Naming of Stars

Rollo

R
I know there have been some discussions on this subject, but I didn't find any coherent thread.

In Frontier 2 they used a sort of procedural method of naming all stars that didn't have "proper" names.
Ackackgre, Essbaaq, Veefayq. Probably nice names if you wanted to believe in some strange mythology or alien presence, but once you scanned the outer reaches it all got extremely confusing and bland. The only thing that separated the star names were the length, from 5 to 9 characters aprox. and all too many were so similar it was impossible to remember them.

What I would want to see for E: D is a mix of all known naming systems and when that isn't enough, the rest can be procedurally named in some fashion.

  • Arabic names: e.g. Pollux, Rigel, Aldebaran etc.
  • Bayer designations: From the brightest in a constellation, e.g. Alpha Centauri and down, e.g. Beta Hydri etc.
  • Flamsteed designations: In order of right ascension, so 61 Cygni would indicate the 61th westernmost star in Cygnus
These systems are flawed and not very accurate anymore but I would still like to see all of them to be present in game. Also these naming systems should also be weighted in the above order so not to use the Bayer name for a star that already have an arabic name., e.g. Betelgeuse shouldn't be named Alpha Orionis.

As the above designations only exist for the brightest stars much of the rest should have their respective/or:
Yale Catalog of Bright Stars. (HRxxxx or BSxxxx).
The Henry Draper Catalog (HDxxxxxx)
The Durchmusterung catalogs (BD, CoD, CPD)
The SAO catalog (SAOxxxxxx)
The Hubble Space Telescope Guide Star Catalog (GSCxxxx yyyy)

I know there will be a massive number of boring "HR34567" etc. but I still prefer it to the "Ackackgre-brigade".
 

Voyager_NL

Voyager_NL
FD have already stated that they want to use known catalogs to base the galay upon... so it would be fair to assume that they will use the nemes from these catalogs for the more obscure/lesser known stars.
 

Darren Grey

Darren Grey
I'm guessing in the future many of those stars will be renamed though, since popping over to GD346277-B for some narcotics doesn't quite have the right ring to it.

A big problem for Frontier was lack of disc space to store information, so without that restriction they can have more hard-coded names and also bigger seed data for procedural names to ensure more variety.
 

Rollo

R
Darren Grey said:
I'm guessing in the future many of those stars will be renamed though, since popping over to GD346277-B for some narcotics doesn't quite have the right ring to it.
Click to expand...
I still think GD346277-B has a better ring to it than popping over to Essbaaq to make a deal. "Oh is that the place they have that great deal on Essbaaqian pastry?" "No, that's Essbaqq, 37 parsecs down the road to the left."
What's an Essbaaq anyway and who the h*** named it? What I'm saying is that no matter how good the procedural naming process will be there will be millions upon millions of silly names.

Or maybe it's just me, remembering numbers rather than silly names. Although good to hear that FD did state that they were going to use the catalogs. I'm content with that.
 

Flak

Flak
I wonder if some systems with have different names for different factions... The Alliance call a system EssBaaq, but The Federation call it EssBaqq. A bit like the English channel :D
 
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