the Fox class has a number of names, but I think part of this is because the Fox was produced far in excess of inital plans. my money says that the fox was oringally planned to be a run of 4 ships (Fox, Indomitable, Intrepid, Indeflegable) given we know the inital ship and the class was renamed late in the game to honor Hanse Davion, my guess would be it was proably another "British I name" (Invincable maybe?) we know that the Brits would often rather then name a class around a theme, name it around a letter (thus the D class destroyers would all be D names etc, that said Battleships didn't carry much of a theme but I think this was because a lot of those where names connected to ANICENT pedigrees)
We can proably trace 3 distinct "Groups" of ships after that.
the first seems to be ships named after worlds, which I suspect was eaither an attempt by the fedcom navy to simplyl appease important worlds (ones whose support may have also been deemed essential to the procurement process) or those worlds may have funded the ships construction for the honor of having the ship named after them (IIRC there had been some talk about Canada funding the construction of a Queen Elizabeth Battleship back in the day)
The ships named for famous admirals then may have been from a "third grouping" and was perhaps ships named by the KSD administration to attempt to bring the navy onboard by appealing to their sense of history
I was just looking at the list of
Foxes and pondering some similar things.
I like the idea of different "batches" or "groups" accounting for some of the variety in names.
It is indeed pretty clear that some of the names are just from TPTB being like "the FedSuns is vaguely British."
I find the idea of one batch being all named after important worlds a little problematic.
Robinson,
New Syrtis, and
Kathil certainly fit, and
Kentares makes some sense for historical bloody-shirt-waving importance. However,
Bryceland doesn't seem particularly important for any reason,
Antrim and
Rostock aren't planetary systems anywhere on the map in any era, and
Murmansk is a Combine world which drops off the map after the 2800's.
Arguably it would have also made more sense to use planetary names for the
Avalon class. However, notably there is no member of that class named
New Avalon, but of course there IS a
Fox class named
Fox. I sort of suspect there was disagreement or confusion among TPTB over whether ship classes actually needed to have a nameship.
