About this planet name generator
Real planet-naming is already science fiction. Astronomy's working names are catalogue entries — HD 40307 g, Kepler-186f, the seven worlds of TRAPPIST-1 — surveyor's grid-references waiting for history to happen to them, though the IAU has run public campaigns that gave a lucky few proper names. Closer to home the conventions get poetic: the planets carry Roman gods, and the moons of Uranus are named, by long tradition, after characters from Shakespeare and Pope — Miranda, Titania, Oberon orbiting a giant. A science-fiction planet name plays in that same space between the catalogue and the myth: 'Cinderia (HD 40307 g)' tells you tidally-locked, Latinate charter, K-type primary; 'Refinery-3' tells you corporate administration and an indentured workforce in one hyphenated breath. This planet name generator works the whole spectrum, and every name comes with the world attached.
What a planet name encodes
Who named it, and what they wanted. The catalogue register is the surveyor's voice: neutral, numbered, claiming nothing. The founder and religious registers are the settler's voice — Caladan-of-the-Three-Moons is three generations of pride in a single name. The corporate register is an asset tag, and the worlds that wear one usually have the labour history to match. The colonial-renaming register carries the sharpest politics: an indigenous name underneath an imposed designation, and which one a character uses tells you their allegiance. Around these sit the Latinate classical names, the mythological transpositions (Olympia, Yggdrasil, Tlaloc — humanity packing its gods for the voyage), the lost-colony archaisms, the preserved alien names with their glosses, the plain geographical descriptors, and the industrial-function names that are barely names at all. Each result identifies its register, because the register is the colonial history in miniature.
What you get
Every roll returns a planet name (often with its catalogue designation), the physical profile — mass, gravity, atmosphere, biosphere — a settlement history that explains who came, why, and under what charter, a planet-as-experienced paragraph built for the landing scene (the sky's colour, the day's length, the dominant smell, the name of the principal city), and a current situation a GM can run: a strike, a biosphere discovery that voids the terraforming licence, an ecological reauthorisation fight with three factions and a deadline.
The double-name rule of lived-in space
The most realistic touch in SF naming costs nothing: give a world two names and let context choose. The Expanse runs on this — official designations in the briefing, Belter shorthand on the docks — and real astronomy does too, with catalogue numbers for the journals and campaign-names for the public. In play, the doubled name is free characterisation: the company man says 'KW-Hespera', the third-generation settler says 'Hespera' with the prefix conspicuously missing, and the survey AI says the full catalogue string every time because nobody ever taught it not to. Results in the catalogue-and-colloquial register hand you both names and the gap between them, which is where the politics live.
How to use planet names at the table
For a Traveller-style sandbox, generate a sector's worth and let the situations interact — the strike on the refinery world wants the grain the agricultural world can't ship. For Stars Without Number, drop a result into a hex and use its situation as the world's faction turn. For a one-shot, one planet's hook is the whole evening. And for any system, the experienced paragraph is the read-aloud as the shuttle descends: sky, day-length, smell, skyline. Players decide how they feel about a world in those four details, long before the briefing finishes.
For pure-fantasy realms or worlds, use the /realm-name-generator or /world-name-generator instead. This generator is tuned specifically for science-fiction planetary settings, where every name is also a deed of ownership — and somebody, somewhere, always disputes the deed.