World name change?

[Tom Mazanec]

Are world names ever changed? For example, suppose a "Furry" world is discovered on Quantum 4 in the year 1908 by an American project and is named Aesop-2. A couple years later Homeliners get to England and discover that Aesop-2 is the world of Wind in the Willows. Would the name be changed to Grahame?

[Tom Mazanec]

Come to think of it...the "barbarian" in Attila was actually Genghis Khan, so I guess not.

[David Johnston2]

There is one occasion under which a world's name changes...when they find out it isn't really an Echo or isn't one anymore.

[Flyndaran]

How often are stars or planets renamed in the real world?
Planetary nebulae are still called that despite now knowing they have nothing to do with planets.
Bureaucratic "textbooks" are hard to alter.
I think it would add some light humor for PCs to hear where they're going only to find a place different to expectations.

[AlexanderHowl]

I think that a world that changed Q might be renamed, especially if the event that caused the change resulted in a dramatic change in the history of the world. For example, if you had Homeline terrorist smuggle a nuclear weapon into an Echo that was taking place during the First World War and he or she used in to vaporize Washington, DC before Wilson decided to intervene in the war, then that dramatic of a change might cause a renaming of a world. Other than that though, I imagine that they would be quite conservative about changing names.

[Curmudgeon]

It would depend on the rules for naming, assuming there's anything that official. I might presume a couple of rules. First, that the earliest name given to a particular timeline takes precedence. For example if one group lands in North America and names the world Frontenac-6, another lands in Europe and names it Charles III-2 (because in this timeline Mary, wife of William II, won the argument against her mother-in-law, Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, and William III of Orange is Charles of Orange and rules England, Scotland and Ireland as Charles III) while a third group also lands in North America and names it Metacomet-2, when Metacomet (King Phillip) makes a successful alliance with the Mohawk against the colonists. In sorting it out, it was named Frontenac-6 first, so the other two names are dropped when it turns out they're all the same timeline. Second, using The Wind in the Willows example, if a correction is made early enough [before a name becomes official], other names will fade into disuse, so the corrected name becomes official.

[johndallman]

I rather presume that Infinity's various exploration sites do actually tell each other which timeline coordinates they're planning to investigate. And since worlds they can reach are identifiable by their coordinates, there should be no confusion over failing to identify worlds as being the same.

Identifying worlds that other groups have reached, but don't have Infinity-scale coordinates for is another matter, of course.

[TGLS]

I think there needs to be a third, if the the first name is very wrong, the name is changed. For example, if we have a world named "Vacant-82" upon investigations in Northern Alberta, and later discover (much later) that Neanderthals are fighting Velociraptors in Eurasia, renaming the world is much more reasonable. Or if we find Taft radiation on an apparently empty world (naturally discovered before Taft radiation is known), the name is changed.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I rather presume that Infinity's various exploration sites do actually tell each other which timeline coordinates they're planning to investigate. And since worlds they can reach are identifiable by their coordinates, there should be no confusion over failing to identify worlds as being the same.

Identifying worlds that other groups have reached, but don't have Infinity-scale coordinates for is another matter, of course.

I wouldn't think the necessity of renaming worlds would come up very often, but are Infinity co-ordinates solely timeline co-ordinates or do they include a geographic element, and is that geographic element something that can be winkled out of the co-ordinates to give a purely timeline reference? Then there are the misjumps, where the coordinates say you're headed to one place but you end up in another. And it all assumes that Infinity does cross-check co-ordinates for duplication in a timely manner, which, granted, does seem likely. Then again, there's the question of the conditions under which Infinity considers subsequent trips to the same parallel worthwhile vs. "Fine, record that one and let's move on to the next timeline."

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by TGLS

I think there needs to be a third, if the the first name is very wrong, the name is changed. For example, if we have a world named "Vacant-82" upon investigations in Northern Alberta, and later discover (much later) that Neanderthals are fighting Velociraptors in Eurasia, renaming the world is much more reasonable. Or if we find Taft radiation on an apparently empty world (naturally discovered before Taft radiation is known), the name is changed.

Sounds reasonable.