System Naming?

[Seizewell Warrior]

Having just arrived in the "Eishat" system up on the Formorian Frontier, I started to muse on who actually devised these in game system names. Some are quite clever, albeit in this case rather crude, but presumably entirely fictional for the game and no relation to real astronomical naming conventions?!

 

[Nihila Vex]

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[moorison]

Some of the systems reflect real stars, being in roughly the right place, roughly the right type, approximately the right size, etc. Some of them are named, I think, on the basis of requests from early backers - I seem to recall station, NPC and body naming was a backer perk at certain levels during the Kickstarter. And some of them are algorithmic as in the original Elite 1984, where there were 8x255 stars with algorithmically generated names.

I forget exactly how Frontier: Elite 2 and First Encounters did it, but I know Pioneer - the unofficial, open-source First Encounters remake - generates actual names for every system rather than using ED's horrendous STRI-NG0-FG-AR-8A G-3 'system' for naming stars.

If I am not mistaken, the system names in Pioneer can repeat however. In the other games they (should) be unique.
It would have been better if all sector names could be a bit more memorable and distinct. There are groups of similar sounding sectors, the difference sometines only being one letter.

 

[varonica]

- generates actual names for every system rather than using ED's horrendous STRI-NG0-FG-AR-8A G-3 'system' for naming stars.

The thing with the "STRI-NG0-FG-AR-8A G-3" is that if you know how to interpret it you get vauable information about the system and its location in the galaxy, if they were all just named that information would not be available.