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Why are there still so many unnamed planets (and systems)?
- Thread starter Bobsy
- Start date
Well, about 100 times harder than you think as there are 400,000,000,000 systems IIRCNot naming all 4,000,000,000 systems and the multitude of planets and moons with individual names is just pure laziness on the part of FD. As a paying customer I expect better.
Pull your sock up FD. Like seriously, how hard can it be.
... and only 171,000 words in the English language.
Anyway - I'm off to visit Horse Battery Staple - anyone coming?
Fdev need their own version of that Astronomical Society wotsit.
Got 750£ 900$ 0.02Bcoin? Name that station baby!
Then you get to wait 12 months while they decide whether to go ahead with "Faking Sockcooker Port"
Got 750£ 900$ 0.02Bcoin? Name that station baby!
Then you get to wait 12 months while they decide whether to go ahead with "Faking Sockcooker Port"
This is such a good post. Well done.Some planets in ED inherited hand-made names from the prequel games. The Earth-like planets in Eta Cassiopeia, for example; Eta Cassiopeia was a hand-crafted system and its three Earth-like worlds are Trojan, Feynman, and the moon Navy Central where the Federal Navy has a major fleet base.
Some planets in ED inherited names from the prequel games that were procedurally-generated by the old name-generator algorithms. In FE2/FFE, All Earth-like planets had names generated from a (relatively small) possible picklist, and many of these names were copied across to ED. Which is why in ED there are two planets named "New Africa", two planets named "Conversion", and four planets named "New California". ED does not have a similar procedural name-generator, apart from the generic system-name planet-number.
Some planets were named by FDev, just for ED, and just on a whim of the developers. I'm pretty sure the planet Birmingham, in the Gurney Slade system, was named by FD, as Sir DB is noted to be a fan of obscure British 1960s and 1970s TV and radio comedy show, including The Strange World of Gurney Slade.
Finally, some worlds were named by Kickstarter backers, If you gave more than £750, you bought the right to name one Earth-like planet, as well as the space station orbiting that planet (space station naming was awarded at the £500 level). We can see numerous of these systems, such as Calhuacan (Stapled Peacock Flesh / Dearden-Salter One), Jotunheim (Daisy / Big Harry's Monkey Hangout) and Bast, with a backer who must have been a big fan of Tottenham Hotspurs (THFC-est1886 / Hart Station).
That still leaves an awful lot of planets without unique names. There were way too many of them for FD to manually create new names (there are 2743 Earth-like planets within 300 LY of Sol) and FD would have had to write an algorithm to search for them, since most of them are in procedurally-generated star systems. And I suspect it came down to running out of time to implement an Earthlike-planet-renaming algorithm before the game launched. Because I do agree with you. A planet that's been inhabited for over a thousand years, and is home to billions of people, is going to have a more imaginative name affixed to it than "Duamta 4". Especially in cases of multiple ELWs int he same system, where there'd be plenty of scope for confusion. Procyon has a record-breaking four inhabited Earth-liike planets in it. Their names? "Procyon B 4", "Procyon B 5", "Procyon B 6" and "Procyon B 7".
It's that "Kickstarter" one that's causing the backlog, however. ED can't simply say "We're accepting suggestions for new planet names, be the first to submit a name for a planet and it's yours, for free" when they charged their backers so much money for the same privilege. In the name of fairness, they can't really charge less than £750, and I doubt anyone would want to pay £750 now to rename a planet in a game that's seven years old. So all we have left is people occasionally "earning" the right to rename a planet, through a contest or some such.
My head-canon explanation is that there was debate among the first colonists as to what to call the planet, and they used the generic name as a temporary measure. But people never resolved the debate and the "temporary" name became permanent. That story might work for half a dozen planets, but not for the hundreds of them we actually see in ED. And definitely not for places like Procyon.
I would also have thought that the generation ships that launched for these colonies a thousand years ago would have had an attractive prospectus done up to attract colonists, and nothing attracts colonists more than a catchy, exotic-sounding name. You wanna see your grandkids colonize El Dorado? Sure. You wanna see them colonize Groombridge 1618 A 3? Maybe not so much.
