Whilst compiling the ship listing, it occured to me that there should be some sort of system for working out the registry numbers of Commonwealth spacecraft. I managed to draw up three theories concerning this matter:

1 - The Commonwealth simply number their ships in the order in which they're commissioned (e.g. the ship commissioned before the Dreadnaught would have had the registry number CNV-300). However, the registry number of the Terrible is CNV-9228, which would suggest that the Commonwealth has over nine thousand ships, whereas President King states during the intro movie that Fleet-Admiral Hanson has 'over three thousand ships at her command.' Even given piracy and other matters, a difference of six thousand is still difficult to explain.

2 - Each ship class has its own registry initial (e.g. Dreadnaught-class ships begin with a 3). This fails because there are ships beginning with 8s and 9s and we only know of six naval vessel classes. Remember that transports are not counted as naval vessels and C-Fighters do not have registry numbers).

3 - The third theory is the one that I'm going with. Assuming that Commonwealth vessels are constructed at more than one shipyard, each reigstry number begins with a numeric identifier of the shipyard. Each registry number must be at least three digits long, the first being the shipyard's ident number followed by the total number of vessels built there so far. Obviously, this would mean that the Dreadnaught was the first ship to be built at shipyard number 3 (hence the registry 301). There are a couple of problems with this theory, but they can, just about, be ironed out:

• Ships with only two digits in their registry number: I conjecture that, at first, the main shipyard had an ident number of 0, which was not put in front of the other two digits. This was later changed and, therefore, all Commonwealth vessels with a registry number with the structure CNV-** are very old ships.
• Say, for example, that the shipyard where the Dreadnaught was built builds 101 ships, this would mean that the latest ship had the registry number CNV-3101. Obviously, this would clash with the first ship to be built in shipyard number 31. To get around this problem, an extra 0 can be added in between the shipyard's ident number and the vessel's own ID, making it CNV-30101. This, of course, clashes with the one-hundred-and-first ship was shipyard number 30, so another 0 must be added, making the registry CNV-300101. Of course, we don't know how many shipyards there are, but I conjecture the total is no more than about twenty-five, so this particular example problem would never be encountered.

Thanks to some help from Particle Systems, I've noticed that some of the vessels have the registry number prefix CC instead of the standard CNV. Presumably this is to differentiate between cargo vessels and normal naval ships. Because of this, a lot of the registry numbers in the ship listing have been updated. I assume that CNV stands for Commonwealth Naval Vessel (in fact there's numerous pieces of evidence in the game for this), whilst CC either stands for Cargo Carrier or Commonwealth Cargo - which would help distinguish them from neutral cargo ships.

If anyone has any other theories, or problems with the current ones, please e-mail me at:
GarethHall@compuserve.com