In Search Of... "Planet Arse"? :-)

[Ranthe]

One of the things that reminded me of the existence of Elite (and though the Wikipedia entry for same, the existence of Oolite) was the book "Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin" by Francis Spufford, which discussed a number of not-widely-appreciated British contributions to engineering and science like the Black Arrow rocket, Concorde, the Beagle II space-probe, Vodafone, and... in the chapter entitled "The Universe in a Bottle", the game "Elite". It's a cracking good read and highly interesting.

One thing that I learned of from this book and other sources was prior to the release of "Elite", Braben and Bell went through an exercise in checking that the procedurally-generated system names didn't contain any rude words - and in one case, an entire galaxy had to be deleted because a planet called "Arse" turned up in it. But according to Spufford, after the original "Elite" was released...

Word reached 4a Market Hill [Acornsoft] that an intrepid explorer had indeed discovered a Planet Arse in one of the seven galaxies that Bell and Braben hadn't checked for expletives.

Now I've gone through the Oolite Planet list on the Wiki and can't find any Plant Arse, so I'm wondering whether this story was true. Did Oolite ever change the galaxy/planet list from the original Elite?

Or did the author of the book pulled this tale out of his er, backside?

[Smivs]

As far as I know, the original story is true, namely that a pre-release version of Elite did indeed have a planet 'Arse', but that this was 'dealt with' before the game was released.
Oolite does not have an 'Arse', but does have a 'Rear'

[onno256]

@ranthe

Hehe I've got Space Truckin' in my Hyperradio!

[Eric Walch]

Oolite does not have an 'Arse', but does have a 'Rear'

But it is easy to revert it to 'arse view' in shipdata.