I do almost exclusively "real stars" games, and I'm one to hate seeing all those "Gliese 408 A-II - Moon 13" type entries out there because they lack personality. But once you're 50-80 years into a game, the sheer number of balls of rock you have to come up with names for becomes daunting. Even just restricting it to the worlds of interest can exhaust a good supply of names pretty quickly. Anybody got a good system they use?
I've tried a couple of different systems, with varying degrees of success:
1. Starting from Sol, each "arm" gets a different cultural mythos to draw on. So there's the Greek Arm, the Norse Arm, the Vedic Arm, the Sino-Japanese Arm, the Celtic Arm, etc. Works pretty well as long as there's enough arms, not too many planets, and you have some encyclopedias of world mythology on hand.
2. Greek names based on attributes of the planets themselves.
Thalassa for a water world,
Borea for a freezing world, etc. Problem there is that you run out of words for cold/ice/frozen and hot/boiling/smoky/fiery pretty quicky.
3. Names based on association with the constellation that the parent star is in. So, for Alpha Centauri the worlds are named after famous centaurs -- Chiron, Nessus, etc.
One upside to this method is that the names can be used for the stars themselves, to help clear up the clutter of "Gliese XXX" that builds up. Downside is that you have to do a fair bit of work building up a database of what star is where. And you find most of your early worlds named after bears, snakes and virgins.
Another thing I've taken to doing is renaming all asteroids with minerals. Initially I tried to make them match up with their RL counterparts, but found it nearly impossible since they're numbered based on distance from Sol rather than order of discovery as they are in real life. And trying to sort by size and match up the largest ones fails as well. So I just took to naming them based on their number in Aurora and making a 1-to-1 eqiuvalency with the RL numbered asteroid. So Asteroid #3 becomes 3 Juno, Asteroid #74 becomes 74 Galatea, etc. The nice thing with that is that when you move on to the next system with significant asteroids, you can just jump up to the next 100 and renumber. So if Barnard's Star has 235 asteroids, Asteroid #26 can become 426 Hippo, and so forth. There's something like 16,000 named asteroids -- it'll take a while to run out. Makes it a LOT easier to keep track of as well.
