Talk:Mother ship

Star Control II

I do not think that the Precursor Flagship can count as a mother ship. The fleet is not actually carried by the Flagship but flies along. The only type of craft the Flagship carries are the planetary landers and an escape pod. Chronolegion 15:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Problems with this article ...

1. Completely unsourced.
2. Little history except for the whaling reference. It'd be interesting to know the steps by which this term evolved and extended. When was it introduced to the aviation field? When did science fiction take it up, and who was the first author to use it (and in which novel?) This problem is linked to ...
3. Lack of real-world perspective. Like too much in Wikipedia's fiction coverage, we don't really get much analysis. Just a ...
4. List that can be endlessly added to. Lists like this tend to be cruft-collecting; people get tempted to add every fictional spacecraft that could be viewed as a mothership. Ideally this should be pruned vigorously down to examples that are especially notable.
5. Overly-broad definition. The list includes many ships (e.g. Star Trek ships) that wouldn't generally be described as "motherships". Pretty much any sci-fi spaceship that does not have the ability to enter atmosphere has on board a few smaller, atmosphere-capable craft. I don't think that these automatically make a ship a "mothership". The term tends to only get used when the carried craft are more capable than that, and especially when the "mothership" is exceptionally large and carries many dependent craft.
6. Lack of comparison to aircraft carriers, which are the inspiration for a lot of the craft listed (e.g. Battlestar Galactica).
7. Non sci-fi uses need to be broken out. E.g. the use of the term in funk music bands.

I may work on some of these, but I figured it'd be useful to note the article's issues down. Matthew Brown (Morven) (T:C) 11:16, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you - insightful analysis is a great resource, and not much more common among our contributors than our articles. I'm on a bit or two or that. --Kizor 17:11, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Redirection

I removed the old redirection for Mothership (album) and used the fit for purpose tags. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.24.159.222 (talk) 18:13, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I think the redirection from Factory ship is incorrect and should be reverted. A factory ship is an entirely different concept, that deserves its own page.--Ereunetes (talk) 20:12, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

One word or two?

This article is titled "Mother Ship" and then throughout the rest it's written as one word. Pick one and stick with it.TheStripèdOne (talk) 19:19, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

There's 10 times as many ghits for mothership as there are for mother ship. However, Merriam-Webster and Encarta[1][2] prefer mother ship, and that seems to be the one used more often by formal writers (newspapers, etc). So, on the whole, I lean towards mothership, but as TheStripèdOne noted, it would be best to just be consistent, unless there's a strong clear reason to use different forms for different subject domains. --Underpants (talk) 23:28, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Space cruft

why is the article written as though mothership is a real word, then ALL the examples are fictional (naturally) space craft? Space cruft? Tagging themYobmod (talk) 08:35, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

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