Real Ship Names

[JaegerDelta]

Perhaps they just built one and said "Thats cool, lets build more." 

that is undoubtedly what happened, though over years. the designing and constructing of a ship is a complex undertaking. so, keeping with the squid, it is from the order of chaladon, they would have a name for it (when it was first made and only flown by people within the order) that is most likely different from the name it is known by today (the squid). 

Think of the names of the ships in-game right now as sailor slang for those ships, an informal name that it goes by in the greater world. An example of this is the humvee ( not a ship i know but its an easy example ).  The humvee's actual name is High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), humvee is a slang term for the vehicle used by soldiers that has entered the common vernacular.  the same would be true of these common ships in the world of GoI:O.

[Chaodiurn]

I honestly doubt that most ships received proper names in their early developing cycles at all. Especially in a post-apocalyptical scenario resources probably aren't that obtainable, and thus any built ship has to be modified to fit its environment the best (e.g., deserts, alpine landscapes and such). Sailing the sea is one thing. The sea, well, remains the sea. Flying low-altitude however surely requires less subtle changes to a boat's design. I could think of a CQB-Squid for urban combat or something the like. So, even with certain designs being superior, those would still have sub-designs. I'm thinking about it like the early submarines were named. During the Second World War, German submarine classes ranged from Type I to XXIII, not containing any names at all. Those then received further sub-classes, as II A, II B, II C and II D. Even the Type VII, the workhorse with its main-type ending up being VII C, never received any change to something more recognizable. Similarity can be found in U.S. history, where the class of the most-built submarine during the First World War was simply called S. According to Wikipedia (our beloved, never-failing source for trustful knowledge *cough*) those S-class boats sometimes received the name Sugar Boat, what I would take as the equivalent of the class names we are using in GOI.

Our problem with the Galleon is fixable by just this pattern: the first submarine fully designed and built in China (meaning without being a copied U.S. submarine) was the Song-class, in 1997. This name, however, is only the classification the NATO gave to it. The Chinese name for the class is Type 039, separated also by letters, e.g., Type 039G.

If you put the pattern of boats driving below sea-level on ships flying above, we could easily get something like FW 42-A for the first Galleon (FW being the abbreviation for flying whale... I'm not always in a creative mood). But that, alas, doesn't really sound attracting nor fearsome enough for a game, does it?

[JaegerDelta]

I honestly doubt that most ships received proper names in their early developing cycles at all. Especially in a post-apocalyptical scenario resources probably aren't that obtainable, and thus any built ship has to be modified to fit its environment the best (e.g., deserts, alpine landscapes and such). Sailing the sea is one thing. The sea, well, remains the sea. Flying low-altitude however surely requires less subtle changes to a boat's design. I could think of a CQB-Squid for urban combat or something the like. So, even with certain designs being superior, those would still have sub-designs. I'm thinking about it like the early submarines were named. During the Second World War, German submarine classes ranged from Type I to XXIII, not containing any names at all. Those then received further sub-classes, as II A, II B, II C and II D. Even the Type VII, the workhorse with its main-type ending up being VII C, never received any change to something more recognizable. Similarity can be found in U.S. history, where the class of the most-built submarine during the First World War was simply called S. According to Wikipedia (our beloved, never-failing source for trustful knowledge *cough*) those S-class boats sometimes received the name Sugar Boat, what I would take as the equivalent of the class names we are using in GOI.

Our problem with the Galleon is fixable by just this pattern: the first submarine fully designed and built in China (meaning without being a copied U.S. submarine) was the Song-class, in 1997. This name, however, is only the classification the NATO gave to it. The Chinese name for the class is Type 039, separated also by letters, e.g., Type 039G.

If you put the pattern of boats driving below sea-level on ships flying above, we could easily get something like FW 42-A for the first Galleon (FW being the abbreviation for flying whale... I'm not always in a creative mood). But that, alas, doesn't really sound attracting nor fearsome enough for a game, does it?

yeah, but it wouldnt be for the game, it more reveals something about the "personality" of each of the factions. The Yeshans are highly militaristic and would probably use those very dry designations. but cultures with different values would have different styles to their naming of ships, if they were indeed state sponsored.  a privately built ship that has since become a common design would likely have had a proper name

[Chaodiurn]

cultures with different values would have different styles to their naming of ships, if they were indeed state sponsored.  a privately built ship that has since become a common design would likely have had a proper name

I think that it's tricky to take separate looks on public and private designs and/or productions, as it requires more detailed looks upon the political and economical structure of the setting's world. In our capitalistic word, e.g., it's common that even the most famous products have simple classification-names. I could think of Daimler's Mercedes-Benz, having the cars named A-Class, C-Class, E-Class and even more confusingly GLK-Class. Same goes with BMW, M3, M5 and so on. To get even more abstract and even farther away from airships, Apple's iPhones are named from G2 to G5, again with suffixes to make slight adjustments and improvements.

Of course we have to take into consideration that the ships we encounter in GOI are not built for civil usage. The Squid could have been a civil ship built for the means of fast, cheap transportation before receiving any guns. But arming a design is rarely an event that gives inspiration to change a class's name into something more awesome, especially if the (fighting) culture is more of the Spartan type. Sure, there are also cases playing against that (Seat Megan, Fiat Punto, Enterprise-class carrier, Balao-class submarine, Kiev-class carrier), and yet the border between the private and public sectors is probably weakened by the events leading to the scenario we're playing in. Creating a completely new classification because a ship got weapons seems a bit far-reaching for that, and even if the ship originally was developed under the name it has in GOI (Spire and Mobula have a good chance for that in my opinion), I think that it would be but coincidence that every ship that is currently in-game is such a case.