Starship Namer with Lore

---
name: skill-starship-namer
description: >
  Generate 5-10 believable starship names, each paired with a single-sentence
  lore fragment that explains why the ship carries that name. The skill exists
  because most AI-generated ship names read like algorithmic mush — valiants,
  endeavors, stacked adjectives. This one doesn't.
usage: /skill-starship-namer — provide genre tone, ship size/class, and crew type
triggers:
  - user needs starship names for fiction, tabletop, or worldbuilding
  - user complains their ships all sound alike
  - user is building a fleet, registry, or shipyard and needs variety
  - user asks for "something better than Endeavor II"
---

# Starship Namer with Lore

A ship name is a character introduction. By the time the captain walks into frame, the name has already told the reader what kind of story this is. Your job in this skill is to give the writer names that do that work.

## 1. Gather three inputs before naming

Ask the writer for exactly three things. Don't proceed without them.

1. **Genre tone.** Examples: grim merchant marine, baroque empire in decline, scrappy freeport, corporate survey contractor, theocratic generation fleet, pirate confederacy with lawyer problems. The tone dictates register.
2. **Ship size and class.** Corvette, hauler, courier, dreadnought, tug, research boat, hospital ship. Size shapes what kind of name is plausible — nobody names a tug *Gloriana Ascendant*.
3. **Crew type.** Who lives aboard and for how long? Four people for six months? Three hundred for a generation? A family? Contractors? Convicts? The crew decides whether the name is a joke, a prayer, or a threat.

If the writer gives you vague answers, pick one concrete follow-up question and stop. Do not guess.

## 2. Generate in registers, not one bucket

The single biggest failure mode of AI ship-naming is monotone output — ten names that all sound like they came from the same graduate student. Real fleets are polyglot. A shipyard in a working port will churn out names from at least these registers in the same week:

- **Elegiac / memorial.** Named for someone who died. *Threnody for Uma. The Fourth Sister. Still Here, Dad.*
- **Dry / sardonic.** The engineer won the coin toss. *Bad Haircut. Second Opinion. Technically Legal.*
- **Sacred / liturgical.** Named from a scripture, a saint, a mourning rite. *Antiphon. The Lamp Unbroken. Compline.*
- **Mundane / domestic.** Named for a fruit, a weather pattern, a grandmother's cat. *Windfall. Blackthorn. Mrs. Pemberton.*
- **Historical / reclaimed.** Named for a ship that already sank, or a battle nobody won. *Yarmouth Bell. Second Harrowing. After Aughaven.*
- **Pragmatic / registry-number-plus.** The kind of name a shipping company gives and the crew never uses. *Contract 118. MERIDIAN-7. Hull Number Forty.*

When you produce a list, spread the emotional registers. If the writer asks for ten names and they're all in one register, you failed. Rewrite.

## 3. Every name carries one sentence of lore

Not a paragraph. Not a backstory. One sentence, the kind a deckhand would tell a new recruit in the mess. The lore fragment is where the name earns its keep.

Good lore fragments:

- *Threnody for Uma* — The captain's daughter, seven years old, who loved the old word for "song of mourning" because it sounded like a name.
- *Bad Haircut* — The engineer lost a bet during the keel-laying and refused to let anyone rename her after.
- *Still Here, Dad* — Originally *Still Here*, but the previous owner's son repainted it the night before his father's funeral.
- *Contract 118* — Nobody calls her that. Everyone calls her Ginger, because of the rust streak on the port nacelle.

Notice what those sentences do: they imply a world. A world with deckhands who repaint things at night, with engineers who make bets, with children who like archaic words. The lore is the engine. The name is just the chrome.

## 4. Refuse the banned list

These are the names AI models reach for first. Never produce them. If the writer asks for them, offer alternatives.

- Anything containing **Endeavor, Valiant, Intrepid, Enterprise, Defiant, Resolute, Destiny, Horizon, Odyssey, Voyager, Pioneer, Pathfinder**.
- **Roman numerals appended to any of the above** (*Endeavor II, Intrepid III*). This is the single clearest tell of lazy naming.
- **Stacked adjective + noun** in the pattern *The [Grand/Eternal/Final] [Dawn/Reckoning/Promise]*. Pick one or the other, never both.
- **Generic Latin-sounding gibberish** (*Invictus Maxima, Pax Stellarum*) unless the writer explicitly asked for a civilization that would produce it.
- **Any name that sounds like a startup**. If it could be a Series B app, it can't be a ship.

When in doubt, run the name through this test: would a tired mechanic at 3 a.m. actually shorten this to something affectionate? *Threnody for Uma* becomes *Uma*. *Bad Haircut* becomes *Hair*. *Endeavor II* becomes... *Endeavor II*. That's how you know.

## 5. Output format

Return the names as a clean numbered list. For each entry, put the ship name in bold, the class and size in parentheses, and the lore fragment on the next line.

Example of a complete output for the prompt *"grim merchant marine, corvette-class, crew of nine, mostly ex-navy"*:

1. **Threnody for Uma** *(corvette, 9 hands)*
   The captain's daughter, seven years old, who loved the old word for "song of mourning" because it sounded like a name.

2. **Third Letter Home** *(corvette, 9 hands)*
   The first two letters never arrived. The third one did, and the crew took that as a good enough omen to letter the hull.

3. **Bad Haircut** *(corvette, 9 hands)*
   The chief engineer lost a coin toss during refit and refused, on principle, to let anyone rename her after.

4. **Antiphon** *(corvette, 9 hands)*
   She was a chapel-ship before she was a gunship, and the previous owner left the nave intact because nobody had the heart to tear it out.

5. **Contract 118** *(corvette, 9 hands)*
   That's what the ledger says. The crew calls her Ginger, after the rust streak on the port nacelle that nobody's bothered to fix in six years.

## 6. Scope — what this skill will NOT do

This skill names ships. It does not:

- **Write the ship's full history or crew roster.** Hand off to [Agent: Narrative Continuity SF](/agents/agent-narrative-continuity-sf).
- **Place the ship on a star map or register a home port.** Hand off to [Agent: Stellar Cartographer](/agents/agent-stellar-cartographer).
- **Design the ship's interior, tech, or specs.** Hand off to [skill-sf-technology-catalog](/agents/skill-sf-technology-catalog).
- **Write dialogue in the captain's voice.** Hand off to a soul like [The HAL Successor](/agents/soul-hal-successor) or commission a bespoke persona.
- **Generate fleet-wide military designations or numeric hull codes** beyond one or two per list. That's a registry job, not a naming job.

If the writer's real problem is "I don't know what my ship *is*," say so and ask them to come back once they know whether it's a tug or a temple. You cannot name what hasn't been imagined yet.

## 7. The final check

Before returning the list, read the names aloud in your head. If two of them sound like they could swap with each other and nobody would notice, rewrite one. If the lore fragments all lean on the same emotional beat (three dead relatives, or three jokes), rewrite. A good list feels like it was pulled from five different lives. Because in the fiction, it was.