On inventing mecha names

Naming people, and naming things: perennial troubles in writing. I find that defining some rules, restrictive though it might feel, actually makes the whole business easier. It also shapes the resulting name-sets so they do feel like they come from one specific cultural context.

In Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, Taru armours have names which alliterate, and include nature (e.g. Halcyon, Ash), pastoral (Reaper), or temporal (Cockcrow, Twilit) elements. Here’re some examples:

• Conquest at Cockcrow
• Flowering Fusion
• Twilit Tyrant
• Cloudburst Castle
• Halcyon Hammer
• Reaper on the Ridgeline
• Autumn Eagle
• Hellebore Hulk
• Caprice of Prickthorn (this is Kin-Bright’s old armour; it was called Prince’s Caprice when her father piloted it in his youth)
• Nightingale of Needles
• Seek Not at Sunset
• Sundown Sickle
• Hailing Harvest

The rules for alliteration working here are that the word's primary lexical stress, not necessarily its beginning, determines the sound—Caprice alliterates on pr—and that all vowels alliterate with each other. If you note these rules, you'll also have learned the rules for alliteration in Old English poetry!

An additional constraint: the names have to fit alternating metre! Almost all of these can work in a x/x/x/x/x/ pattern. A few, such as Conquest at Cockcrow, Prince’s Caprice, Seek Not at Sunset and Hellebore Hulk, only easily appear at the start of lines with initial inversion (/xx/x/x/x/), though sometimes a bit of jiggery-pokery can fit them in elsewhere.

I remain very pleased with Caprice of Prickthorn, because that's easy to fit in when given in full (x/x/x), but can be shortened to Caprice when I need x/ and Prickthorn when I need /x. At one point Kin-Bright mentions the armour's former name, Prince's Caprice. I meant the name change when it entered her possession to indicate something about how the servants in her clan's household regard her personality—something she doesn't think about herself—though I don't know how clearly that comes across in the poem!