So, I was playing TOA last night, and it occured to me that in at least one other 4x space game, you have the ability to name your ships when they are built/launched.
In the later game, this isn't as big of a deal, but in the early game, when you have say less than a dozen ships, some of those being on long range scouting missions, well it'd be nice to be able to identify with them as other than scout ship #3...
Sure, colony ships will probably go unnoticed, i.e. galactic transport #3, but even then, this might be an interesting way to identify where a ship is going when you are scrolling through the shiplist, i.e. Colony Ship Vega 3 instead of just Colony Ship 3.
Plus the game could always default to ship # 3, 8 or whatever, if you can't be bothered. Or perhaps there is a generic list of names, maybe even broken down by size, that players/designers simply add to the game folder, and the game assigns those names to ships in some fashion.
It's a small personal touch, but in the Ascendancy I name ships after their star of origin often, especially the huge ones...