Catalog numbers
Mar. 12th, 2006 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinIn ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pompe's discussion on worldbuilding in RPGs and science fiction, we talked about the danger of just picking names for your space-opera setting off of a star map, since the bright stars that have names are pretty unusual and tend to be short-lived monsters.
That reminded me of a pet peeve of mine: when science-fiction writers want to indicate a star or asteroid or planet with a technical-sounding alphabet-soup designation, they rarely make it consistent with the ways in which this is actually done in practice today. It's not that hard, but seems uncommon. If I ever see a fictional alphabet-soup asteroid referred to as, say, "2012 LM349", or for that matter a star referred to as a string of digits beginning with HD, I will applaud, right there on the spot.
Granted, if the story is set in some future society, nomenclature may have changed; and there are about a zillion completely different star catalogs that list specific kinds of stars. But you can still avoid doing things that don't make any sense. For instance, planets and moons that are given some sort of ordinal letter or number designation are likely to get them more in order of discovery than in order of distance from the primary; that way they don't all have to be changed whenever somebody discovers another one. And, please, don't just give something an unadorned Greek letter for a name; there aren't that many Greek letters.
pompe's discussion on worldbuilding in RPGs and science fiction, we talked about the danger of just picking names for your space-opera setting off of a star map, since the bright stars that have names are pretty unusual and tend to be short-lived monsters. That reminded me of a pet peeve of mine: when science-fiction writers want to indicate a star or asteroid or planet with a technical-sounding alphabet-soup designation, they rarely make it consistent with the ways in which this is actually done in practice today. It's not that hard, but seems uncommon. If I ever see a fictional alphabet-soup asteroid referred to as, say, "2012 LM349", or for that matter a star referred to as a string of digits beginning with HD, I will applaud, right there on the spot.
Granted, if the story is set in some future society, nomenclature may have changed; and there are about a zillion completely different star catalogs that list specific kinds of stars. But you can still avoid doing things that don't make any sense. For instance, planets and moons that are given some sort of ordinal letter or number designation are likely to get them more in order of discovery than in order of distance from the primary; that way they don't all have to be changed whenever somebody discovers another one. And, please, don't just give something an unadorned Greek letter for a name; there aren't that many Greek letters.