Hands in pockets, mooching about

It's been a rough week.

Not particularly rough for me, you understand, because my problems are few, but for at least one friend.

So, happy thoughts towards him.

Anyway. Books.

I thought I'd made a serious mistake because having decided to do this NatNoWriMo thing, I've realised I have no plot, no characters and no setting.

Except I think I have them now.

Of course, this leads me to talk of naming spaceships.

If you look back over the best loved spaceships, you end up thinking about Star Trek. You might recall Lost in Space but you probably won't recall the name of their ship. Odds are, though, that you know the USS Enterprise. So any book that features a space ship has to give that ship a memorable name. It has to feel right. It has to have weight, and purpose.

All the parody names that people have come up with don't quite work. Even the Protector from Galaxy Quest doesn't really have "it". Galactica does, at least these days, and that's mostly thanks to the re-imagined BSG which gave the ship the dignity it never had in the original series. It's even got more cultural weight than TARDIS, which has entered the English language to mean any space which is deceptively roomy.

So, if you want to give a starship a name, it has to have a unique something.

I think the Nostromo has it,but it's pinched from a Conrad novel and that seems to help.

Inevitably, Wikipedia has a list of fictional space ships and most of the names are rather...naff. Compared with some of the names the Royal Navy used for cruisers and battleships (come on! who doesn't love the name Warspite?) they seem rather dull and thoughtless.

So, loads of source material for all this stuff, and loads of words to play with.