Sci-fi name generator

A short given name with Slavic and Latin roots beside an Igbo surname, the mix a long-settled station would produce. It reads as a lead: easy to say and hard to confuse with anyone else in the cast.

Kael is a coinage that sounds one generation removed from Earth, and Lindqvist anchors it to a Swedish family line. Good for a sci-fi character raised off-world by parents who kept the old name.

Two syllables against one, so the surname lands like a full stop. Voss is the half people will use over the radio, and Tamsin is what only two crew members are allowed to call her.

Rank and surname with no first name is how a crew speaks on duty. Ibarra is Basque, three open syllables, and it carries authority without needing a hard consonant anywhere.

A Sanskrit given name with an Irish surname, the kind of pairing that needs no explanation three centuries from now. It suits an engineer or medic the reader should trust on sight.

Castellan once meant the keeper of a castle, so the surname hints at inherited duty. Yuna keeps it light. A fit for a station administrator who was born into the job.

The lowest officer rank in front of one of the most common surnames on Earth. This is the junior crew member a story follows when it wants a pair of new eyes aboard.

A title that works on any deck and a Yoruba surname meaning the crown suits me. The meaning never has to appear on the page, yet it gives a ship surgeon a little quiet pride.

Two clipped halves, five letters and four. It sounds like a pilot or a smuggler, someone introduced in a bar scene, and the hard K lets the surname double as a call sign.

Built on the Greek west wind, so it suggests weather before anything else is known about the world. A good name for a sci-fi planet with a breathable sky and storms worth mapping.

The stem nods to Johannes Kepler, whose name already sits on thousands of real exoplanets. It sounds like a world found by survey and settled by the scientists who found it.

The opening echoes thalassa, Greek for sea, and the doubled s softens the ending. Use it for an ocean world or any colony whose first export was water.

Nyx is night in Greek myth, and the x gives the name one sharp edge in the middle. It suits a tidally locked planet where every settlement sits on the dark side of the line.

Soft from start to finish, with the stress falling on the o. The ending has an Eastern European colour, which makes the planet sound founded by settlers who brought a language with them.

Vega is a real star 25 light years out, and Australis is Latin for southern. Together they read like a chart label: the southern colony of a system that has more than one.

Parva means small in Latin, so this is the lesser world of the Deneb system. A modest name for a mining moon or a farm planet that the capital forgets until harvest.

Second of Antares, in the Latin a naval registry would use. The red supergiant behind the name makes it a natural home for a military frontier or a dying-sun story.

Fomalhaut comes from Arabic for mouth of the fish, and Prime marks the seat of government. Hard to spell and easy to remember, which is about right for a capital world.

Carthage was itself named new city by the Phoenicians who founded it, so this is a new new city. A trading port by instinct, and a settlement name with a warning folded into its history.

Solace promises rest after a long crossing, which is what a port at the end of a shipping lane sells. It could be sincere or it could be a brochure, and the story gets to decide.

The Apollo 11 landing site was Tranquility Base, and Camp says nobody has upgraded the place since. Good for a first-generation lunar settlement still living in prefab.

Samarkand was a Silk Road city, so the name already means distant trade. Adding Far pushes it to the last stop on the route, where prices double and questions are few.

Tharsis is the volcanic plateau on Mars that holds Olympus Mons. An arcology is a whole city in one structure, so this is a sealed tower on high ground, visible for days of travel.

Shackleton crater sits at the lunar south pole, where the rim stays lit and the floor stays frozen. A dome there would be built for ice mining, and anyone who knows the map can tell.

Callisto orbits outside the worst of Jupiter's radiation belts, which makes it the safe harbour of that system. Anchorage fits a fleet stop where ships wait out repairs and paperwork.

The Kuiper belt lies past Neptune, weeks from anywhere by any sensible drive. A waystation there exists for fuel and gossip, and the name is as plain as the people who run it.

The adjective changes the noun completely. A hammer is a threat, and a patient one is a threat with a plan. It suits a siege ship or a salvage tug with a slow, strong arm.

A small bird and a boast. Crews name a ship like this after it survives something it should not have, so it belongs to a light freighter with patched plating and a full cargo book.

Louis XIV had "last argument of kings" cast on his cannons, in Latin. Shortened to two words it becomes the driest possible name for a warship, and every officer aboard knows the reference.

An albatross crosses oceans without landing and is bad luck to harm. Stubborn turns that into a joke about a long-haul starship that is slow, old and impossible to retire.

The name implies a first dawn that failed. It fits a colony ship launched after an earlier one was lost, and it carries the hope and the debt of that history in two words.

The oldest pattern in ship naming: a virtue and a home port. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, so its pride would be a flagship, polished for parades.

Io is the most volcanic body known, which makes Wrath an easy match. A name for a gunship or a privateer, and short enough to paint in letters visible from the next dock.

A family word in the place of a virtue, so the ship reads as cherished. Titan has thick air and methane seas, and a vessel named for it is likely a tanker or a tender built there.

Halcyon means calm and prosperous, which is exactly what a defence contractor would call itself. Dynamics keeps the product vague. Use it for the firm whose logo is on everything.

A kestrel hovers over open ground and drops on what it spots. For a salvage company that is close to a mission statement, and it sounds like a family business with three ships.

Heavy Industries is the suffix of shipbuilders and steelmakers, and Onyx gives it a black, polished face. A megacorporation name for foundry worlds and orbital drydocks.

Lumen is the unit of light, and hydroponic crops live on lamps. The name is a small pun the founders were proud of. It suits the company that feeds a station and knows its leverage.

Perihelion is the point of an orbit nearest the sun, the fast part of any route. A freight line would choose it to promise speed, and the long word looks expensive on a hull.

Two founding families joined by a hyphen, Russian and Vietnamese. Combine is a colder word than company, and it suggests the merger was about control of a supply chain.

A trust holds assets for someone else, so the name raises the question of who the someone is. Good for a bank, a land registry or the quiet owner of a whole moon.

Concern is an old term for a business group, common in German usage. It gives this company a stiff, pre-war formality, like a firm that has outlived several governments.

A concordat is a formal agreement, often between powers that distrust each other. Applied to the moons of Jupiter it suggests a treaty state: several colonies, one signature, constant bargaining.

Hollow could describe a place, such as a carved-out asteroid, or the agreement itself. That double reading is useful for a faction whose peace treaty everyone signed and nobody trusts.

A number implies eight others, and Directorate implies files. It sounds like an intelligence service inside a larger state, the branch that characters mention quietly and never visit.

The rim is wherever the maps get thin. Collective says shared ownership and no single ruler, so this is a frontier alliance of small settlements that vote on everything and agree on little.

Warden is a job title, so this faction is defined by its duty and has no border to defend. It could be a patrol fleet, a militia or a protection racket, depending on who is describing it.

Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt and the obvious place for a union hall. Free tells you they broke from a company, and the plain wording sounds like a banner at a strike.

Remnant means what is left after a loss. Whoever uses this name claims to be the last heirs of the home world, a claim that is sad or dangerous according to how many ships they have.

Order gives it a religious or knightly cast, and a ninth sun implies a pilgrimage through eight systems. A name for monks with a fleet or a cult with a calendar.