Deep space naming convention
- Thread starter hoopy
- Start date
I am currently in a group named BLU THUA ..etc.etc, so this must have been a really blue Thursday in April? well It put a smile on my face.. 
Have a look at https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=150529 for some info on sector sizes and subdivisions.
Even if we can't reconstruct why a particular sector has a particular name, I'd like to know where they got the strange sounding words they use from. Some of the words repeat, as in "Prua Hypai", "Blaa Hypai" and "Gru Hypai". I'm not sure if there is a pattern, but all "Hypai"s I've seen so far were in the negative coordinates. Or maybe it is something from real astronomy after all?
There letter/number pattern should be logical and relatively easy to figure out.
Even if we can't reconstruct why a particular sector has a particular name, I'd like to know where they got the strange sounding words they use from. Some of the words repeat, as in "Prua Hypai", "Blaa Hypai" and "Gru Hypai". I'm not sure if there is a pattern, but all "Hypai"s I've seen so far were in the negative coordinates. Or maybe it is something from real astronomy after all?
There letter/number pattern should be logical and relatively easy to figure out.
As I understand it: the galaxy is divided into regular cubes on three planes - "up", "centre", "down"; there are lists of prefixes and lists of suffixes and they progress in order vertically and horizontally, but there are occasional breaks in the pattern where it switches to another set of lists. If you look at enough of them you can see where the pattern repeats. I just couldn't be bothered to scan through the entire galaxy map to write them all down.
Where there are hand-placed sectors (e.g. Col 359) those sectors overwrite the proc-gen ones.
Where there are hand-placed sectors (e.g. Col 359) those sectors overwrite the proc-gen ones.
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I don't think it's to do with cubes. I think it's to do with the naming algorithm they've used to generate a unique name for 400 billion systems. The pattern is like this:
[word] [word] xx-x x###-### where x is a letter and # is a digit. So each [word] [word] can (and probably does) have 45697600000 different systems. Which means there needs to be just under 10,000 different [word] [word] combinations. Words are generated using vaguely pronounceable syllables like [consonants]+[vowels] e.g. [bl][aea] etc.
So likelyhood is that each [word] [word] has that 45697600000 different systems. Maybe some will have less, don't quite know how they've decided to go about it, but it's all down to making enough unique names for all 400 billion systems.
[word] [word] xx-x x###-### where x is a letter and # is a digit. So each [word] [word] can (and probably does) have 45697600000 different systems. Which means there needs to be just under 10,000 different [word] [word] combinations. Words are generated using vaguely pronounceable syllables like [consonants]+[vowels] e.g. [bl][aea] etc.
So likelyhood is that each [word] [word] has that 45697600000 different systems. Maybe some will have less, don't quite know how they've decided to go about it, but it's all down to making enough unique names for all 400 billion systems.
They are in neat cubes, except for the hand-placed sectors. Move the pointer a long way from civilisation, zoom out to a high level and move along the galaxy map along one of the axes and you'll see. You can follow the lists along and find repeating patterns. If you like and find a sector called AlphaAlice, the next sector along will be AlphaBob, the next sector AlphaCharlie, then AlphaDave... and so on. Except that sometimes the pattern breaks and you see something like AlphaAlice, AlphaBob, Beta-MaxChuck, AlphaDave instead. Within each cube you get all the suffixes "AB-C" and, uh, sub-suffixes "a1-1." I haven't looked in detail as to how the placement of these suffixes relates to the overall position in the bigger cube of the sector, but they can be quite widely spaced IIRR.
An interesting thing for me is the correlation between AA-A suffixes and high-mass systems.
An interesting thing for me is the correlation between AA-A suffixes and high-mass systems.
Aaaah, the neutron star belt?
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Yeah I can confirm that. I flew right down the edge of one of the cubes and it looked like this:
It's pretty amazing, really! Aren't the laws of physics incredible?!
