Federation Timekeeping

            Timekeeping on a single world is a straightforward exercise because there is only ever one rotational period and one revolutionary one, this means that the length between each noon remains constant (well ok, near constant), and each year the same length, there may require additional adjustment to keep the hours in line with the daytime, and perhaps additional days to years, but one system can be applied to a whole planet. The Federation on the other hand has several dozen inhabited worlds each of which has unique periods of rotation. As such the Federation has had to create new time systems for these worlds because a standard set on another planet will quickly become meaningless on another as the hours drift out of synchrony of the days.

            The Federation has had to reluctantly settle with painstaking creation of new calendars and timekeeping systems on these new worlds, a process which has unfortunately made time keeping across the Federation a total nightmare.

            There has however been a certain consistent use of method, a new world will have a calendar system based on the length of one of its years, which is used to divide the year into rational groups of days, The arrangement of these days must also account for leap days to maintain the positions of the equinoxes within the calendar. All Federation races have made use of natural moon systems for their time keeping, the new calendars are free to incorporate these systems into their calendars. Calendar systems are generally simply solved, and are not really important for the Federation though they are convenient for the inhabitants of the planets to have rational time system they can relate to (e.g. winter occurs during the same months every year etc.). To be fair, the people who really notice the fact that the seasons fall out of sync across different planets are either people who regularly move between worlds and people going on traditional holidays to other worlds (and to there horror find that each ‘year’ they go it gets colder and colder at their destination).

            The greater problem for the Federation is the time divisions of days. The simplest solution is to create new lengths of hours minutes etc. for each world which mean traditional timekeeping systems can be used even if the length of each interval is subtly different. Though this kind of adaptation is widely used it is not widely liked, most complain about the ‘untrustworthy nature’ of the new units, as a ‘new hour’ may be quite different to more familiar ones. However these sentiments are mainly held by people who regularly move between systems, (and more cynically and specifically, old people, with their repetitive mantras of ‘hours were longer in my days’ and ‘whats that in old time’). Mostly these systems are fine for the inhabitants, especially as their colony world grows and matures, as it gives their systems value.

            The other system commonly used on world to regulate their days is to use the same length intervals as existing systems, but not to complete a proper cycle, instead additional hours are added or lost according to the length of the day. This system avoids the creation of new units, but does make for irregular clocks. Also this system still has to work to the new planet’s rotation to maintain a constant association with hours and solar events. Though this system means that conventional time units are maintained it still does not create a synchrony between worlds.

            To generate a universal time system we have to free the system from having any regular meaning on any given planet. This universal time system, otherwise known as metric, is a completely artificial way of measuring time. It is based on the hydrogen frequency and is scaled for general use into convenient time intervals this metric time system is actually the most used within the Federation as all systems actually draw upon it in some way. Though metric is not linked with any real planetary day length, or year, it is not used for daily life on a planet’s surface as its shares no synchrony with its rotation. However metric does have a real sense between worlds, as metric time is the same throughout the Federation.