Direphoenix summed it up - there's never more than one Enterprise NCC-1701 in active service at any one time, or any other name/registry. The -A/-B/-C etc. suffixes are purely to denote which ship of that name it is - not to differentiate between several active ships.

So yeah - if you've got a ship called the 'USS-Spacemonkey, NCC-90210', and want to call your new ship the 'USS-Spacemonkey, NCC-90210-A', you've got to either re-name or decommission the older ship, as it's impossible to have two ships share the same designation (remember that the -A suffix doesn't count as part of the registry, as doesn't using the 'NX' prefix instead of the 'NCC').

Two problems with this;

1. It costs in-game funds to continually rename your ship. Only the first rename is free, so anyone who changes ships often is shelling out funds for it.
2. NPCs in the game will refer to your ship name. If you decide not to rename ships, the NPC chat will show as "Renown-BETA" instead of just "Renown". That can be immersion breaking.

I guess I will have to check my ships when I log back into the game on Thursday, because I DO have my ships named "***-A" and "***-B". If I recall correctly, I was even able to use the suffix letter on the registry number according to canon. I ALMOST guarantee that I'm right...I won't be back in-game until then, so for now I'm only "almost certain".

EDIT: Now that I made it all the way through the posts, I am doing it the way suggested above, by adding the letter to both the name AND the registry number. Sorry...that's what I get for posting before completely reading.

You can certainly name your ships that way.

The point people were trying to make is that it's not canon to add the suffix to the name. Only the registry.

Yeah, I figured that out after I read the WHOLE thread...LOL

You can do this, there is a box on the rename screen where you can add a letter to the registry. But you still have to rename or decommission your original starship because you can't have two ships (or two BO's) with the same name under the same character... Which is pretty much to canon, there has never been a case where 2 ships of the same name has been in active service at the same time.

Yep. I didn't dispute any of that.

Couldn't you make the letter part of the name, internally?

So the ship is stored as "Enterprise-D".

But the "-D" only displays in certain contexts.

I believe it costs merits, not EC to change a ship name. Simply lower the merit costs of changing a ship's name; either across the board or by tier. Merits are dear to a low level character and he probably can't afford to rename each ship as he ranks up but merits become trivial at the top rank. For now, making it easier for lower level characters to rename their old ships lets them keep them and still keep their favorite name for their new ship. The "real" ship name should be your top level one because that's the one you don't grow out of like the lower tier ships. I quit using my favorite names on my Miranda because I couldn't afford the merits to rename them 20 hours of gameplay later when I got my tier 2 ship. Making it much easier to rename the lower level ships would be an easy fix for the problem, at least until they decide to add the registry to the ship's name for game purposes.