New Regions – Why not use the ones already established by the exploration community?
- Thread starter Corbin Moran
- Start date
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But someone might have to come up with a proposal where we name FDev's regions if they make it into the game as is.
But someone might have to come up with a proposal where we name FDev's regions if they make it into the game as is.
I have one good argument against it. "Galactic Aphelion", seriously?
It's the area opposite from Sol in Galactic co-ordinates. That is the more general meaning of the Greek word "aphelion": the more specific meaning in orbital mechanics is derived from that. So it's a wholly appropriate name.
What's your problem?
No, aphelion is specifically the highest point in the orbit around the Sun and my five-minute google search shows no sources confirming your hypothesis. The same search indicates that aphelion translates literally as "away from the sun". And while I really dislike almost all of those names, this is the only one (as far as I can see) that uses a word improperly.
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I like the names more than pure numbers
I like the names more than pure numbers
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You can't do better than weave the longstanding community work into the game.
You can't do better than weave the longstanding community work into the game.
Aphelion is specifically the farthest a body gets from the sun, the generic term for the farthest separation between any two orbiting bodies being apogee. The farthest from Sol you can get in the galaxy is the galactic aphelion, the usage is somewhat divorced from the original usage for orbital mechanics within the solar system but hardly egregiously so.
There is no usage more improper than your use of an adjective implying elevation rather than just distance.
In the orbit around the Sun. All examples of "aphelion" I can find refer to the point on the orbit around the Sun, it's the way Wikipedia describes it, it's the way dictionaries describe it, it's the way NASA uses it. If you search for "galactic aphelion" in quotes, all you get are Elite results, a Yahoo Answers question with one of the answers being "A galaxy doesn't have an aphelion, a perihelion, or an equinox", an EVE alliance and some bot-generated trash. While now I see you could technically translate the word literally and use that, I can't really find any uses of it in that context that aren't connected with Elite.
I'm afraid you're wrong, the generic term you're looking for is "apsis" or "apoapsis", "apogee" refers to the maximum distance the from Earth in an orbit around it.
Funny, I can find multiple references to objects in orbit around Earth having an altitude, once again including NASA web publications.
Whoops, you are correct there, I did indeed type the wrong word. *hangs head*
You're wrong everywhere else though. Nobody is suggesting that Galactic Aphelion was a thing before it was used by the GMP, it was a term coined for the GMP to take the existing meaning of aphelion and use it to name the region of the galaxy farthest from Sol. It is an appropriate usage, and I really don't see why you have such an issue with it.
There's only one meaning of aphelion in English (all of the definitions I could find mention orbits), the one you refer to exists only in Greek. So it's not an improper usage of the word, but a piece of gratuitous Greek that masquerades as an improper usage of an existing astronomical term? That's hardly any better.
Edit: One more thing I've just realized - "aphelion" translates from Greek as "away from the Sun", not "the furthest away from the Sun", notice the lack of the superlative in the former. Now not only it doesn't make sense when using the English definition, the usage of Greek term is pointless too, as every single point in the universe that isn't the Sun is "away from the sun".
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Jesus wept. Are you completely oblivious to how ridiculously petty you're looking right now?
Having the regions named would be better than just numbers. (Using both might be a good option as all localizations may not have good translations of the existing English names.) Some of the names might not fit well into graphics so then using the numbers might be more convenient.
Being able to have NPCs say "to look for <insert something cool here> out between the formadine rift and <insert region name here> region " rolls of the tongue much better than "look between sector 31 and 14". Easier to remember the names too vs the easily confused numbers.
Hopefully using the names is not some legal/ copyright issue as they were not generally developed/established by Fontier Dev etc.
Being able to have NPCs say "to look for <insert something cool here> out between the formadine rift and <insert region name here> region " rolls of the tongue much better than "look between sector 31 and 14". Easier to remember the names too vs the easily confused numbers.
Hopefully using the names is not some legal/ copyright issue as they were not generally developed/established by Fontier Dev etc.
You'll have to take that one up with Johannes Kepler, since he coined the term with the meaning "farthest from the sun." And it's even more gratuitous than you think, because the term isn't technically Greek. Kepler used the Modern Latin term "aphelium" (since he was writing in Latin, after all) - that then got changed to "aphelion" in English sometime around 1670 because the Greek ending sounded better.
As for the term "galactic aphelion" itself? Meh, it's not quite how the term is normally used, but it certainly doesn't bother me enough to argue about. Astronomers just talk about the galactic far side, but that's a bit less specific-sounding than you want for a regional place name. I suppose you could call it the Antipode, although that's also wrong since you're importing a term from spherical geometry. So I dunno, if you can come up with a clearly superior term you might get some traction if you started a conversation about it over in the GMP threads. Nitpicking here doesn't seem like it will be terribly productive though.