2/4/2026

2/12/2026 6:42 PM

5

0

0 wins / 0 losses

Sage

I've been pondering some similar things about naming conventions because my story also involves planets, but uses portals (due to a prompt) and leans toward fiction. While the few planets in my story are technically not real (outside of Earth), I worked on an ID system that could archive the universe to help ground it a bit. The tentative format I'm using is Galaxy-Sector-System-SystemBodies, then breaking down the system bodies into specific ID ranges to make the indexing more consistent from an archival standpoint. I'm also using Crockford's Base32, which uses 0-9 and A-Z minus ILOU, because when you have something like K2OI-1023, the I and 1 can look similar to the reader. The end result is long still (e.g. 4M8T92R7K-3X2T-9A6K-03B), but it makes it more theoretically possible to index things on a universal scale. Anyway, by grounding your story in established names, the average reader might struggle to remember the difference between something like KOI-5389 and KOI-5554. So if you want to give yourself a little bit of plot leeway, especially since humanity can do space colonization, it would be fair to allow everything to have a more “normal” name too. What I plan to do, and what you can consider, is to blend the two. Treat the "old" names as ID labels, and then attach to each of them a unique name. You can mention one or both where it makes sense contextually, but the goal would be to give each name enough identity that the reader can easily differentiate between them. As far as your other questions go, if you're already going the more scientific route, including names that were found by other projects (like TESS or CHEOPS) is a good idea, especially if this leans towards the 100-year range. I think that adds more flavor and implies some competition between the scientific community, while still aligning it with the KOI- and other names. Even if the names are grounded in reality, I don't think you should plan or expect people to search for them outside of the story. Assume the vast majority of readers will want everything self-contained within it. And if they do decide to look it up, think of it as a small bonus for them to better appreciate your work.

Sounds good! I’ll be focusing on my first story this weekend, but I plan to review it sometime next week or the weekend, as time allows. Looks like a fun read.

Thanks for the welcome! Dice roll would be great here since I’m fine with reading anything sent my way.

I’ll join this. I get pretty busy with work and life, so writing an occasional review would be a fun way to do a focused read here and there. Feel free to randomly assign me one that’s available.

I'll go with 34.