Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "IJN Taiho - Always Train Your Crew" video.
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Japanese ship naming conventions are atrocious. I don't remember if it was Shokaku or Zuikaku, but one of those names means "auspicious crane". That's a horrid name. A lot of the other ships have kinda faggy sounding poetic names along those lines. Then again, we're talking about the nation which builds what amounts to a suicide cruise missile and names it ohka, or "cherry blossom" Yeah. Put a rocket motor and wings on a 2000lb bomb, add a pilot, and then name the thing after a pink flower. Only in Japan.
The British are the best in the world at naming ships, hands down. This was true in WWII and today. The most appropriately named naval vessel in the world is the Vanguard class missile submarine HMS Vengeance - the perfect name for a second strike doomsday weapon. The latest Royal Navy carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, seem to have missed out on this tradition of solid names, and gone for the more pedestrian "name ships after people" route, which is a bit of a shame.
The US Navy had one carrier with a Royal Navy-style name, that was still the best we've ever used - USS Intrepid. Far better than the usual American naval tradition of naming carriers after people. Intrepid was apparently a bad luck ship, and is now a museum in New York, that I visited several times as a child. Enterprise is a US Navy legacy name which keeps popping up, and isn't bad (CVN-80, a Ford class carrier under construction now, is slated to be named Enterprise, the third carrier by that name), but the British are better at the whole concept of naming naval vessels than the US is. Our WWII submarines named after fish thing was kinda cool sometimes (USS Barracuda is a cool name. USS Pogy is not), but we seem to have gotten away from that and gone to the boring "name ships after places" model.
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