"wanted to know if it was feasible to do this, regardless of how unnecessarily difficult it may be."
It is certainly feasible, as Paolo's answer shows you, but designing your code like this will force you into writing slow, complex, buggy code:
You would be much better off using the fields of a structure, or simple, efficient indexing with a cell array, or a table, or any of the other efficient ways to store data. For example, much more efficient would be a simple cell array:
C{end+1} = input('Name of the ship: ','s');
now you have a list of all of them in C. Having the data in one array makes it easy to process the whole list, making it simple to loop over them, or, for example, to find out if a particular ship is included:
strcmp(C,'Orange')
Or you might use fields of a structure:
fld = input('Name of the ship: ','s');
S.(fld) = ... your data...
Possibly the best data format for your data would be a table: then you could easily store the ship name and other related data, and use all of the convenient tools that tables support for analyzing your data.
By designing your data better, you can make your code much simpler and more efficient. What you are doing will force you into writing slow, complex, buggy code. What you are doing means that you cannot use all of the MATLAB tools that operate on arrays/tables, like my simple example shows, because your data is not in one array but is spread around lots of separate variables. This is a really inefficient use of MATLAB.
You should change your data design.
