colonies

Trope-a-Day: Planet of Hats

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(Incidentally, if you were wondering what I was doing this weekend, I was attempting to nail down the characters for my next ongoing longer series. I think I have a good handle on four of them, as of now. The fifth… is troublesome.)

Planet of Hats: Trying very hard to avert this one, except for in-world explicable exceptions like relatively new, low-population colonies, and odd cases like Valiár (Imperial Core), one of the Thirteen Colonies whose colony ship malfunctioned explosively, leading to the planet being populated by large numbers of clones of an original small group of archetypes.  (And even then, they’re not all that hatty.)  And, of course, some created species.

Trope-a-Day: Naming Your Colony World

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Naming Your Colony World: Examples of most of them exist in various places, although the Imperial Grand Survey works really hard to discourage people from naming anything New Anything, to the point of refusing to register the names, on the grounds that in deep time, eventually naming things New New New New New Whatever is too damn silly for words.

Beyond that, most of them are literary or mythological references, with a smattering of egopoli and symbolic names.  Numbered names are generally reserved for unexplored systems (most of them beyond the periphery of the Associated Worlds), and star names are generally not found per se, although generally, settled systems tend to be referred to, even on star charts, by the name of the primary settled world/main habitat in the system, rather than that of the star; which is not to say that the star doesn’t retain its own name separate from that of the world in formal usage, of course.