I have a phobia about naming of parts of an object due to my Flightsim experience in designing.
For example in flightsim designing it is crucial that parts be named correctly like elevator and not wingflap. If you compile the model to another format the names must be according to a protocol to get the animations correct.

How do you name the different parts of a design? A model may have several different parts. I can not figure it out.

 Don't worry about it too much, name the parts as you know them to be and others understand.

Coming from an engineering background I tend to know what the 'proper' names are of the models I do most of the time but sometimes it's just easier to name them something with a logical but simpler name. i.e. left and right instead of port and starboard etc. As long as most people can understand what they are supposed to be, no-one's going to worry too much. It's really down to how you want to do it.

I know also how fanatical flight simmers can be. Constant arguments about flight characteristics, cannon effectiveness, climb rates etc.........      It's a game people...... lol

If  your parts are all separate objects, you can rename them in the buttons window.  Meshes are reusable and can be named separately from objects, which are individual instances of a mesh.  If they are not separate, you will need to separate them or use [vertex groups.](http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Vertex_Groups)

As an aside, how do you use the Mesh name. I always rename the mesh name to the object name but haven't  managed to locate anything in the Wiki that tells you how to use it.

Also can you export the object without * *the mesh name attaching to it?

I was working on something a while back that had a bunch of different leaves in it, but they didn't all need to be unique.  I had a few different leaf meshes that created an absolutely huge file that ran pretty slowly when duplicated a bunch of times, but having all the objects link to one of the original 3 or 4 meshes worked much better.  So I had meshes named leaf1 through leaf4 or something like that, each of which had several hundred objects linked to it, and the objects were something like leaf1_1 through however many there were for each type.

I think some of the exporters do let you change how things are named, but I'm not sure.