ELW Names

[Del Maximum]

I've always wondered what it would take to have some names for inhabited ELWs? I doubt that the at least 4 billion people living on Nemehi A 6 call it "A 6".
That is my characters home according to his backstory, so by necessity I have been filling out the worlds culture to some minor degrees, and have arrived at a name for the world. However A 6 was originally colonized I'll leave open, but at some point a large cohort of laborers were exported to the world by a meta national conglomerate that sourced their labor from their own homeworlds. This resulted in an interesting mix of Vietnamese, Australian and South Pacific Islander old earth stock, or the 1300 year descendants of those peoples. As an aside: I really want to go to a BBQ cookout on A 6, with those culinary traditions.
The people there came up with the name Wā Kāinga , Maori for 'distant home'. I think it's a beautiful name for an earthlike far from the oceans of earth. The same spirit that lead the ancient Polynesians to cross the seas for unseen islands lives on in the people of Wā Kāinga, and all other distant homes like it. Wherever people are.

I got a little off piste, there. My question is what would it take to get these places which are homes to billions to have more human names than "A 6"? Is this a pipe dream? I know stars get their names changed from time to time, but there are rare worlds outside of Sol system that have real names.

 

[Sapyx]

I do agree with you, that it seems ridiculous that a planet with billions of people on it, and likely having been colonized for hundreds of years, doesn't have a "proper name".

There are several sources of names for planets in the ED universe.

• Legacy names, given to planets in the prequel games. Planets like Lave (original 1984 Elite) and Peter's Eden in Arexack (FE2) had their names copied across. If the system made it into ED, then the legacy names were almost always copied over too.
• FD's own imagination. In the Gurney Slade system, we have the world called "Birmingham". It's fair to say that this is an FD derived name; Sir DB himself and numerous other founding staff were fans of 1970s British TV and Radio comedy, including a little-known TV show called "The strange world of Gurney Slade". I assume the reason that FD didn't go around assigning more names to planets is that they simply ran out of time before game launch. There are an awful lot of inhabited Earth-like planets in the Bubble (about 2000 of them, by my reckoning), and many more high-population non-Earth-like planets, in ED - many more than in the prequel games (in which every inhabited planet had a name procedurally assigned to it from a relatively short picklist of names).
• Kickstarter backers. In the original kickstarter scheme, donations up to a certain level earned you the right to name one planet. At a certain even higher level, you earned the right to name two planets. The planet "THFC-Est1882" in the Bast system was named by a backer who apparently was a great fan of the Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club.
• Memorials and other in-ED activities. This thread is about a planet given a name as a memorial to a terminally ill player placed in-game some time ago.

I assume it is that third one that is causing the problem. Some people paid £750 for the right to name a planet. Some of those people might be a bit miffed if other people are now simply given the right to name a planet, for free, or for a much lower fee.

Finally, if your proposed name were somehow accepted, ED does not support accent marks in star system and planet names. So you would have to make do with "Wa Kainga".

 

[GonzTheMalificent]

Renaming a settlement or spacestation should be the ultimate ARX prize.

 

[Del Maximum]

Ah, interesting. Yeah that kickstarter reward does seem like the complicating factor in this. I think it would be another little way to make the bubble's history more tangible, and puts things into perspective.
Im not sure that a flat ARX reward would be the best solution as I know that fdev takes care with lore control in the universe. It would probably just end up meaning more Dev resources diverted to managing in game content and world building. Like how when we submit PMF applications we need an in game lore description of our group, planet names could also require a similar thing?

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

It would be interesting if they added the ability to name them in a similar way to the way player factions are created. Make an application and have FD look over it to make sure it checks out. Ie.. make sure there are no overlapping names or they dont have future plans for that name or planet.