Thanks, Galen. Yes, they are all weapons or weapon-related. Longinus was the name of the soldier who reported;y pierced the side of Jesus on the cross, hence the "Spear of Longinus". The gladius is a short Roman sword that more or less shares a silhouette with my frigate. A shamshir is a Persian variant of the scimitar, hence the ship name. And the Gae Bolga was the ultimate weapon of the Celtic hero Cúchulainn, sort of like a spear, but it would enter a man through one path and exit via 30, making it a messy sort of trick to pull off. In any case, it kicked a lot of ass. The rest I'll just assume are obvious to most people.
Dsytopic -
Wikipedia has a pretty good breakdown of different naval ship classes through the centuries. For the purposes of GalCiv, I like to divide them across the hull types like so:
Tiny: Satellites, drones, fighters
Small: Frigates, corvettes, corsairs
Medium: Cruisers, destroyers
Large: Battleships, battlecruisers
Huge: Dreadnoughts, carriers, miscellaneous big things
Although convention dictates classifying ships by things like length, displacement, or armament, you learn quickly from history that you can pretty much call ships whatever seems appropriate for the age.
It's usually more satisfying to name a ship after its role than its hull. For example, corvettes were typically short range coastal ships, so that would be good for a ship you intended to park in a defensive orbit. Frigates, on the other hand, are a more generic escort ship. Cruisers are for "force projection," or sticking your nose out into enemy territory. Battlecruisers are closer to a battleship, but faster and less heavily armored. Once you get larger than a battleship, you can apply whatever fun names you like, since we have no real modern day analog for huge hulls other than carriers.
To mix things up, I also like to scale ship classes up and down with a "light" and "super" prefix. So you could see a small hull "light destroyer" or large hull "light carrier" or a huge "super battleship".
Wow, seriously, upload your images to the libary man. I'd love to have half of those ships.
