Andrew

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"Its a CLOCK!" - Sisko, "Dramatis Personae" DS9.

No, really. They are all called "type this" or "type that". For example the curvey one first seen in "Coming of Age" is a Type 7 medium shuttle, according to the TNG Tech Manual. The more angular shuttle that was first seen in fifth season "Darmok" is a Type 6 light shuttle, and this is confirmed verbally in the later episode "The Outcast".

Coincidentally, the first Type 6 shuttle seen was named the Magellan. None of the rounded Type 7 shuttles was ever named Magellan as far as I know - we only heard or saw the names Sakharov and Hawking, both famous physicists. Just goes to prove that even Larry Nemecek can make mistakes .

Timo Saloniemi

When does a shuttle become a starship?

Maybe Nemecek got his info from Okuda or Probert?

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"Its a CLOCK!" - Sisko, "Dramatis Personae" DS9.

Danube class USS Lena:
NCC-75357
Type 7 shuttle Lena attached to USS Perth, NCC-45678:
NCC-45678/5

So I don't know when a shuttle becomes a starship, but when it does, it gets a registry of her own (and becomes a she ).

Nemecek has good inside info on many things, and he's involved in the very nice Fact Files as well. But some things he either has to invent or leave unexplained, since not all Trek things have an explanation. The shuttle classification system does seem to come straight from Sternbach and Okuda, since they wrote the Tech Manual which uses Type 6 and Type 7 instead of class names.

Perhaps this is just as well: if shuttle-sized craft got class names, we'd soon run out of cool ones.

The only other Trek naming system to remain intact (and incidently a Starfleet one too) is the tradition of naming all Danude classes after rivers (so far only Earth ones, but I would speculate that rivers from other planets are also used).

Runabouts are considered to be star ships. The naming conventions for them, if it is derived from Earth custom, is to name the ship when it is "christened" upon initially launching the completed hull. This is usually done before internal equipment is installed (or so I understand) but, for military vessels, at least, the name remains the same throughout the vessel's service life, no matter how many different crews it goes through or how many refit's it's subjected to.

Whether the Federation observes these conventions the way I described them is another story, but I'm sure that the Federation derived it's naming conventions from the maritime traditions of it's members. I suspect that Earth's vast oceans (between 70% and 80% of the planet's surface area, depending on who you ask) are a rarity. Perhaps this is why Earth's maritime traditions are so influential. Perhaps we (or at least our counterparts in the Star Trek Universe) are the only spacefaring civilization with hundreds of years of maritime tradition, and the other members respect that, or at least find it interesting enough to adopt our conventions, in whole or in part, anyway.

--Baloo

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I once lost my corkscrew and had to live on food and water for several days
-W.C. Fields
http://members.tripod.com/~Bob_Baloo/index.htm

We pretty much know that the captain of the ship names his yacht when he takes command if the ship has one. The yacht on the Ent E is the Cousteau. I forget what the yacht on the Ent D was called. I think it was the Callipso.

And I doubt that shuttle names have to be always unique. There could be fifteen different shuttlecrafts Magellan out there on fifteen different ships. I would say the names only have to be unique within one ship. And I'm sure they can come up w/ seventy different explorers and scientists for a ship w/ that many shuttles.

Commander Timberland: "Admiral, have you decided to name the five Type 9 shuttles yet?"

Admiral C: "Yes Commander, I have. They will be named after the members of a 20th century boy band called the Backstreet Boys."

:p

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He can't be unoriginal
The way I feel is sexual
The way I feel is sexual.

(And although I gather none of us lives on the shores of Lena, I feel the big rivers of Siberia get far too little attention in the Danube naming scheme...)