In the Star Trek franchise the Federation had several classes of vessels, i.e. Miranda-class science vessels, Constitution-class cruisers, Exeter-class starships, Galaxy-class starships, etc.
Were there consistent rules for the naming of Star Fleet vessels in a fashion similar to military navies of today?
Are there any canon examples, samples, or publications which support the tradition?
Were such traditions followed by other space-faring species of the Alpha quadrant?
In the 70s, between TOS and the movies, the Star Fleet Technical Manual attempted to impose the notion of rational name assignments to Federation starships. Constitution Class ships were all named for famous Earth ships-of-the-line, for example; Dreadnoughts were all named for kinds of governments and agreements (Imperium, Federation, Concordat, Entente); etc.
Thing is, except for the Constitution Class itself, all the other ships types were invented whole-cloth by Franz Josef (although Roddenberry signed off on it at the time), and except for a brief background mention of the scout Columbia in TMP, they're never seen or heard from again, except that Reliant looks a little bit like Franz Josef's transport/tug design.
After that, the answer is pretty much, "no". Writers used whatever names seemed cool at the time. Sometimes they were in-jokes (Yamato is as much named for the anime space battleship as it is for the WWII battleship from which it's derived). Sometimes they were symbolic (Defiant NX-74205, which became a symbol for defiance of the Dominion). Other times, presumably, they just sounded good.
I remember a line from Deep Space 9, where Kira comments on such a great number of runabouts being destroyed throughout the series. It was something like "It's a good thing that Earth has so many rivers". This is referencing to the naming convention of runabouts being named after rivers. Shuttlecraft are also named after famous scientists. Those are the two conventions that I can think of off of the top of my head.
