:
Being druck is not the same as being dunk…. or was it the other way around…

i hear ya there bud!

Another day, another small part of the new kitchen installed. (Only a month to go until we have a functional kitchen. Just as well the weather has been good enough to BBQ most days.)

I've been reliving a part of my childhood for the past few days, more specifically inbetween my studying sessions (the breaks). Playing old NES games like Battle City, Mario Bros., Contra etc. It's funny to think that 20-30 something year old games are much more fullfilling than some of the newer ones.
I also got to try “Legend of Grimrock”, a fatasy kind of game that remided me how fun dungeon-crawling can be. I played it for 5 mins before encountering few giant Snails where I decided I was not going to fight them, but rather making the fall into a pit trap… thinking outside of the box but I didn't get xp from them. I also raged a little bit when I couldn't pick up bones to use as throwing weapons(but I kinda needed them more for many of the physics-puzzles that require plate pushing etc. )

I've just started doing spring cleaning for the first time in my life. Normally over the last few years I just ended up moving, but this time I have a house instead of a crappy apartment in the bad part of the city. I asked a close friend to help me out a bit, and she brought her 5 year-old daughter along to play in the back yard. It took about two seconds before her daughter found some old graffiti stickers I had laying around in a drawer and now anything that had even one sticker on it before is plastered in them, including the fridge, my laptop, my desk and an old skate deck I was saving to paint something on. Luckily, the fridge was already this pretty ugly goldenrod-coloured thing from 1960-something, so I might actually just continue her work and keep covering it and hope the landlord I'm doing rent-to-own from doesn't freak about it. I'm thinking I might just clear coat the skate deck and sell it with the coating of stickers as the design too. People usually go nuts for anything done by a kid. 5 year-old art is the equivalent of having a budget Damien Hirst on hand with art collectors. For whatever reason, anything a little kid makes is just so much more pure and inspired than anything an adult artist could possibly create in their lifetime.

Gunwallace wrote:
The HMS New Zealand had a similar fate to the Australia, also being scrapped in 1922 to our disgust. The most annoying thing for New Zealanders is that we were still paying the British for the cost of building the damn thing when WWII broke out. It was a very sore point. (A friend of mine did his M.A. on the social and political history of the HMS New Zealand, which I had to proof read for him).

Exactly! It's things like this that were pretty massive but have been forgotten in history by people who have sort of misunderstood their importance and impact.

@Gullas- Well the ship never really got the chance to be as iconic as that. It's more of a historical episode now, to those that get the importance. :(

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OK, the pages of the the 2012 DD Radio play continue to pour forth their brilliance! And now mine in finally in, page 5!!!
http://www.drunkduck.com/2012_DD_Radio_Play/5390764/

lba wrote:
For whatever reason, anything a little kid makes is just so much more
pure and inspired than anything an adult artist could possibly create in
their lifetime.

Oh I get why people have a kid fetish when it comes to “art”. It's about insecurity and inadequacy: art from a pro is intimidating because the ideas behind it were big and deep and clever and dangerous… supposedly. but from a child it's all pure “art”, it's natural, safe, unmediated. Also about creating fake value on the cheap in what is a very silly and nasty little industry.

Pretty pathetic really. I'd be suicidally embarrassed if I developed a taste for “art” created by kids. It's basically giving up on even pretending to like art. It's saying “yeeeeaaaah… I'll never get it, but I know art involves spending heaps of cash so here's a bundle for any old crap with no thought in it so ever”.
If they collect both child and adult art at big prices, then that's actually worse.

Now that's NOT the same thing as admiring work done by children, especially your own. There is a massive distinction between that and paying thousands of dollars for kid art, elevating it to the mystical heights of Hurst etc.
- which is generally pretty thoughtless too, but the distinction is that it's supposed to be, it's part of the art game. The artist has status and you pay for that with the work and get an investment piece.

Kid art collectors (who know what they're doing, not the idiots who get it because they think they love it) think they can fake that status and create an artificially valuable art piece, bypassing the artist status thing with the pretence that because kids are “pure” (or some made up crap) that they already have all the requisites that make famous artists so valuable.
It's the equivalent of spray-painting stuff gold and pretending it's real gold.

That pretty much sums up my opinion minus the thought that it's a very special brand of stupid collector that believes there's anything remotely pure or significant about the thinking in a child's artwork really.

I know kids pretty well, and they don't have nearly the thought process that way too many people try to attribute to them. They're not thinking about it, they're just drawing something cool or familiar to them. No brilliant genius and deeper meaning behind it. That's why I use the example of Hirst. In my view, he's probably the first artist out there to successfully take full cynical advantage of the art market's attribution of value to fame. The guy makes little to no pretenses whatsoever about the fact that there's no brilliant concepting behind it all and that he doesn't even touch the vast majority of things attributed to him, but people buy it up like crazy and add their own views left and right about his personal worth and what his art is.

I like the analogy of painting things gold. You're basically paying for a bunch of dots that's only valuable because the guy who commissioned some intern to do it happens to have a recognizable name. It's probably not a very safe investment because eventually the game
is likely to fall apart, but that's not going to matter to him with the
numbers he's pulling down. I think we've gotten away from the value being attributed to the artist's skill and he's definitely the first artist I've seen who makes no pretense that that's his game. For that, I'm in awe of the guy. He's brilliant. He's not much as an artist maybe, but he's marketed himself and his brand to the point that he could probably vomit on a paper plate and still get it to sell because the work itself has no value. It's totally in his name, and I wish I could be so good at that game to pull a living out of it.

Caught a nasty cold, got a blister on one of my fingers and got randomly attacked by a small army of bees. Got stung once on my head…UGH!

life…e___e kill it with fiyah…

@Katch- you need to accompany that post with a pic of an angry fuming chibi, with a big swolen sting on the side of her forehead ^_^

@lba- yeah, that's pretty much it exactly. Although quite a few artists have reached that same point before Hurst. He's just getting more cash now than anyone did before.

That sort of thing probably goes back to the first celeb artists back in the Renaissance, where work of students and workers was always attributed to the master, so the price would always be high because his celebrity ensured it.

In the 20s the Daddaists exploited the whole system and deliberately made work from crap. People still attribute deeper meanings to it as well as stuff about WW1, but they were cleverer than that.

Piero Manzoni literally sold his shit to people… in tins.

Salvador Dali and Piccaso were well known for signing basically anything because they were well aware their signatures were the only value they needed.

Andy Warhol was well known for exploiting his fame to sell work.

Jeff Koons was famous for basing most of his career on subverting and exploiting the art industry.
And many more.

Yeah, I just think he also kind of embodies a new level of cynicism in the art world and culture in general. Even Koons pretended at one point he was making a point taking advantage of the art world and there were articles and people taking him seriously when he said it. Hirst doesn't say it at all, and I've never once seen a positive article about the guy, yet he sells schlock for millions to someone. He's like the hipsterdom of the art world. Nobody seems to want to admit to liking him, but someone sure as hell does for him to even exist.
People seem have become jaded towards anything the creative world pumps out lately and it seems like everyone is kind of taking this “ah! the hell with it!” attitude towards things. I meet more and more designers, musicians and film makers whose philosophy is basically “I don't much care what I make so long as I get paid to do something”. I see a lot of advertising that's pretty much just the company acting like they don't care if you buy their product too, like they're so cool and secure in their place in the world they never care if they have another customer again. And it's just been within the last few years that I've been seeing this. It's like we're about to go through the late 80's and early 90's all over again when the reigning sentiment was that everyone felt like they were living through the plot of Clerks everyday. I'm still debating if it's just local, national or whatnot, and what exactly seems to be causing it. Maybe it's just me seeing this.

Hahaha, I like your take on that! ^_^
Yeah, that'd fit. Things have been aping the mid to late 80s for a while… time now for the 90s to come back again. I know you're right.

And that's not just a mystical thing like arbitrary decade periods of time just naturally repeating themselves on human conciousness in some magical Yungian way, it's actually people deliberately making it happen that way:

- It's easier to separate fashions and fads into decade periods so they why we group them like that.

- it's WAY easier to create new fads and styles out of old stuff that's gone before.

- It usually works best when there's at least a 10-15 year gap (quite often longer) between revivals so people have had enough time to get sick of the previous fads and enough time to forget about their distaste of the one from 10-15 years ago.

- Also, it's probably about people generations moving on and getting all nostalgic for some period in their youth.
…says me listening to Urge Overkill and Tracy Bonham, watching my Daria DVDs and rocking my 90s influenced 70s revival flairs and tight T-shirts
NOooooooooooooooo… self awareness is a horrible thing.

And that means you can get the jump on it now man! ^_^
Start digging back into the mid to late 90s for the good stuff, it's what everyone's going to be basing everything on in the next few years. Better get in early!

BTW, what was good in the 90s? There was some decent “indie” rock… fledgling hipsters, LOTS of BAAAAAAAAD dance music when every pimple thought he was a “DJ”, and the whole 70s revival thing was well under way back then of course… Haha…

Honestly rather than going back 20 years to relive something that was barely tolerable the first time around why not go back 100 years. Let's all live like it's 1912, not 1992.

Wow 1992, will we be getting retro four-inch-thick lap tops with tiny screens? And Barney?

I'm going to go out and see if I can find some Bicentennial of War of 1812 events and maybe the reinactment of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and then the 150th of the American Civl War and relive shit worth reliving and fuck the 1990's.

i think i miss the idea of dances the most as the only dances i've ever been to are the type where you either jump in place because there's no room or bump and grinds. which isn't even dancing really and is just annoying.

can that be a trend again? actual dancing?