Keeping Time in Felarya

Subject: Re: Keeping Time in Felarya Sun Jan 26, 2014 12:02 pm

Okay, I'll take a stab at the matter. I'm assuming a lot of this, so yeah, I know we don't know how some of the things really work. They could be adapted later if needed.

The proto-calendar
Felarya's first method to measure time, as used by the guardians and then the titans. Little is known about it aside from the fact that it represents insanely long periods of time divided in smaller periods of variable length. The smallest unit seems to be tens of days, but it is not consistent throughout the fragments found in Jadong Temple. It is believed to be designed by Notys, since she would be the one most perceptive to Felarya's dimensional changes and rift logic, but it is pure speculation.

The thousand calendars
During the Recovery era, numerous humanoid races flooded into Felarya, establishing into a myriad of settlements, frequently isolated from each other, and eventually developing their own means of measuring time. The most proficient calendar came with the Elven Empire, and was adopted widely in many of its provinces after conquering. The Elven Calendar year spans for 218 days and is split into three periods. These periods represent the three steps in the annual cycle of the trees most used for making bows; seeding, growth and flourishing. The year starts with the seeding season, extending for 53 days, and ends with the flourishing season spanning for the same time. The growth period divides the two seasons with a 112 day period. The smaller measures of time vary from community to community.

The ancient calendar
(also called the calendar of fear nowadays)
The first calendar to be widely spread throughout Felarya. It appeared briefly after the construction of Milkadis temple, and although the Elven Empire shunned its use, it became more predominant as the Empire started its decline. The start of the calendar is marked in black, a day of anguish and fear, and what is known today as the Mirror Day. A poorly understood phenomenon in its age, this day allowed terrible creatures to appear from mirrors and other reflective surfaces such as metal armours or weapons and even buckets of water. It didn't take much for the people of Felarya to understand that it was a periodic occurrence and therefore this calendar came to be, born from the fear the event caused. Other means to measure time became secondary.

The ancient calendar consists of 296 days each year, the first of which is always a Mirror Day. The rest of the divisions vary locally, depending on how they adapted their own calendars into the new time frame. The most notable are the Elvish adaptation, where they divide the year equally in two and settle for a faster tree cycle of 148 days already contemplated in their previous calendar, and the Human adaptation, where they divided the year into five periods of 59 days that allow two full trulp harvests and a small fallow period each, leaving the Mirror Day as a spare outside of any of the seasons.

The Sagolian calendar
A calendar of which very little is known because of the sudden disappearance of its users. The year span is rather short compared to previous calendars, and seems to sport small changes every few years, but aside from that, it is very regular. It is divided in eleven seasons and each season in a varying number of weeks of eleven days. It is not known in which events the year is based, but it has been speculated that it measured cycles of Felaryan magic energy or ley lines, while others claim that it was based on numerology alone. Either way, it hasn't been used since the fall of Ur-Sagol.

The new calendar
(also called the Negavian or the mechanical calendar by some)
This calendar has been made widespread by the efforts of numerous adventurers and merchants based in the city of Negav, which carry them around for the benefits it has when planning trips or harvests. The calendar was created by the eccentric timelogist Tanto "Kronos" Iccaim who was the first person to bring a precise mechanical clock to Felarya in the year 1792. Upon ascertaining that the rumours he had heard about a world where time seemed to flow erratically were true, he was determined to find a constant he could use to measure time. After years of research and discoveries, he published his original calendar, where a year lasted 120 days. It was later modified to three times that amount due to the population's psychological need to have at least one Mirror Day a year clearly marked in their calendar.

Tanto's calendar, therefore, assigns a length of 360 days to a year. This year is divided in fifteen periods of 24 days which he called a "Solar cycle", although time wore out its use in favour of the shorter term "month". Tanto arbitrarily divided this period into four "weeks" of 6 days each, happy to find that the basic number in his home planet's mathematics had something to do with Felarya's periodic nature.

The specifics behind that division, besides the arbitrary 6-day week, weren't found out until after Tanto's death in the Great Destruction of Negav. From the notes that could be rescued, the 24-day month had the peculiarity of having a constant value if all the daylight lengths were added. Tanto hadn't stopped there, however, and found out that not only day length, but also night length was constant after five repetitions of said month. That was what he originally intended to mark as a year, a period of 120 days where the time measured from the first sunrise to a moment before the one hundred and twenty-first sunrise was constant, no matter the uneven day lengths contained within that period. Still Negavians preferred to maintain the 360-days-a-year format.

Not only did Tanto develop a calendar, but also a smaller time measuring system to use in everyday planning. Only a few years later were experts able to decipher the complex notes that remained, which covered the details of his tuning of his own mechanical clock. Apparently, the findings involving the month and "old" year were done early in his research, and he spent the remaining years looking for a time frame that resulted in round numbers for month and year length. He eventually rebuilt his clock using a 25% pure cubic actinite half of an inch of side, which powered an electric engine moving the internal gears. He also changed his original sphere divided into thirty-six segments for another one divided in sixty segments. Two hands would slowly move around the sphere, one of them completing the circle in the time the other advanced just two segments. The name of those segments was lost, so experts called them "minute" because they were small and calling them "tiny" wouldn't have felt right. The longer segments that the slower hand moved while the other completed a circle were noted as "hour" by Tanto, and such is the name they still have to this day. It wasn't until the arrival of the Vishmitals, with even more precise methods of measuring time, that a smaller unit was created under the name of "second", since it was the second unit to use the sixty-segment system, in recognition to Tanto.

Such is the time-measuring system used up to this day. There have been attempts to change this system to a more simple one a few times, but the confidence in its use that Negavians have developed, and the round numbers it generates when coupled with the calendar, make it difficult for the government to establish simpler systems that are used in other worlds.

That is my suggestion for both the calendar and the time frame. To sum it up, we have:
- 60 seconds make a minute.
- 60 minutes make an hour
- Tanto's original clock had 30 hours. We can leave it that way since there's not a stable time reference for the length of a whole day, sunrise to sunrise. But we can establish a limit as in "It has never been observed a day longer than X hours". I suggest 30 for that X, now that I'm at it.
- 6 days make a week.
- 4 weeks (24 days) make a month.
- 15 months (60 weeks or 360 days) make a year.
- 336 hours of daylight in the 24-day month. Averages to 14 hours of light a day.
- 8,640 hours make up a 360-day year. Averages to 24 hours a day.
- Tanto's original 120-day year would last 2,880 hours, but it would still average to 24 hours a day, of course.

A lot of credit to Nyaha for the original idea of the constant length of time per period. You're da boss, man. If you want to discuss something, feel free to do so.

I ended up going more or less with people's opinion that simple makes best. I kept RL Earth's time system up to hours a day. I think the 6-day week and the 24-day month is simple enough for people to remember, while 360 days is as close as I could get to a real year length without going into non-round numbers.

Tell me your impressions. I expect a lot of critique here, so don't let me down.

Subject: Re: Keeping Time in Felarya Wed Feb 05, 2014 10:35 am

Okay, since nobody else is saying anything I will. First, I like the idea of having multiple calendars, each of which might still be used in present day Felarya, depending on geographic location. As for the last one, it's clear to see you put some definite work into figuring out how to arrange it all. I'm glad to see my idea not going to waste, too, personally. I do have a little problem with the terminology - while I like that you went for simplicity, the way you describe it sounds like they just happened to name them things that are the same as what we called them in English. Which I think is extremely unlikely. I think it would be more realistic if what they ended up calling each unit just translated into what we call them in English, but that might be seen as kind of a handwave, maybe? I dunno. I can't follow at all any of the details you described about how he rebuilt his clock, myself. I think it might have to be dumbed down a bit, I am sad to say, or maybe just put into layman's terms. I mean, overall it seems like a good system, but as I can't really follow everything that's been put into it I can't say too much about it. I also think there should be some mention of the fact that one of these calendar days could very well take place during a physical nighttime, seeing as their measure is meant to be independent of the actual length of days. At least, that's how it looks in my mind.

Subject: Re: Keeping Time in Felarya Wed Feb 05, 2014 7:49 pm

Well, names are not very important right now, I think that discussing the system takes precedence. Besides, I made up most of the name explanations on the spot, and I didn't even mention where "week" came from, so yeah. Can be changed any moment.

The clock explanation isn't really that deep. I just mention him using actinite, and since purity and size affect power output, I felt I should specify them. The sphere description just says that he ends up having a clock with sixty marks around the circle, just like ours. However, it doesn't have big marks every five spots like ours. It just has those sixty marks. It is also mentioned that, when the minute needle completes a whole circle, the hour needle only advances two marks. In our clock, the hour needle advances five marks even though we don't really notice because the hours are signalled big and we get the impression it has only advanced one mark. Internally it's no big deal, just bigger gears, so it can be done.

As for the days, I guess I forgot to state that calendar days are taken from sunrise to sunrise. "Day 1" of the year starts as the sun rises, and ends just as the first rays of sun appear after the night, giving way immediately to "Day 2". It goes this way since there is no way to predict when does the night reach its middle point, uneven as they are, with the only exception of the 120th night, since by then you know all the night lengths of the cycle and substracting them from the total gives you the exact night length of that one night. You know there is the same daylight time if you add up the whole month, so there's really no point in giving each day a set length and risking that a day is made up completely of night time. Also, just a mention. This system works best with a 'normal' day distribution. Sun rises, makes an arch and then sets, giving way to the night. If we go with Thy's theory of the still sun (which says that the sun is high up in the sky, unmoving, then just disappears in the blink of an eye) the system will still work, but it will lose a lot of its prediction power. After all, with the 'normal' day, you can more or less tell how much is left before sunset based on how long the day has been from sunrise to midday (when the sun is at its zenith).

Subject: Re: Keeping Time in Felarya Thu Feb 06, 2014 4:38 am

This is all getting too complicated for me. Consider me out of this conversation.

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