Been playing the game since Beta and haven't really thought about it until now!
What does HIPP and HD represent with a star?
- Thread starter stocko1111
- Start date
These are designations by different real-life catalogues.
Ian Phillips
Volunteer Moderator
The star catalogues that were used to source the names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue
Cool, thanks all!
Would I be correct in assuming that these have been 'hand placed' by FD then and not randomly generated?
Designations for stars beginning with HIP are from the Hipparcos catalogue and those beginning HD are from the Henry Draper catalogue. The Hipparcos mission's objective was to measure the parallaxes of tens of thousands of stars to provide definitive distance measurements, work now being done for more than a billion stars by the Gaia mission. One of the reasons influencing the choice of which real stars to include in the game was the presence of good distance measurements, not just brightness, but the properties of named systems are not necessarily a match to their real-life counterparts (e.g. Beta Lyrae is not a binary in ED, unfortunately).
THe ones with real names taken from real catalogs were hand-placed, most with their real known attributes. That's why there are so many famous real stars in the game, in their real location.
The "real world" stars, just like the named "real world" nebulae, are hand-crafted and hand-placed, inserted as additions onto the procedurally-generated galaxy. We're told there are about 100,000 such hand-crafted systems.
By "hand-crafted", we don't necessarily mean someone has meticulously sat there for hours designing each system. For most of these "hand-crafted" systems, the vital statistics (star class(es), direction and distance from Sol) were simply copy-and-pasted from the raw data provided by the star cataloguers; this is perhaps most noticeable in the "star beams" around certain nebulae, which in ED seem to have "rays" of bright stars pointing towards Earth. In most cases (particularly the ones outside the Bubble far away from Sol), for any planets such stars might or might not have, they have had their own procedural-generation script run for them.
For example, the 17 Draconis system. The three star types were copied from catalogue data, but the planets in it were originally procedurally-generated. The star forge just happened to generate an Earth-like moon in orbit around a gas giant, so FD "locked in" the system data with further hand-crafting of a space station around the Earth-like and giving each planet a name.
One notable feature of the ED galaxy is that the people responsible for hand-crafting the stars and nebulae were apparently two different teams. Because there are stars closely associated with certain nebulae in real life - the nebulae would not exist, or would not be visible, without those stars - yet in ED those stars and nebulae have been placed quite distant from each other. Two notable examples I've seen are the Gamma Cassiopeiae / LBN 623 and Eta Carinae / Eta Carina Nebula associations: in real life, they are right next to each other (within a few light-years at most), but in ED, they are hundreds or even thousands of LY apart. The star cataloguers and nebula cataloguers obviously had different opinions on the distance!
By "hand-crafted", we don't necessarily mean someone has meticulously sat there for hours designing each system. For most of these "hand-crafted" systems, the vital statistics (star class(es), direction and distance from Sol) were simply copy-and-pasted from the raw data provided by the star cataloguers; this is perhaps most noticeable in the "star beams" around certain nebulae, which in ED seem to have "rays" of bright stars pointing towards Earth. In most cases (particularly the ones outside the Bubble far away from Sol), for any planets such stars might or might not have, they have had their own procedural-generation script run for them.
For example, the 17 Draconis system. The three star types were copied from catalogue data, but the planets in it were originally procedurally-generated. The star forge just happened to generate an Earth-like moon in orbit around a gas giant, so FD "locked in" the system data with further hand-crafting of a space station around the Earth-like and giving each planet a name.
One notable feature of the ED galaxy is that the people responsible for hand-crafting the stars and nebulae were apparently two different teams. Because there are stars closely associated with certain nebulae in real life - the nebulae would not exist, or would not be visible, without those stars - yet in ED those stars and nebulae have been placed quite distant from each other. Two notable examples I've seen are the Gamma Cassiopeiae / LBN 623 and Eta Carinae / Eta Carina Nebula associations: in real life, they are right next to each other (within a few light-years at most), but in ED, they are hundreds or even thousands of LY apart. The star cataloguers and nebula cataloguers obviously had different opinions on the distance!