Hacker News Reader

Ignoring all the practical considerations, the one thing I am positively in favour of is naming warships things which we can all believe in, so USS Defiance is great. I've always enjoyed the US submarines San Francisco and even District of Columbia, and the Chinese ships Liaoning and Nanchang, as an example. But my favourite names have to be the British names Formidable, Invincible, and Audacious. Now that I can get behind.

View on HN

I mean, they literally named an entire class of ships when they launched HMS Dreadnought - and also caused previous classes of ships to be renamed to "pre-dreadnought".

But they've always had a flair for ship naming - Erebus and Terror, famous for Franklin's 3rd Expedition were originally bomb ships (that is, armed with mortars instead of cannon) of the Hecla class and Vesuvius class respectively, so firstly, naming mortar armed vessel classes after volcanoes, pretty cool.

But then check out the names of Erebus' sister ships...

* Hecla

* Fury

* Meteor

* Infernal

* Aetna

* Sulphur

* Vesuvius

* Devastation

* Volcano

* Beelzebub

You'd feel pretty badass serving on the HMS Devastation.

Fun fact - HMS Erebus took part in the Battle of Baltimore, so helped inspire that line from the US national anthem about "the bombs bursting in air"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com