On Fri, 7 Feb 2025 15:08:05 -0000 (UTC),
jdnicoll@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote in <vo57kl$hfg$
1@reader2.panix.com>:
The Treacherous Business of Naming Stars in SF
Incorporating stellar nomenclature into fiction can be a wild ride.
https://reactormag.com/the-treacherous-business-of-naming-stars-in-sf/
My ears perked up when I saw "Achernar" -- very close to "Achenar", the
capital of the Empire in _Elite Dangerous_.
A word on that: since the game is (tries to be) a 1:1 representation
of the Milky Way, there's a lot of stars that just have catalogue numbers.
(If even that.)
This results in some factions in the game being named after a star's
catalogue number, such as (in the Ross 154 system), "Independents of Ross
154", "Ross 154 Vision Partners", and "Ross 154 Group", to name a few.
Some systems end up with proper names, such as our player group base, "Balones", and many factions there bear the system name. Not too far from Sigma Andromedae, which has the same slathering of faction names with
"Sigma Andromedae" in the name. "Sigma Andromedae United" and "Sigma Andromedae Blue Party" are two of them.
Meanwhile, almost all of the stars in the game's Milky Way haven't
even been visited yet. Further off, where stars don't have catalogue
numbers, they are named by sector, position, and type, such as (one
at random) "Eorm Aod XR-V c2-3". "Dr. Kay" is the astrophysicist-turned- programmer that gave us this galaxy, and we are in her debt...I daresay
it is the most ambitious "sandbox game" to date.
Finally, a bit of trivia, which may be "scientifically-controversial": at
the extreme edge of the Solar System, in game, is a 2G world,
Persephone. While there's ideas about it actually existing, there's
no such known body out there...so far...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
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