Captain

A captain was, conventionally, a senior commanding officer or otherwise appointed individual commander of a spacecraft, a manned spaceship. As a title, the term captain appeared commonly throughout various human factions and societies.

Variations of the term's use

Ultranauts tended to have a more informal appointment of captains and the titles for captains tended to vary from crew to crew, but their captains were generally referred to as such.

Due to their political ideology preferring non-militaristic sounding terms for various military ranks, the Demarchists of Yellowstone often prefered to use the term "shipmaster" to denote the captain of a military spacecraft, instead of simply using "captain". This also made their use of "shipmaster" different from its more common use among Ultranauts and other groups (where that term was more often used for a chief engineer equivalent).

Notable ship captains

Demarchists

Known Demarchists who were referred to as captains (even if just informally).

• Pell (Panoply employee, cruiser pilot often titled "captain")

Ultranauts

Ultranaut captains and their home lighthugger vessels.

• Rauma Bernsdottir (Equinoctial)
• John Brannigan (Nostalgia for Infinity)
• Irravel Veda (Hirondelle)
• Rafe Van Ness (Petronel)
• Voulage (Cockatrice)
• Forqueray (Apollyon)
• Queen Jasmina (Gnostic Ascension)
• Orcagna (Orvieto)
• Heckel (Third Gazometric)
• Basquiat (Bride of the Wind)

Flotilla colonists

Captains of the fleet of generation ships used for the colonisation of Sky's Edge.

• Balcazar (Santiago)
• Armesto (Brazilia)
• Zamudio (Palestine)
• Omdurman (Baghdad)
• Khan (Islamabad)

Notes

• Historically, the term "captain" originated as a land-based military rank (lit. "headman", "hetman") and only became associated with naval terminology with the diversification and expansion of naval warfare. Before that, the term "shipmaster" (at least in English) was often used as the term for a ship's leader. After the growing commonality of "captain" for commanders of warships, the term shipmaster became a synonym for a "civilian captain", the commander of any ship other than a warship.
• Related to the above, the Demarchist use of "shipmaster" seems either intentionally synonymic, or harkening back to the older meaning (i.e. a generic, non-military term for a ship captain), precisely to avoid the connotation with the military etymology of "captain". In the Demarchist military's use, "shipmaster" thus works as a sort of euphemism for a warship's captain.