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My prompt involves finding and settling an unknown world. As one might expect, this will be a scifi story set some relatively short time in the future (20-100 years). I have sourced the various planets that you can choose to explore based on the real world catalogue of potentially superhabitable worlds. Because of where we are with study in that field, all of the potentially superhabitable worlds that we know of come from one of two Kepler Telescope field studies. This leads to most of my potential worlds having names in the format of KOI-8000.01.

My abstract thought was that using by using real celestial objects, the reader may be interested enough to do some small amount of research about them outside of the game. Is this an unrealistic expectation?

Would it add more character and verisimilitude to the story to vary that naming convention up to show that some were found by projects like TESS or CHEOPS?

No one will know but you.

I like you Ogre, but that does not actually address either of my questions.

I like Ogre

I like Ogre

I also like Ogre.

My personal suggestion is to add a few fictional worlds that have fictional names alongside the real ones.

Make sure to include a Planet McPlanetface.

I was playing around with the idea of having whichever planet you select being called that based on a public vote to name the new colony world.

I would prefer realistic names (unless the story is fantasy; also, if there is undiscovered intelligent life on these planets, I'm assuming they'll have their own name for their planets). Also don't forget unless you're a bazillion years in the future, you have certain physics constraints. For example if you intend to travel many light years away, there will be differential aging between you and the place you came from when you return; you can't have instant communication with people far away; etc.


But, in terms of your lore in the world, there's no reason not to include optional background pages. End does it quote successfully in some of his storygames to enrich lore. So you could do it here and be fine, I imagine.

EDIT: You are free to disregard reality in your story, obviously. This is just a preference. But if your society found some fictional ToE that allows for the things we think are impossible, go for it.

The story is a mix of real world science and scifi superscience. I am handwaving some of the physics to allow probes and the colony ship to move at an average of 3x light speed, so within the timeline of the game (basically the first half) you get a total of 500-750 years to launch some probes and the colony ship prior the likely destruction of earth. Quantum communications offer the ability to get data from the probes when they arrive, so no need to wait for a return trip.

I realize I could just fully make up everything, but I like the idea of using currently identified planets as possible targets. I guess the real core of my question is, does including references to multiple real world projects add more to the story than just using a single projects output. Is it better to see a list of items that are like:

• KOI-7621
• KOI-5554
• KOI-5389
• KOI-5176
• KOI-8047

or Alternately something like:

• KOI-7621
• KOI-5554
• HD 191939
• K2OI-1023
• JWST-123

I recognize that this is a fairly minor detail, but reviewing these lists and determining the ones you want to get more info on is a pretty big aspect of the early game, so I feel it is kind of important.

A little variation wouldn't hurt, the numbers aren't going to stick on their own.