On Naming

Far more than you want to know about how people and ships are named and addressed.

Attention conservation notice: You really don't care about the details in here.

Identifiers

Naming conventions across the trade fleet vary a bit, but the core addressing system remains constant:

Every member of the trade fleet past or present has a UUID (in the lineage of the ship in the story these are extended UUIDs with extra bits. This convention has not become entirely universal - some people are still on old UUIDs because they consider the switchover not really worth the hassle for the very low chance of collision and some people have switched over to an entirely different identifier system. This occasionally causes interoperability problems when ships meet).

Every ship also has a unique identifier, typically of the same format as individuals.

Ship-local addressing

When generating new crewmembers UUIDs the ship ensures that the two least significant bytes (which are random) are unique amongst living crewmembers. This allows people to be addressed in casual mode by the last two bytes.

When this is done the bytes are pronounced as follows (taken from here):

With the name read off in little endian order. So if the UUID ended FD0B (253, 11), then their casual address would be zod(11)-bim(253).

People can and do use casual address in person, but it's considered a bit weird and formal. Think of it as equivalent to referring to you by your full name and title.

Shortening someone's casual address to the least significant byte is considered very bad manners. Do not refer to zod-bim as zod.

The casual address convention is quite common in the trade fleet, though not everyone pronounces the byte values the same way.

People sometimes use extended casual address when needing a referent that is globally unique across all crew members present or past. This is the casual address followed by the number of people who have had that casual address. For example zod-bim might be disambiguated as zod-bim 7 if there were 6 previous crew members identifiable as zod-bim.

Use names

People shipboard can also register one or more use names, which are the ones most people will refer to them as on a day to day basis.

No two current crew members can register the same use name, and having a registered use name is not required (but is considered a bit weird and subtly disapproved of).

Newborn babies are assigned a use name at random from a standard pool (which may be changed over time by vote but tends to be pretty stable - you occasionally get votes to include new names encountered in local cultures that people think are cool, and sometimes names held by particularly disgraced crew members are voted out of the pool).

It's considered quite normal to discard your given use name once you qualify to full crew member - about two thirds of the population do it.

Typically people will have at least two use names registerd along with preferences for how you should use them - e.g. a friends use name and a formal use name.

Some people remain quite stable in their use names over their life while some like to change them on a regular basis. HUD technology and active cues make it relatively easy to keep track of what use name you should be using for someone.

Certain use names are reserved for special positions. You may not take the use name Captain unless you are actually the captain (but the captain does not always take it either). The rules are a relatively complex system of classification (you can't call yourself "Captain Jack Sparrow" if you're not the Captain either, but nor can you call yourself El Capitan, or Centurio). You can always appeal by taking it to a vote, but it will cost to do this. Most people don't bother and pick simple and uncontroversial names.

Ship names

Ships are named at time of creation though may change over their lifetime. Names are normally a meaningful phrase although tend to stop short of full blown Culture ship naming conventions.

The ship in the story is named "Eschaton Arbitrage" (profiting from the fact that different civilizations have their apocalypse at different times).

The crew generally agree that this is in poor taste, but the constitution makes changing ship names moderately tricky - you need a 73% majority for a replacement name, and nobody has been able to come up with a name they like better.

Names are best-effort globally unique: When traders meet they synchronize their ship databases, and if they notice a ship of a different identifier which has ever had the same name as their current ship name they must change names to one they know to be unique.

The name-change faction keep hoping to run into another ship called Eschaton Arbitrage, but so far no luck.

(Violations of this policy occasionally occur, but it's embedded at the constitution at an early enough level that anyone that forked before then hardly counts as the same trade fleet, and people who have changed that part of their constitution are generally regarded as jerks and are less likely to be cooperated with).

When needing to refer to a ship uniquely in casual conversation you would typically use however many of the least significant set of bytes in their identifier are required to disambiguate it in the local database (together with a version number for the local database if you want to be really precise), but because of the practice of keeping ship names distinct this rarely comes up except in historical documents.

Honorifics

There are no honorifics in the trade fleet.

Intership name usage

Ship names are used as patronymics when referring to crew in a broader context. Zod-bim 7 could be more fully referred to as "Zod-bim 7 off the Eschaton Arbitrage (yom-sic-tem as of database revision 54992).

This is both the trade fleet convention but also matches typical local usage of patronymics: Essentially everyone aboard a ship is related to some greater or lesser degree, except for the relatively small fraction of first generation crew (typically well under 1%).

DRMacIver/programmer-at-large-notes

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