The Mineral and Ore Survey System (MOSS) is a catalog of systems that have been surveyed and their associated surveys. This information is made public, along with who currently has a claim on the system. This information is considered invaluable to mining outfits and even independent operators looking to make it big.
The MOSS is administered by CORIS, the "Cooperative Ore Resource Information Services". They are an independant organization funded by all five major governments and whose board is made up of volunteers from every mining coporations who pays for membership.
A MOSS designation for a system isn't it's cononical name, but often these smaller systems don't get names so the MOSS designation has become a sort of defacto name for systems that have nothing else to identify them.
A MOSS designation is simply MOSS-<10 digit alphanumerical identifier>, i.e. MOSS-9ZG907MGTS. The CORIS gives the designation and that designation isn't supposed to ever change. (Practically, it can happen, but it's mostly clerical error.)
Four systems carry no generated identifier. When the catalog was first assembled, the homeworlds and seats of the founding governments were entered under their own names rather than assigned one, and CORIS has never seen a reason to change that. The identifier is the system's name in the MOSS alphabet, padded on the left with zeros to ten characters, and MOSS-0000000SOL is the first entry in the catalog. Every other system, however old or important, has a real designation; New Corinth, Tel'Erani and Redding all do.
| System | Designation |
|---|---|
| Sol | MOSS-0000000SOL |
| Calysto | MOSS-000CALYSTO |
| L'Dree'll | MOSS-000LDREELL |
| NorAel | MOSS-0000NORAEL |
This system is slightly modeled off the "Common Land Units" used in crop insurance.
The alphanumerical identifiers I'm using are generated by NanoID. Simply set the alphabet to 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, and the length to 10. To generate a new one from that page, simply slide the slider for the length up or down one, then back to 10.