From Henry Quirk:
What was the inspiration for the Hariven (its design)?
…and…
In-universe (in Eldrae-speak): what does ‘Hariven’ mean?
On the former — no specific inspiration, I’m afraid to say. I just designed the smallest possible viable freighter for the setting, then went through it to strip out all the awesomeness, and then again to make sure that it could be repaired by the interstellar-era equivalent of a shade-tree mechanic with a lump hammer and a roll of duct tape.
On the latter – absolutely nothing, I’m afraid. (It’s not an Imperial design, after all. It’s the sort of design that has Imperially-acculturated celestime architects summoning their chaises longue with severe fits of the vapors. The closest it comes to that is that its drive is a hack of an open-sourced Nucleodyne Thrust Applications design.)
Instead, it’s named after its designer, one Sev Harik Venn, of the League of Meridian, who figured he was designing a kit Citroën 2CV for the Expansion Regions and that the lawsuits probably wouldn’t get back as far as him. In that, he proved to be exactly right, retiring in the 5100s with a large pile of cash, a string of mistresses, and an eventual death from extreme lipidification of both livers.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2018/10/23/question-whats-in-a-name