About planet names
Gentle coinages like "Kothomia" and "Bololara" share the list with registry tags such as "zorth Q6SQ", splitting the output between settled worlds and surveyed rock. The alphanumeric forms suit charts and logs for systems no one has landed on. Give colonized planets the vowel heavy names and leave the codes for places without a flag.
How planet names are built
Planet names fuse eight small phoneme banks in several templates, including a designation form that builds a short name and appends a four-character code. So the engine coins Colorkanna and Mapolos as bare names, and Zendriss Q6SQ or Bennova 3B15 with a code suffix.
Colorkanna
c+o+l+orkanna (phoneme fragments concatenated in sequence)
Zendriss Q6SQ
z+endriss (opening letter plus name body) + Q6SQ (four-character code)
Bennova 3B15
b+ennova (opening letter plus name body) + 3B15 (four-character code)
Naming notes
The banks are small (from 5 entries up to 52), concatenated to form pronounceable coinages. The designation template draws four tokens from a 46-entry code bank to build a code like Q6SQ. Use the bare names for storied planets and the coded ones for catalogued bodies. Good for a space-opera setting or a star-map of unexplored worlds.
Questions about planet names
- Why do some planet names end in codes like Q6SQ?
- A designation template appends four tokens from a 46-entry code bank as an alphanumeric code. Use those for catalogued planets and the bare names for storied ones.
- Are the names pronounceable?
- Mostly. The phoneme banks are tuned to produce sayable coinages like Colorkanna and Mapolos rather than random letters.
- How do I organise a star system's worlds?
- Give central planets bare coined names and outer or newly found bodies coded designations, so the contrast marks which worlds matter.