Star system name - star class relationship

[c64orinoco]

Maybe it's just the sector I am in, but I have noticed I can pick what type of primary star a system has just from the name. The suffix gives it away: where I am, MS-U F2-nnn systems all have either Black Holes or B0Vs as primaries.

This makes navigation very easy, if you are trying to only find Black Holes; you don't have to spot them on the map.

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

[Kancro Vantas]

Can you elaborate on the details? You are mentioning that the Suffix gives away the type of stars, but then your example stops at the suffix and middle of the name. MS-U F2 tells us nothing about the nnn that follows and that is the object of your comment.

 

[Ziljan]

Can you elaborate on the details? You are mentioning that the Suffix gives away the type of stars, but then your example stops at the suffix and middle of the name. MS-U F2 tells us nothing about the nnn that follows and that is the object of your comment.

Yeah I noticed that too. Fishing for info/confirmation without really giving any in return (and yet almost seeming to be informative)? You'd make a good spy OP

But seriously, unless I am out of the loop on certain sectors, I thought the numeric suffixes were unique catalog numbers? So did you really mean "prefix"? In which case, yeah, there are trends for certain catalogs, but I don't think it's any kind of guarantee.

 

[kpmop]

...MS-U F2 tells us nothing about the nnn that follows and that is the object of your comment.

I took it to mean that the "MS-U F2" was the significant bit with the nnn just being any number. I kind of assumed those types of star names meant something, but not managed to work it out. Maybe I should start paying more attention...

 

[Allitnil]

Yes, just like AA-A has the most unusual / interesting stars in the sector and EG-Y often have black holes or neutron stars. At one time I hunted down AM-D D12 systems because they seemed to have more ELWs than normal although I ended up concluding that it was just that in the sector I was in they were always A, F or G stars.

Whatever the procedural generation formula actually is, it clearly doesn't just assign random stars to random system names. There's a combination of where you are in the galaxy, density of systems (which maybe is just related to where you are) and the system name that limits what the primary stars in each system can be.

 

[c64orinoco]

I am being coy because I don't want to reveal the name of a lucrative sector!

Suffice to say: its near the Core.

Assuming the format is:

Sector_name AA-A Bn-nnn

Where A, B are any alphas, and n is any integer 0-1

Then in the sector I am exploring, any system of the form:

Sector_name MS-U F2-nnn

Contains either a BH or B0V as the primary.

Clearly there is some kind of relationship between these letters and the system generation algorithm.

 

[c64orinoco]

Thinking about it, this is entirely logical - FD haven't hard-coded a 400 billion entry lookup table, they just use a list of names - several thousand - assigned to sectors, and given an algorithm 'weighting' based on an age/density (maybe H-R?) model of the Galaxy.

The system 'number plate' is all you need to know to generate the system - the seed for the procedural generator.

I suspect conversion to hex / binary will provide more detail!

What does this mean? FD could 'inject' new systems very easily...