Just reporting back for a de-brief after patrol.
Couldn't help myself, I went ahead and modified the numerical suffixes in the 'old' list part of the englishnames.cfg - I added my 'Z' to anything with a number.
Had to go all the way to my patrol zone at AM34 before I encountered ANY ships (they must have heard The Terror of the Seas had put to sea again). Anyway, the first one I encounter is a British Medium Merchant, designated in the Scope, Uzo, ESB Ident Book and the Kapitan's Log (after I sunk her) as, you guessed it, "Medium Merchant 20Z". That pretty well nails it for me.
The thing I remain curios about, is that if I remove all suffixes, will the ESB take you to THAT ship (as it did in this case), or will it take you to a sample of the generic class, and then you have to do a hunt from there among all the 'Medium Merchants' in the Book? (I suspect not - it feels a bit like cheating, though, to have the ESB do the work - but I'm not complaining - a bit of larceny is fun.
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