Alternate Calendars

[VT45]

This is for alternate ways for measuring time, whether alien or from a TL so exotic that they do not use the modern calendar. Here's something I came up with. This is a clock from Kiria, a planet that Emperor Qianlong and Azardin have been helping me create. Now this will not be the script that these people use, but these people are loosely based on Tolkein's Elves from LOTR.

It took me a while to figure out how these people would percieve time, but I finally figured it out. There are no bodies in their system, other than their sun, which they could use to calculate time, so they use the regular old base 10 for their hours and minutes. Also, since gravity is different on their planet, even something that might seem as fundamental as the second is different. 1 Earth hour has 3600 Earth seconds, but that is 4409 Kirim seconds.

So, 20 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour, and 62 seconds per minute.

[Legolas]

Looks quite cool. However, since the "second" as a unit of measurement is defined rather arbitrarily and retroactively, it seems strange that the people of that world used a very strange number - 62 - as the number of seconds in a minute. You could at least have made that 42 to make some sense

[VT45]

Originally Posted by Legolas

Looks quite cool. However, since the "second" as a unit of measurement is defined rather arbitrarily and retroactively, it seems strange that the people of that world used a very strange number - 62 - as the number of seconds in a minute. You could at least have made that 42 to make some sense

It makes sense, if you think about it. The hour and minute on our world predate the advent of the second. And from what I've read, the second on our world came from Galileo's obervation of the swing of a pendulum. So, if that's true, why wouldn't a Kirim second be defined the same way?

[Codae]

Originally Posted by VulcanTrekkie45

It makes sense, if you think about it. The hour and minute on our world predate the advent of the second. And from what I've read, the second on our world came from Galileo's obervation of the swing of a pendulum. So, if that's true, why wouldn't a Kirim second be defined the same way?

Our second is devised such that 60 go into a minute. The pendular definition was created to easily represent a time period 1/86,400 of a day.