"I would be astonished if your fate somehow grabbed you from here. Swords and boats," snorts Bella. "But it's probably still worth being careful about tendencies revealed by the fate, however much I rendered it obsolete in the particulars."
"...anyway, any of those words would indicate that we wouldn't fight with people who belonged to the whatever with us," says T'Mir, "and none of them strongly suggest that we wouldn't fight with other people, I'm not aware of a noun in English that does that, we'd have to start prepending adjectives."
"I don't think the Federation are going to just call it 'that thing Davlia and Isabella T'Mir and her alternate universe double and the Quendi are running', so I'd like to have a name to present to them before they decide to call us the Counter-Federation or something like that."
"Serene? Tranquil? Pacific, but Earthlings will think of the ocean named that."
"It's not very namey. I'd put it in a brochure if I were advertising it to Materians but not the name."
"Are we planning on having names in several languages, or just one that transliterates?"
"I mean, if people can't pronounce the name they'll call us something else, we need to either self-translate preemptively or live with anyone who doesn't get use out of the primary name making something up. That is not quite 'the more names the better', though."
"Yeah, the Federation will call us the Elendil if we introduce ourselves that way. The Ferengi or somebody might not."
"You might want to put off meeting Ferengi till you have monetary economies more figured out. They're very into trade and commerce."
"Monetary economies are useful for a lot of allocation problems if you have a large population. I like the Federation model, really - I like almost everything about the Federation except how unwilling they are to let more things be the Federation. And their genetic engineering policy."