Coulda been “Starlords”


I shouldn’t have laughed at the Space Force naming themselves “Guardians”. It turns out they requested submissions and we had a boaty-mcboatface situation. Take a look at the list if you’re looking for a laugh.

They could have been “Galaxians”, or “Celestians”, or “Trekkies”, or “Geeks”, or “Loonies”, or “Homo spaciens”, or “Wookies”, or “Stormtroopers”.

You know what? They were all silly. No matter what they choose, they were going to look ridiculous.

Comments

  1. komarov says

    I like stormtroopers. Incompetent troops commanded by an incompetent poltiician whose only skills were intrigue and propaganda. “Mobile Infantry” would have been interesting as a name, too. I would have liked to see what that did to recruitment numbers. “Sorry, what exactly would I be signing up for?”

  2. says

    This is just SO wrong. There should be two Es in Wookiee!

    Also, I propose Redshirts, regardless of what color the actual uniforms are. But they should be red.

  3. ospalh says

    I would a) have transferred the ICBM forces to them, PLARF & Strategic Rocket Forces style, and b) named them Rocketeers.
    Well, apart from abolishing ICBMs asap.

  4. Dan says

    I’m just glad they didn’t pick a name that’s gender specific like Sentrywoman or Starlord. It always gets so clunky when you have to switch back and forth or refer to a group.

    And anyone who contends that a gender specific title should be universal, you better be okay with referring to a group of males as Sentrywomen or Starladies. Proposing that only male specific titles are universal exposes your bias.

  5. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Stardusters “We are all stardust” Dusting the stars to keep them clean.
    howabout Jaffa

  6. PaulBC says

    Erlend Meyer@6 You beat me to it but I wondered too. I liked “nothing because you wouldn’t hear it in space anyway.”

  7. says

    Anything but “Astrogator”. Not only is it needlessly clumsy and pretentious, but Navis refers to vessel and not sea.

    I guess “Space Cadets” was way too obvious.

  8. microraptor says

    I think “this waste of everyone’s time ad money has been canceled” would have been the best name.

  9. Howard Brazee says

    Remember the play and movie “No Time For Sergeants”? The protagonist’s friend spent the movie wanting to be in the infantry the way his family always was. He didn’t like being in the Army Air Corps where they were called “airmen”!

  10. PaulBC says

    Susan Montgomery@9 Until you mentioned it, I would have thought it was a portmanteau with “alligator” not “navigator.”

  11. PaulBC says

    Spacebenders like in Avatar. I am too lazy to see if it’s there and I can’t get search to work on that document.

  12. unclefrogy says

    just what is their job anyway? What are their duties and purpose? Are they a space military, a space police force, the equivalent to the coast guard in space? Are they in charge of the science of launching government sponsored missions to space?
    it is all a muddle and would make much more sense if the budget was increasing but it is not though there is a lot of non-governmental experimental development going on. At the moment we are having a hard time just staying a live and functioning above survival level regardless of the stock-market
    uncle frogy.

  13. dontlikeusernames says

    The stupidity of the whole situation notwithstanding…

    I’ve always been a fan of the word ‘Solar’ (from D&D). You have to put the emphasis on the first syllable, so it would be ‘So-lar’. It’s just a beautiful word involving our own little (relatively) star.

  14. consciousness razor says

    We probably shouldn’t call them “Satan-worshiping Jewish Space Laser Specialists”…. It might give some folks the wrong idea.

  15. wzrd1 says

    Well, they could’ve simply kept with keeping the name accurate with their reality.
    Budget Blasters.
    Because, everything military and especially military aerospace is expensive. Even their fenceline orbital radar is expensive and it’s a glorified fence line VHF radar unit. That is their biggest job, monitoring junk in orbit, operating the GPS birds and if memory serves, NRO birds.

  16. brightmoon says

    Lol , old old memory of a children’s tv host making a Mr Spaceman parody song of Johnny Cymbal’s old hit Mr Bassman. Don’t remember whether it was Sonny Fox or Sandy Becker

  17. birgerjohansson says

    As I recall, “The Restaurant At the End Of The Universe” had a force called “Frogstar Fighters”.
    And then we have the M-force protecting us from Godzilla et al.
    Finally, the various forces from Doctor Who: Cybermen, Daleks and a bajillion others.

  18. Duckbilled Platypus says

    Nobody suggested Major Tom? Seems the most appropriate given that the whole enterprise sounds like a narcotically inspired pipe dream…

  19. stroppy says

    Ok now you’ve done it, gone and sparked a neuron.

    The Holy Modal Rounders
    “Mr. Space man”
    Appropriately weird, funky, drugged and off the wall for the occasion.

  20. PaulBC says

    I always like “Science Patrol” from Ultraman. I had no idea they had orange uniforms at the time, since I was watching on a B/W TV.

    They were kinda useless though, at least against the weekly monster attack. Maybe they were more effective in their other responsibilities.

  21. davidc1 says

    Is this bollox still happening ? I thought it would have been one of the first things President Biden would have scrapped .

  22. Duckbilled Platypus says

    @37 stroppy Didn’t know them, and now I do. Very fitting anthem for the new space force.

  23. says

    How not to do democracy

    Don’t ask people to vote on purely ceremonial questions. HS student govt, for example, is an institution with the laudable goal of introducing students to the forms and practices of democracy, but allowing them to choose only for purely ceremonial positions. Well, what we see is that after an interval of dutifully voting for earnest strivers to be class president, at some point the student body is going to get understandably sick of those earnest strivers, and since Student Body President can’t really create real damage, they will vote in a joke candidate.

    This dynamic is what got us the name of “guardians” for the members of the space force, because of course the space force is about as meaningful as student govt. More importantly, this dynamic is what got us Trump as president. Generations of messaging instead of ideology has many of us convinced that US govt is as meaningless as student govt, so why not vote for Trump as a joke, protest, candidate?