Sci-Fi Timekeeping

[darkling]

Hey, so I originally posted this as part of a larger question, but at kesher's advice I am going to toss it up here on its own in hopes it is of general interest.

I recently made a sci-fi RPG/skirmish game as kind of a 24 hour RPG challenge for myself. And that project got me thinking about a couple of sci-fi tropes, among them how weird it is for science fiction settings to still use our base 60, 24-hour day, 365 day year timekeeping system which is based on the apparent motion of our sun. The system makes a lot of sense to us today, but really seems suspension of disbelief breaking in other contexts.

It still holds for near future things where earth remains the center of humanity, like say Star Trek or Starship Troopers. But once you start dealing with a setting where humanity has been separated from Earth for a long time, or a setting with non-humans who developed their own system on their own planets, it begins to stretch credulity that folk go around talking about minutes, hours, and days.

To resolve this in my mind I came up with a quick & dirty standardized, SI style timekeeping system. The basic unit is the Arc. An Arc is 1,000s or 16.6 minutes.

Below the Arc are the Deci-Arc: 100s or 1.4 minutes; the Centi-Arc: 10s; and the Mili-Arc: 1s, which is often colloquially called a 'tick' or 'beat'.

Above the Arc are the Deca-Arc: 10,000s or 2.7 hours; the Hecto-Arc: 100,000s or 27.7 hours, often colloquially called a 'shift', which serves as the basis for economy and activity much like our day does; and the Kilo-Arc: 1,000,000s or 11.5 days, which serves pretty much the same purpose as our week.

Thought this would be of interest to those designing sci-fi settings, I am probably going to try to use it in my next one and see how my players adapt.

[crusssdaddy]

In The January Dancer and Up Jim River, author Michael Flynn creates a system of time based on the heartbeat. It's several thousand years in the future and humanity is spread across a couple arms of the galaxy - FTL travel is commonplace via what are essentially wormholes. The core worlds use a base-12 system (12 beats = 10 seconds, all the way out to a year of 360 days), while the peripheral worlds use a metric system (100 beats = 1.39 minutes, which turns into a year of 347 days). Complications sometimes ensue in negotiating between the two.

I think it works well in a book for fluff, but in a game I wouldn't want to stray too far from a comfortable & intuitive means of keeping time.

[darkling]

I don't think that I have ever heard of Flynn, which is a failing on my part as I used to sell sci-fi books for a living. I will have to try to hunt those titles down. Thank you!

[crusssdaddy]

His books are challenging but worth it. The Wreck of the River of Stars is one of my very favorite sci-fi novels.

[ragnorakk]

I'll second the Flynn recommendation, he writes some good stuff.

Timekeeping is an interesting issue. I tend to hand-wave the realistic considerations. Inhabited systems use local time, and if they are interested in interstellar activities, maintain clocks synchronized to the time other other important places or synchronize with Imperial Time. This is a totally lazy handwave on my part admittedly.

[Finarvyn]

Not at all canon, but I noticed something interesting about TOS Stardates.

Think about a typical stardate, say 1234.5 (in TOS they had four numbers, then one past the decimal point).

What if the first two numbers 12 represent a shorthand notation for the year. (E.g. 2412) We do things like that all the time. Today's date is 8-21-11, for example.

For a part of a year, use the last three digits plus the decimal. If you take 99.9 and divide by 365 (number of days in a year) you find that each 0.1 of a stardate is roughly 0.27 earth days. If we assume that stardates aren't based on earth's calendar, it's not hard to come up with a conclusion that each 0.1 stardate could represent 0.3333 (basically 1/3) of a day, or that each 0.1 stardate could represent a single 8-hour duty shift.

Okay, a bit of a reach, but it's kind of a neat thing.

[Falconer]

The Writer’s Guide has this to say:

We invented "Stardate" to avoid continually mentioning Star Trek's century (actually, about two hundred years from now), and getting into arguments about whether this or that would have developed by then. Pick any combination of four numbers plus a percentage point, use it as your story's stardate. For example, 1313.5 is twelve o'clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon of the next day. Each percentage point is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of one day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don't worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode.

I have been thinking of having Stardate represent elapsed time for the purposes of logkeeping on a mission (or campaign). The first digit would be the year, the next three digits would be the day. So 1313.5 would be: Year 1, Day 313, Noon. This would be handy because it would reflect the fact that time is relative, and give you a nice futuristic-feeling timekeeping method, while allowing you to synch it up whenever you wanted to Earth time.

[kesher]

I went looking for time-related articles in the Encyclopedia Galactica, but couldn't immediately find anything. However, the term "chronometrics" popped up, which is thought-provoking...