I like the whole designation idea, because it’s really hard for me to process a list when all the names are truncated; since i like to keep my ships organized by race, they would all show up as [insert race name here] 
I think the smaller font looks great.
I would still enjoy it if there was a better way to select your ships than choosing from that long list of icons, but for now the names seems like a big improvement.
I think the designations are a pretty awesome idea. To help keep myself a bit organized I like many others place some qualifier names at the start.
Also, I will buy the new race :3 When does it come out?
Wheee lots of action here since I last looked.
Assuming we’re working within the context of a list of icons. . .
The name underneath seems OK, and would certainly help with six different versions of the same cruiser hull, at least for those who use a naming scheme that takes advantage of the X letters of text space. (I personally use a faction designation, like IMP or TRI followed by size designation CR or FRG followed by some sense of what the thing does, so the text-under-icon idea would be pretty useful without a lot of re-naming on my part.)
However, we seem to still have the case of the FRG taking up as much of the icon space as a CR, which means that disconcerting moment of moving a big-looking FRG icon into the deployment area and having it shrinky-dink down to some tiny size. If Cruisers and Frigates were represented according to the same visual scale, that would give a more accurate “feel” to the representation. Fighters remain a problem, though, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread, presenting them at scale size would make them flea-sized dots.
For fighters, then, they could be represented at a different consistent scale, but in outline only. This would allow for a 5 meter fighter to be half the size of a 10 meter fighter (no idea if there are such things, but you get the idea), but presented in outline would still be obviously a fighter and not a frigate or cruiser.
On the other hand, the icon-based deployment system may now be a victim of the game’s success. Many players are designing so many ships that the paradigm no longer makes sense. That is to say, if you design 3-5 versions of cruiser, frigate, and fighter, no problem. I bet there are people out there with dozens and dozens of designs–per faction–and it seems we may need a new UI paradigm to handle the load. Time to clone a certain computer game coder. . .
RC
Cheap designation trick. Everything after the ’ (single quote) is the designation.
Ship name:
Tribe Cruiser Freedom CL MK1’CL P EMP
And “CL P EMP” would show up under the icon.
Now that is a good idea!
It occurs to me that the reason everyone is naming ships with racename-classname-hullname-otherstuff instead of just the otherstuff part, is because we aren’t satisfied with the load design screen, am I right?
Currently the load design dialog has three columns: name, class, race. The default sort order is alphabetical by name, but you can click on class or race to sort on those fields with name as the secondary sort.
What if this screen had four columns: Race, Class, Hull, Name; with the default sort order being alphabetical by race, then by class within race, then by hull within each class, and finally by name? Would you name your ships differently?
I like Ramcat’s idea but will that still be user friendly and not confuse casual gamers (do we care about casual gamers?)
I’d like to name them with [race][class][specialty] and then put a 'designation on the end.
That way I can still sort them in ship load screen and still see the designation (without race) in the deployment screen.
But - I’m greedy. 