Ship naming headaches

[Vedric]

Is there a way to stop new ships from getting unique names? I really hate this. If I design a ship and name the design to "m300 Vanguard", I want the ships built to this specification to be named by their design with a number after it. For example the 17th of such design built would be named, "m300 Vanguard 017". After a retrofitting this ship with fresh components it would be "m300 Vanguard mk1" along with a unique ID (number) indicating it's place in the production chain. I've noticed some of my designs follow this rule and it sure makes retrofitting and organizing much easier being able to read what what design and revision a ship is at a glance.

As it stands I've been renaming all my ships manually. This helps because the name is the class and revision of the design. Sorting or scanning through the fleets and bases screen is easier without having to select each ship and look at the little window on the lower right. Hovering over the ship in the lower left main screen window shows it's design and revision rather than some generic name which has no informational value.

Am I doing something wrong here? Why are some of my ships following intuitive naming conventions yet other designs all seem to get useless unique names that have no informational value in the first layer of UI?

Thanks

[Sithuk]

I sort by maintenance cost in the ship/bases screen to help group my ship designs.

[Vedric]

ORIGINAL: Sithuk

I sort by maintenance cost in the ship/bases screen to help group my ship designs.

Sorting isn't really the problem. For example, if you select "Fleet X" by pressing the F key, when you hover over one of the ships (lower left window) it will say the name of the ship not the design. The name doesn't tell me anything that I need to know. You must click the ship to see what class it is, then click the back button to get back to the fleet, then click another ship to see it's class, and so on. Needless to say this method is tedious even with the smallest of fleets.

We can use the ships and bases screen but this comes with it's own unnecessary complications. You open the oddly undersized screen and rather than a nice selection of easily recognizable icons, you are presented with a pull down menu which happens to have miles of space around it. This space could have been used for those nice icons but instead we get the lonely pull down menu. With that out of the way it's time to finally identify what design and revision each of the ships in Fleet X have. Rather than simply sorting by Fleet and looking at the name you have to click each ship, then look at the window in the lower right, click the next ship, look at the window, and so on. None of this would be necessary if the ships names were "design name + revision + production number". All of my destroyers in my current game were named this way by the AI and I much prefer this over the unique names all my cruisers have. I suppose if I were smart like Fredo I would memorize the maintenance costs of all my ships but with designs often costing the same and various revisions of those designs hovering around the same cost, lets just say I have no desire to count the fishes.

Lets move on to the UI in general now. Just kidding. Perhaps another day.

[Sithuk]

Vedric: The escort, frigate and destroyer auto naming convention fails when they are retrofitted to a different design. Their name doesn't change.