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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

Allusions are fun and all, but I disagree. These are important problems that a lot of people have put their whole careers into researching. Silly names like these lack gravitas.

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Always sad to see these projects suffer from A Shortfall of Gravitas

I see what you did there :-)

Gravitas? What Gravitas?

Indeed they would do well To Consider The Lack Of Gravitas.

Sorry, to explain the joke. The ships name themselves, and when they pick jokey names they're often mocked by the humans (which are in every way essentially ants to the spaceships) for not having enough gravitas. So the ships start naming themeselves things like the "Death-ray 9000 super-killer deluxe", to essentially take the piss.

Funnily enough you can see the exact same effect in principal game-engineers or computer-hacking.

I believe the user you are replying to was also joking, given that many of Banks' ship names reference the g-word

Edit: if not that's even more amusing

I'll make a minor contribution to the discussion by mentioning the Culture ship normally referred to as the Mistake Not..., which is shorthand for

"Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath".

Unsure if this name is also a sarcastic stab that the lack of gravitas in ships' names, but regardless it's very sad that Banks died young :(

Yeah, it's making fun of the human desire for gravitas when it comes to ship names, since it's just exponentially more and more over the top.

Very little Gravitas Indeed.

Ah so its __you__ that took that one

indeed

If anything the caliber and lore of the series gives the project an incredible amount of gravitas. Plus the scheme is just plain beautiful in my opinion.

You may find this Iain Banks interview enjoyable. TLDR search for "gravitas" ;-)