What's in a name

…or how to try and name things in a procedural world.

Automated naming

The naming of systems, stars, planets and satellites has to be automated; read: procedural. More or less join the following:

1. GC: for "Galactic census"
2. x: in light years
3. y: in light years
4. z: in light years

…and you obtain the name of a system; also by extension of a star. I chose to follow the Henry Draper Catalogue numbering system. Although…...somewhat only, as the prefix is not HD :-).

So, to get a planet's name, simply add the ordered index of the planet expressed as a letter starting from b. As per the Henry Draper Catalogue, the letter a is reserved for the star.
The first planet gets b, the second one c and so forth.

For satellites, it's even simpler: finish by adding the index of the satellite to the parent planet's name. So planet GC.1.2.3 b's second satellite's code is: GC.1.2.3 b1.

What about negative system coordinates?

I was worried about them at first, but I think they actually look cool and scientific-y. Not to mention that a human can actually understand them:

• GC.103.-32.13
• GC.-134.200.-45

Where it is effortless to mentally extract the coordinates of the star from the name.

Name collisions

Should normally be ok? The obvious trick in the above examples is the addition of . separators which I hope will prevent any collision from happening. And it still looks nice. :-)

It does not garantee absence of collisions, though, as two or more stars may end up having the same rounded light year coordinates in all three dimensions. It is a small chance, but it exists nonetheless. Mmmmmm

Human naming

The naming of systems by humans will of course have its place! Who would not want to see a star named as "New Hope" or "Land's End"?!

The idea feels natural in terms of features - because it is. But it also is the first hint of the meeting of two worlds:

• The procedural world
• The manually crafted world

This raises many questions about how to merge two data sources of extremely different origins and nature, which I hope to cover in one or more future posts.

Not set in stone

This current naming scheme is bound to change. For one, it does not say which galaxy are we talking about and assumes the same naming convention for all galaxies. In a world where we might want to have, say, a large central galaxy and several dwarf galaxies orbiting it (such as for the Milky Way), this is a problem.