Ship Organization

[Corona688]

After accumulating almost every single ship from this 100-day career save, I finally had to start weeding and organizing to put the things I reuse time and time again to the top.  My scheme is 0[Letters] Name,  0 to put them at the top of the sorting order, and letters to designate the type so they're split into sections.

• A:  Small, super-long-range high-DV craft like asteroid intercepts.
• H:  Heavy lifting vehicles.
• L:  Landers
• M:  Mining vehicles
• R:  Rescue/Orbital maintenance vehicles for grabbing and pushing other craft.
• T:  Orbital transports and return-craft.

Simple craft like the 0R Dragonfly and 0H Megadreen only have one designation but many have multiple letters like the 0LHM Armadillo heavy miner.

How do you organize your ships?

[Sharpy]

A simple system of names.

Destination name + craft type name, descriptive. Possibly extra for grouping - 'carrier' for a craft that carries many. Letter (A, B) for multiple of same craft on same body. Extra 'LD' for 'Long Distance' - versions that are meant for special destinations.

• Minmus SciLander ('land and leave there' probe)
• Minmus SciCollector (satellite, as above)
• Minmus OreScanner
• Minmus JumperLab
• Ike JumperLab
• Kerbin SciCollector (left in high orbit)
• Mun OreRover A
• Mun OreRover B
• Moho Temple
• Dres Temple (a special class of manned landers for exploration)

Craft currently unassigned, parked in LKO get no body prefix.

• Claymore (asteroid tug, a special class.)
• BigMiner
• Dropship Carrier (LKO, any kerbal can take a capsule and land.)
• SavingKlaw Carrier (many drones for saving rescuees from LKO)
• SavingKlaw LD Carrier (Long Distance version, Mun, Minmus.)

...is the game's behavior of naming 'derivative craft' moddable, and/or are there mods for it? Because 'Eve Probe Carrier Probe' looks damn dumb and I'd like to mod the game to crop the 'carrier' part off the derivative ship, instead of appending 'ship' or 'probe'.

Edited September 2, 2016 by Sharpy

[Snark]

Well, one way I organize them is to delete the ones I'm not gonna be flying again.  A little housecleaning works wonders. 

Names are generally celestial body name, plus one of a specific set of nouns indicating roles.  The "role names" I use:

• Pioneer:  The first (usually unmanned) probe I send to a new planet before my follow-on exploration.
• Surveyor:  Unmanned polar orbiter that has a survey scanner.
• Miner
• Lander
• Flyer
• Tug
• Tanker
• Mission:  a large composite craft consisting of orbital mothership plus landers
• Station
• Base

For the "station" or "base" cases, these are often the result of contracts, so to differentiate their names I add a roman numeral indicating crew capacity, and a suffix letter for specific parts added at the behest of the contract (e.g. L for lab, C for cupola, etc.).  So Mun Station IX-L is "an orbiting station holding 9 kerbals that has a lab".

When I have a craft that I'm no longer using, and don't want cluttering up the tracking station and map view, but I can't bear to delete it, then I prefix its name with "Abandoned" before setting its ship type to "debris".

 

[Pecan]

Mostly, everything is given a <destination> <name> <serial> designation.  Destination first so I can find all the things around or heading towards a particular body easily in the tracking station.  Pre-launch they don't usually have a destination but the <name> <serial> still works.  '<Serial>' is just, 1, 2, 3, etc, if it's needed, so that's easy.

For the names themselves I have:

• one-shot missions which will have their own whimsical reason for whatever they happen to be called
• 'permanent' vehicles like stations (called 'station'), mapping and communications satellites ('SCANsat <scanner>', 'COMSat <whatever>')
• 'tractor' reusable transfer vehicles, nearly all of a standard design but with <model-letter> if I care (eg; Kerbin Tractor B2, for the second tractor in the Kerbin system, which happens to be model B)
• Launch vehicles - either disposable 'LV-<max payload mass>', reusable SSTO rockets 'SS-<max payload mass>' or spaceplanes 'SP-<max payload mass>-<max payload size>'.  The extra size information is needed for spaceplanes as their payload is usually carried inside a cargo-bay as opposed to the rockets' payloads being under fairings.

[Guest]

My launch vehicles have real world style class-number names: Sword XI-A, Sword XIII, Nebula I, etc.

Aircraft are named things like TL-# [name] (initialisation standing for Transport Large, based on X-Universe transport classification) and TOMV-# [name] (Transport Orbiter Medium VTOL). For example, the TOLV-1 Hornet is my first purpose-built shuttle design.

Probes are named individually and successively after their destination: Mun Probe I, Mun Probe II, etc. after launch. I'm aiming at having a standardised interplanetary probe design able to handle everything including aerobraking, which I'll modify (ie. remove unnecessary parts from) before launch depending on where I'm going.

Stations have unique names (my theme is different cultures' various names for hell), though my LKO science station is just called 'Asteroid Survey Station' after its main purpose (it has a small craft that undocks to pursue near-Kerbin asteroids and return samples).

 

I was gonna keep the craft designs accumilated during my save to look back upon, but I've taken to deleting unused ones after deciding I don't really care about them and they make the save/load menu take longer to load itself.

Edited September 2, 2016 by Guest

[GoSlash27]

Ships that are disposed of or recovered at the end of their mission don't get unique names in my scheme. They are named for their cargo or mission.

That leaves:

Mass mover (chemical): alphabetical star names

Mass mover (nuclear): alphabetical galaxy name

Shuttle: alphabetical planet name

Orbital station: (planet) station

Surface base: (planet) base

Survey/ science satellite: (planet)sat

Nothing imaginative in my space program

Best,
-Slashy

[regex]

Recently I've been giving my sounding rockets bird names, although a mis-type gave one the name "Falcom", which I thought was pretty cool. My general lifters are getting named after tree species in Oregon, the first one being "Douglas", and if I ever run out of those I'll move to counties in Oregon.

[Chiron0224]

I do Norse mythology names.  I like to imagine that my game takes place in an alternate world where we went with Norse rather than Greek mythology.  I also name the rockets but then use "rename vehicle" on launch pad to give it the mission name.  Here's what I have on my current career.

 

Longship III - an LKO and satellite launching vehicle.  It was instrumental in the Viking program (basically my Mercury) Valkyrie (My Gemini) and the Hunin and Munin probes

Thor V - My Mun lander for my current Einherjar project (basically Apollo)

 

The numbers (i.e. Longship III and Thor V) indicate design stages as I perfected the rocket.  So Thor V is my fifth iteration of the Thor rocket (happy coincidence that it worked so that my Mun lander would be ___ V like Saturn V.  It wasn't on purpose).

[GoSlash27]

1 hour ago, Chiron0224 said:

I do Norse mythology names.  I like to imagine that my game takes place in an alternate world where we went with Norse rather than Greek mythology.  I also name the rockets but then use "rename vehicle" on launch pad to give it the mission name.  Here's what I have on my current career.

 

Longship III - an LKO and satellite launching vehicle.  It was instrumental in the Viking program (basically my Mercury) Valkyrie (My Gemini) and the Hunin and Munin probes

Thor V - My Mun lander for my current Einherjar project (basically Apollo)

 

The numbers (i.e. Longship III and Thor V) indicate design stages as I perfected the rocket.  So Thor V is my fifth iteration of the Thor rocket (happy coincidence that it worked so that my Mun lander would be ___ V like Saturn V.  It wasn't on purpose).

Reminds me of my first run through back in .18 demo where I changed my names to kerbalized variations of the historical names. For instance, my first suborbital launcher was "Moho Bluerock" instead of "Mercury Redstone"

 

[Alpha 360]

I usually chose movie or something to base off all my ship names. For example, a few days ago I created a science game called Kerbalatic Empire and named my ships after StarWars empire ships, like Tie 1, Tie Intercepter and so on. 

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

My ships defy classification.

What do you call a single nuclear lightweight interplanetary tug and lander and rover?  I call it a Minotaur: MMPiV Manned Multipurpose Interplanetary Vehicle

 

[Corona688]

20 hours ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

My ships defy classification.

What do you call a single nuclear lightweight interplanetary tug and lander and rover?  I call it a Minotaur: MMPiV Manned Multipurpose Interplanetary Vehicle

 

I'd call that the ARL minotaur...  I suspect your definition of 'light' isn't the same as mine also

Edited September 4, 2016 by Corona688

[Leopard]

Xbox here, can;t have enough ships to need to name them or it falls over..

That said, Traveller has a decent scheme that could be re-purposed. Two or three character code, then a class name, First character is the general type of craft - cargo ship, lander, passenger transport, station, probe, shuttle etc. Second is a code for the size or capacity, final character is a more specific sub type.

Geeky as hell, but frankly for a game like this? spot on.

As things stand I have "Station K2" as the second station built round Kerbin, Station Mun 1 can probably be guessed to its purpose, Duna One is a probe, you can probably guess where. Only more creative name is "Ulysses", a newly launch cargo tug for stuff between Kerbin and Mun/Minmus - hope it will be about long enough to be worth naming.

[Chiron0224]

On ‎9‎/‎4‎/‎2016 at 1:58 PM, Leopard said:

Xbox here, can;t have enough ships to need to name them or it falls over..

That said, Traveller has a decent scheme that could be re-purposed. Two or three character code, then a class name, First character is the general type of craft - cargo ship, lander, passenger transport, station, probe, shuttle etc. Second is a code for the size or capacity, final character is a more specific sub type.

Geeky as hell, but frankly for a game like this? spot on.

As things stand I have "Station K2" as the second station built round Kerbin, Station Mun 1 can probably be guessed to its purpose, Duna One is a probe, you can probably guess where. Only more creative name is "Ulysses", a newly launch cargo tug for stuff between Kerbin and Mun/Minmus - hope it will be about long enough to be worth naming.

Hell yes, I love Traveller.  Still haven't had a chance to really play the new Mongoose version that came out.  I took part in the playtest and still haven't bothered to get my copy. lol

[ImmaStegosaurus!]

In subassemblies I have my go to rockets classed as type (LLV, MLV, HLV and SHLV according to their payload size and weight), followed by name (Soyuz, Delta II, Delta IV, SLS1/2) and amount of cores and SRB's and finally if I rate design safe enough for crew and how many.

It yields names like:
-LLV Delta II 18U
-MLV Soyuz 5M2
-MLV Proton 1U
-HLV SLS 12M3.

It kinda looks like Russian GRAU system.

Payloads are named after destination planet (+moon or roids on dres) if I need to save them. I rarely use same payload twice with few exceptions like light atmospheric lander which I often launch at Eve and Duna and their moons.

Edited September 5, 2016 by ImmaStegosaurus!

[steedcrugeon]

On ‎03‎/‎09‎/‎2016 at 1:10 AM, Chiron0224 said:

I do Norse mythology names.  I like to imagine that my game takes place in an alternate world where we went with Norse rather than Greek mythology.  I also name the rockets but then use "rename vehicle" on launch pad to give it the mission name. 

I use Norse mythology for my naming convention too!

I've actually documented an elaborate scheme.

	NAME (ALL CAPS)	Reserved for (if applicable)		Destination	Abbreviation		Function (if req.)	Description		Designation	Description
Stations/Outposts	ASGARD			Kbl	Kerbol		RSC	Rescue		"000"	Vessel/Lander numbering sequence
	MIDGARD	Manned Orbital Station		Mh	Moho		Ex	Experimental		"00"	Station/Outpost numbering sequence
	VANAHEIM			Ev	Eve		SCI	Science		"X"	used for 'Branch' nodes
	JOTUNHEIM			Gl	Gilly		Core	Primary station/Vessel node		"x"	used for 'Trunk' nodes
	NIFLFEIM	Proto-Station		Kbn	Kerbin		Branch	Off centre Part
	MUSPELHEIM			Mn	Mun		Trunk	Central/Axial Part
	ALFHEIM			Mns	Minmus
	SVARTALFHEIM			Dn	Duna
	HEL	Kerbol/Stellar Orbiters		Ik	Ike
				Ds	Dres
Manned Craft	ODIN	colony/large vessels		Jo	Jool
	THOR			Ly	Laythe
	LOKI			Va	Vall
	BALDUR			Ty	Tylo
	FRIGG	for 'construction on orbit'		Bp	Bop
	HEIMDALL			Pl	Pol
	TYR			Eo	Eeloo
	IDUN	Landers
	BRAGI
Unmanned Craft	FREYA	Intended for orbit					Example:	" IDUN-Mn001 "
	FREYR	Multi-purpose						This was the first Mun Lander
	NJORD	Rovers
	NERTHUS
	VALKYRIE
	NORNS	SCANSat Satellites
	BIFROST	Comms Satellites

I also run a spread sheet to record all my launched missions, some proposed ones make it onto the list too.

[Spartwo]

Role-Mass-Theater of operation-version-Engine type

Vector tug around Minmus: CHO3LF

They all get their own class names but this helps with organisation.

Edited September 6, 2016 by Spartwo

[Sneaky Bstard Sword]

I don't have a naming scheme for my rockets, but for planes I use the following: KCA [stands for Kerbal Civilian Aircraft] -[number of previous designs + 1] [name of an animal]. For example, the first early career transport workhorse I designed in one career save was the KCA-01 Tahr. 

I've never gotten the the point where I've unlocked BDarmory parts in a career save, due to losing a mid-career save to my OS excrementsting itself, and just not having gotten around to unlocking that node in my current career save, but any future military aircraft would be named with the KCA being replaced with KMA [Kerbal Military Aircraft].