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Comment by dan1234 | Hacker News Reader

FTA:

  But why couldn't the main vessel itself have carried the name?
  Here's one reason: imagine the ship were to get into trouble at some point in the future.
  Imagine the headlines.
  Remember, the places it will work are extremely hostile; they are dangerous.

I can sort of see the reasoning there. “4 dead after Boaty McBoatface sinks” would be a difficult headline to take seriously.

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If that is a serious concern then any kind of name outside of a serial number could look bad in a headline. "Attenborough caught dumping diesel, killing baby seals".

Another beautiful misdirect from the science correspondents :-) One might reasonably argue that the onus would be on the headline writers there to lend the appropriate gravitas.

On the other hand ... there'd still be more publicity for the research programme. How much coverage was there for the prosaically named Ocean Researcher V when it sank, resulting in death of two researchers?

"Four dead after British research ships sinks"?

-For that exact reason, Churchill instructed the SOE (Or, more probably, the armed forces in general, but it has been a while since I came across this anecdote) that whimsy or plain silly codenames for operations were OUT.

He didn't want any widows to receive a letter stating that 'It is with utmost regret we inform you that your husband died heroically for the Empire during the execution of operation PINK UNDIES' or something of the sort.

Makes a lot of sense.

You'll never be able to please everybody, just look at the WMO and their tropical storm naming methodology. I've actually heard someone complain about a perceived bias in the ethnicity of the names. You wouldn't even be able to use a true random number, because of tetraphobia [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia

Vs "Four dead after Sir David Attenborough Sinks?"

"Sir David Attenborough lost with all hands."

Boaty McBoatface was an awesome name. Such a missed opportunity...

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