nAMING SYSTEMS

Within federation systems, a star, planet or any other object may have more than one name, though for species home systems generally that species name for the objects is used. There are a few systems with only one naming system, these being mostly the home-systems of any federation race, including Pholi colony worlds (though the Pholi do not name any object which can not easily be discerned from the ground of their colony world), or established federation species colonies, or new scientific bases where one team has only just replaced the standard scientific reference name.

On these worlds pages the human names will be used where they have been assigned, failing this, or for other reasons, any existing name will be used, for some systems there is a mongrel of this method shown, where human names have been conceived for the planets and major bodies but not individual small moons, or important asteroids.

For names beyond human culture, some literal translations are shown of the name where translation accurately conveys the original name. Within some scientific outpost systems some objects have still yet to have formal federation names, this will either be displayed using the catalogue number or the simple naming system, which is explained below.

In the simple system, the base that is used is the sun, which is nearly always named, planets are then assigned numbers from the order of their distance of the sun, in the sol system, mercury is closest and so is denoted ‘1’, so that planets name under the simple system is ‘sol 1’. Moons are factored in by adding a letter from the common human alphabet, so for example, Earth’s only major moon, will be classed as ‘sol 3a’. The only other common additions to this system are adding the words belt after a number to show the order of a belt in the system, or the use of words such as artifact, or object also in accordance to a number.

This system is quite sufficient for classifying any system, indeed when ship navigators tend to plot courses this system is far more extensively used than actual names, as even in unfamiliar systems the names an numbers give an accurate idea of the structure of the system, without reference to otherwise confusing names.