Time and Dates

235 years ago, Tolan Prime did away with the different timekeeping systems of the world and standardized on a single time system. The Tolan Time Initiative (TTI) put forth the following standard for the second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Historically, in the beginning this created much confusion and contention. There was even a short uprising by a few of the then independent states.

Let’s start with a year. Tolan Prime circles Tolaris Major in 400.1 days. So a year is 400 days, except every 10th year which is 401 days. This did not change from historical accounts. A year was then divided into 10 months of 40 days each. This is where things drastically changed.

Months are no longer given names, but numbers from 01 to 10 are used. The leading 0 for less then ten must be included, at least in official documents. The extra day was added between month 10 and 01 and is just called “Jump Day”. When “Jump Day” comes around, the month and day are set to 00. The year is incremented to the new year. “Jump Day” is a global celebration day if you must know.

Each month is divided into 4, 10 day weeks. The weeks are number 01 to 04, but nobody really uses them. The days are number starting at 01 and go through 40. This tells you why no one uses the weeks, its just easier to count to 40. Changing the months was bad enough, but changing the weeks and days is what really caused things to boil over. The real reason that this became such an issue is a week being 10 days, people worked longer weeks. To make things consistent, the first and last day of the week are considered the weekends. So day 01, 10, 11, 20, 21, 30, 31 and 40 are traditional days off. This means an 8 day work week. Salaries didn’t change for the year to compensate for the additional working days, put employers sure benefited. Now you know why it caused such a revolt.

Now a day is 10 hours long, each hour is 100 minutes, each minute 100 seconds for a total of 100,000 seconds per day. Hours, minutes, and seconds start at 00 and count up. So, hours go from 00 to 09, minutes from 00 to 99, and seconds from 00 to 99. In a way, the government leaders made it easier to define and work with time, but people just don’t like change. Just an aside, the actual amount of time a work day is didn’t change. I think that the officials realized the work week change would be bad enough, so they kept the work day the same.

Now the interesting part is that a second is based off of a time source that emits beta particles at a specific rate. Scientist who devised the time keeping standard, put forth the plan of using this source and count out 10,000,000,000 beta particles and make this a standard second. Only a few know that this is also, the rate of beta particles that are emitted from Tolaris Minor. For some reason the science community and government don’t want people to know this.

Lastly, the final change occurred when time zones where done a way with. So, throughout the Tolan solar system, the time is always the same, Tolan Universal Time (TUT).

So there you have it, the Tolarian time keeping standard.

More on time and dates

Data and time are expressed as:

YYYYMMDD:HHMM[SS]

To give an example of dates and times, today’s date and time would be:

27350129:075035

That is: year 2735, month 01 out of 10, day 29 out of 40, hour 07 out of 10, minute 50 out of 100, seconds 35 out of 100. In general, common daily use or conversation, the seconds are usually left off (unless you have a thing about time).

For sub-second times a decimal point is placed after the seconds.