Design Log: Stardate 04.18.2003

The Naming of the Crew (and Their Ships)

Players often wonder where the designers come up with the names for personnel and ships whose names were never heard on-screen in a Star Trek episode. And occasionally, they take issue with a name the designers settled on. Some of these are "background" characters, extras with little or no dialog, while others (both characters and ships) are simply never addressed or referred to by name. So where do these names come from? There are basically three sources.

First, occasionally a character will have a name in the script of an episode, but the name is never used in dialog. Usually this yields a perfectly usable name for a personnel card. A classic example of this is Patahk, the injured Romulan in the episodeThe Enemy, whose First Edition card bore his script name, never mentioned on screen. Sounds Romulan, and wasn't used by another character already, so there was a ready-made solution to what to call an "unnamed" character. This is also sometimes a source for a first name for a character who was addresed in the script only by last name (and sometimes a military rank), such as Admiral Brand, whose given name "Andrea" on her Second Edition base set card came from the script.

Second, while Decipher does not have a license to make cards based on the various Star Trek novels (which are not recognized as "canon" by Paramount), there are a number of characters and ships from the TV series and movies which appear in either novelizations of an episode or film, or in a novel whose storyline uses those characters or ships in new situations. Especially in novelizations, minor characters or ships will be given names (either full or first names) that didn't appear in the scripts, and frequently those names are acceptable both to the designers and to Paramount, who has to approve their use. Examples include the female Romulan Commander from classic Trek's "The Enterprise Incident," who was named Charvanek in the novel Vulcan's Heart; Voyager's Dr. Fitzgerald (who expired in the pilot episode, but not before getting a name in the novelization of Caretaker), and Elizabeth Shelby, whose first name came from the New Frontier series of novels. An example of a ship in this category is Chakotay's Maquis ship, which was named the Liberty in First Edition. And thereby hangs a tale, which I'll delve into after covering the third category of name sources – imagination.

Yep, a great many of our personnel and ship names are made up out of whole cloth, or close to it. Personnel names may be chosen almost at random, named after a designer's friend (Kitrik) or friend's dog (Talvin), or have some other personal connection for the designer (designer Evan Lorentz named a number of universal Federation personnel in Second Edition after characters in director David Fincher's movies – for example, Altman is a character from Panic Room). On rare occasions they could be a significant anagram (Keras and Krase come to mind) or have some connection to the actor who played the part: Kelly, an unnamed cameo role by Bryan Singer, director of the X-Men movies, was named for Senator Kelly in X-Men. And then there are the names that just "sound" Klingon, or Romulan, or Cardassian, based on existing names. Dokar, Mopak, Jural, and many more were just good solid alien-sounding names (which Paramount approved). (There was also that Romulan in The Borg expansion whose name, I've heard, was a combination of anagram, designer whim, and "sounds Romulan"... not that I would know anything about that.)

While ships (and their class names) might also be named using the random (Fortune) or "sounds authentic" (Trolarak) method, others are named after natural features or provinces of the affiliation's homeworld (the precedent for this was set by the runabouts named for Earth's rivers, such as the Rio Grande) or have literary or historical connections. Such is the case with the Bajoran Kitara (named after Akorem Laan's poem, Kitara's Song) and its Perikian class (from the Perikian Peninsula, location of the headquarters of the Alliance for Global Unity).

But perhaps most notable in Energize are two Maquis ships: the Valjean and Guingouin. And thereby hangs the rest of that afore-mentioned tale, which I got from designer Evan Lorentz. Seems that the name of Chakotay's ship was never heard in Caretaker (or any other episode), but when we made that ship card in The Borg expansion, it needed a name and a class. Nothing in the script, but since it was identified in the novel Pathways (by series co-creator Jeri Taylor) as the Antares-class Liberty, that's what we went with.

Well, that brought quite a storm of commentary from fans who insisted that was not an Antares-class ship (Kasidy Yates' freighter, the Xhosa, is an Antares-class freighter), and that in fact the ship was identified on-screen – not in dialog, or with a name painted on the ship (resistance fighters aren't prone to splashing names across their bows), but in an obscure list on Teero Anaydis's computer display in the episode Inside Man – as the Valjean. (Well, actually, it was given as Val Jean – but let's not quibble about a stray space.) And if it was on-screen it must be canon, right?

OK, not much to be done about that First Edition card once it was made. But with Second Edition we got a Second Chance to make it right, so the Valjean it was. Since a smaller version of this ship was known canonically to be "Peregrine"-class, the designers decided to make the big brother "Condor"-class. But now what to do about poor Mike Eddington's (also unnamed) ship, for which Valjean would have been arguably much more appropriate? For that, the designers went to the real Maquis World War II resistance group and borrowed the name of one of their leaders, and thus was born the Guingouin.

And so it goes, as our intrepid designers endeavor to create new and interesting names for all those nameless extras and anonymous ships. Not the most glamorous part of card design, but it does so much for the flavor of the cards.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

April 18, 2003

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