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Shipboard Chronometers & Jump Space

A few SF novels I've been reading recently bring up the subject of a ship losing-gaining time when it travels through hyperspace (read J-space), generally a minor variance of a few seconds but still such 'phenomena' occurring is still concerning.

My question is has Traveller in any version addressed the issue of lost-found time when re-entering 'normal' space ?
 
I've been wondering about this myself lately. iMTU I already have various Imperial offices and facilities on a world keep dual time (local and Imperial Standard Time) especially with the different day lengths. But I haven't figured out how worlds synchronise their Imperial clocks. On the other hand, as long as you're in the right ballpark does it matter that much?
 
I've not seen anything that says that the subjective time for a ship in jump is at variance to the subjective time of the rest of the universe.

however, since you can make in system jumps, you could, in theory, run a series of "calibration" jumps, where you make "shuttle" jumps between two points close enough to send radio signals between, which would let you compare ship time with a fixed reference time, and thus spot discrepancies with a high degree of accuracy.

The above technique is feasible as soon as jump drive is invented, and thus has had literally thousands of years to be done, I take the view it would be highly unlikely that nobody has tried it (either on purpose or just by using in-system jumps to shortcut a long realspace haul). And since time variance is never mentioned, I take the view it doesn't happen to a level worth worrying about.


like Hemdian, I have the imperium work on standardised time (specifically, the time as measured at the Imperial Palace, Capital), which is used by the Navy and officials when dealing with inter-system affairs. Every member world has a reference longitude define as the meridian (normally that of the control tower of The Starport, for simplicity), and the rest of the world works it out form there.
 
I've been wondering about this myself lately. iMTU I already have various Imperial offices and facilities on a world keep dual time (local and Imperial Standard Time) especially with the different day lengths. But I haven't figured out how worlds synchronise their Imperial clocks. On the other hand, as long as you're in the right ballpark does it matter that much?

If jump does not involve time dilation then I imagine worlds could sync with any passing Imperial Naval vessel, if not then you are stuck with ballpark figures, just my 0.02 credits.
 
I've been wondering about this myself lately. iMTU I already have various Imperial offices and facilities on a world keep dual time (local and Imperial Standard Time) especially with the different day lengths. But I haven't figured out how worlds synchronise their Imperial clocks. On the other hand, as long as you're in the right ballpark does it matter that much?

In the OTU there is an Office of Calendar Compliance iirc correctly. Standard time should be a major part of their remit.

IMTU there is Imperial Standard Navigation Time based reference to pulsars. Simplifying all the science; everyone can see the reference pulsars and so can calibrate their shipboard timepieces.

There was somewhere on the interwebs an article about timepieces in Traveller including a TL chart. The article made reference to clocks (on ships or in computers) being "grav shielded" to avoid interference from G and M Drives.
 
The Captain breaks out the modern equivalent of the sextant, takes a few bearings, and the computer corrects shiptime with realspace time.
 
I've been wondering about this myself lately. iMTU I already have various Imperial offices and facilities on a world keep dual time (local and Imperial Standard Time) especially with the different day lengths. But I haven't figured out how worlds synchronise their Imperial clocks.

They could synchronise against quasar transmissions. EDIT - I meant pulsars, not quasars, although quasars would make ideal reference points for a positioning system.

On the other hand, as long as you're in the right ballpark does it matter that much?

For co-ordinated military campaigns, absolutely. Particularly things like arranging for forces from different orriginating systems to arrive at a specific target system at the same time.

Also it would be vital for safe and accurate jump navigation. Planets and such are constantly moving in their orbits. If you want to get close to a planet, but far enough away to be safe, you need to know exactly where it will be and when it will be there.

Simon Hibbs
 
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I would think it would have to work sort of like it does with ships today.

That is, since the length of a day on some planet would vary it would be difficult to have a standard time unless the locals were willing to put up with all sorts of oddities like having to get up for work at a different time each day, that sort of thing.

So, you would have local time. This wasn't uncommon before the Industrial Revolution and even pretty common until things like the telegraph and railroads appeared making it necessary to standardize time tables and communications times.

Ships would have something that approximates "Zulu time." That is the ship runs on a separate standard day clock that is widely or universally used. That allows for information about planet and system positioning to align with any ship anywhere.
You know where the stars are on Zulu time and that is consistent everywhere you go.

But, you might arrive in-system at say 0200 Zulu time only to find it's locally 3205 in the middle of the day or something odd depending on what the length of a local day is.

So, you could have a ship's captain do something like say "We arrived at 0800 Zulu, so turn to and get a day's worth of work out since it's locally 0200 in the morning on a 30 hour day. When you knock off at 1600 we'll reset ship's time to local so it's 1000. That way you get in a full day's work and full day's liberty all on the same day! :devil:
 
I've been wondering about this myself lately. iMTU I already have various Imperial offices and facilities on a world keep dual time (local and Imperial Standard Time) especially with the different day lengths. But I haven't figured out how worlds synchronise their Imperial clocks.
As was mentioned, pulsars. But even without that you can establish a local GST (Galactic Standard Time) that's pretty accurate. Simply average the ship time of every ship that jumps in. After a few hundred, you'll be pretty close.

In my campaigns I take it for granted that people will distinguish between GST and local time. I even worked out the differences for a couple of my worlds and used it in the campaign. Let me tell you, it's a royal pain to keep track of and rarely worth the effort, even though it does increase the verisimilitude of the setting.


Hans
 
Why not just trust in quantum causality and have jumps not mess up time keeping? Seems simpler and cleaner to me.

And keeps one from having to maintain devilishly detailed records of actual time vs real time, so to speak.
 
Why not just trust in quantum causality and have jumps not mess up time keeping? Seems simpler and cleaner to me.

And keeps one from having to maintain devilishly detailed records of actual time vs real time, so to speak.

Because anything Quantum is both at once very predictable and yet impossible to predict...

Besides, the temporal anomalies of misjumps in MT and TNE make time in J-space not always flowing at the same rate as N-space.
 
But, you might arrive in-system at say 0200 Zulu time only to find it's locally 3205 in the middle of the day or something odd depending on what the length of a local day is.

3205 at which point on the mainworld's surface?

I suppose what you'd normally care about is the local time at the starport, but a universal zulu time will be just as useful and relevant within systems as it is between them.

Simon Hibbs
 
Why not just trust in quantum causality and have jumps not mess up time keeping? Seems simpler and cleaner to me.

And keeps one from having to maintain devilishly detailed records of actual time vs real time, so to speak.

Because this is Traveller. If you don't have design sequences for Atomic Clocks and Time Technican - 1, what's the point?
 
3205 at which point on the mainworld's surface?

I suppose what you'd normally care about is the local time at the starport, but a universal zulu time will be just as useful and relevant within systems as it is between them.

Simon Hibbs

But, you'd still want some standard local time based on planetary rotation time, orbital time, that sort of thing as it would be very inconvenient for those living there to have to deal with when sunrise and sunset are in terms of the day. On industrialized worlds when the work day starts and ends, etc., would be better set on a clock that syncs with planetary motion.
Imagine Earth where everyday the time you get up is the same but today it's after sunrise, tomorrow it's before it, the next day it's in the middle of the night. That could be bad on things like people's circadian rhythm and the like.

I suppose if the environment locally were artificial it wouldn't matter. Locals on low tech agrarian worlds probably wouldn't care either as they wouldn't really need clocks for day to day use.
Let's say you are on a world that still uses celestial navigation for sailing at sea. You need to know when local noon is as well as when sunrise and sunset are to help you navigate.
So, there are lots of good reasons for a local clock as well as a "universal" one.
 
But, you'd still want some standard local time based on planetary rotation time, orbital time, that sort of thing as it would be very inconvenient for those living there to have to deal with when sunrise and sunset are in terms of the day. On industrialized worlds when the work day starts and ends...

I think you're missing my point. On a planet which has day and night, the sun is always rising somewhere. You're not necessarily going to have a standard work day start and end for a whole world any more than we do on Earth. When I start my working day here in London the rest of my team in New York are still asleep and my colleague in India is having lunch.

There's no such thing as a standard local time that can apply to everywhere on a planet and match the day night cycle everywhere, unless it's tidally locked. What will be constant on any given planet is the day length, but that's all. However for each possible hour on the local clock, there will be somewhere on the planet for which that is the current local time. My niece came to visit us from China yesterday as it happens, and when we had breakfast at 07:00am this morning it was already 14:00pm in her home town. You can't think about local clocks matching day night cycles in terms of whole planets, only the clock 'length' but not the actual time.

Edits for clarity.

Simon Hibbs
 
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The only local time that matters to a starship is that of the starport - whether a high-port or a downport.

So a starship certainly can refer to "the local time" and know exactly what that is in reference to ship's time.
 
I think you're missing my point. On a planet which has day and night, the sun is always rising somewhere. You're not necessarily going to have a standard work day start and end for a whole world any more than we do on Earth. When I start my working day here in London the rest of my team in New York are still asleep and my colleague in India is having lunch.

There's no such thing as a standard local time that can apply to everywhere on a planet and match the day night cycle everywhere, unless it's tidally locked. What will be constant on any given planet is the day length, but that's all. However for each possible hour on the local clock, there will be somewhere on the planet for which that is the current local time. My niece came to visit us from China yesterday as it happens, and when we had breakfast at 07:00am this morning it was already 14:00pm in her home town. You can't think about local clocks matching day night cycles in terms of whole planets, only the clock 'length' but not the actual time.

Edits for clarity.

Simon Hibbs

What I was getting at was a planet having a clock that doesn't measure something regular in terms of the planet. On Earth the 24 hour clock is set on planetary rotation. We then use time zones to standardize that clock locally. So, you get up each day at 0800 to got to work. That's what matters to somebody where they are. What you don't want is a clock that measures local time that everyday, where you are at, the sun might be up, it might be night, it might be dawn, it might be sunset. That would mess people up big time.
Now, if the environment were artificial and the lighting etc., could be controlled using universal time is fine.

Sure, ships can be on some universal standard time. That can be available at the starport (assuming it is open 24/7 so-to-speak). It is unimportant to the locals and it would be unimportant for most planetary business.
Where it would be important is knowing what other systems and planets were doing, where they'd be, and that is important to starship crews and astronomers. Joe factory worker could care less.

What someone wouldn't be doing is going on Bombay time in Los Angeles and expecting everyone to understand that.
 
In orbit, time doesn't really matter unless an administrative office is closed. If the high port is geosynchronous (ostensibly to the associated downport), then the two are likely bound together in terms of what "day" and "night" mean.

Perhaps someone with Submarine or ship experience can talk about "Zulu" time, which as I understand it, is the US military clock schedule, and whether they actually "stay" on Zulu time on land, or simply adjust their watches to normal time and be done with it.

Universal time is not particularly important, especially since Jump is random. Having precise time doesn't really buy you anything. Rather, you jump in (however long it took), note the duration, then convert your clocks to the local system time (perhaps the main starport time), and then start working on jump lag and day lag. Jump lag is simply dealing with time offset (like a time zone here), day lag is dealing with the different lengths of physical days on the individual planets.

It's easy to see how orbital facilities in a system would all be on the same clock and day/night cycle, again, likely tied to the main planet. They need to pick "something", may as well pick the time that most of the population are using. Dual mode clocks will be quite common to correlate different time areas, and, perhaps, for the lowest of default cases, those folks in the lone system doing nothing but asteroid mining, there might be an Imperial standard day (or whatever).

But, simply, if you have a populated planet, that's not tide locked, that's going to be the dominant clock of the system, as they do most of the work, and beings bind to the day/night cycle, so, as with everywhere, more people will start their day in the morning.
 
What I was getting at was a planet having a clock that doesn't measure something regular in terms of the planet. On Earth the 24 hour clock is set on planetary rotation. We then use time zones to standardize that clock locally. So, you get up each day at 0800 to got to work. That's what matters to somebody where they are. What you don't want is a clock that measures local time that everyday, where you are at, the sun might be up, it might be night, it might be dawn, it might be sunset. That would mess people up big time.
Now, if the environment were artificial and the lighting etc., could be controlled using universal time is fine.

Sure, ships can be on some universal standard time. That can be available at the starport (assuming it is open 24/7 so-to-speak). It is unimportant to the locals and it would be unimportant for most planetary business.
Where it would be important is knowing what other systems and planets were doing, where they'd be, and that is important to starship crews and astronomers. Joe factory worker could care less.

What someone wouldn't be doing is going on Bombay time in Los Angeles and expecting everyone to understand that.

The US Navy crewman often lives by a 22 hour day when afloat... the 7 watch system, but the crewman's personal day is 6 watches. And if your sleep falls on a dog watch, you get 6 hours instead of 8. (And evntually, it hits both dogs, and then you have 4 hours of sleep... but I've heard from a number of sailors that those days, you take your personal time watch as a nap...)

And the sumariners do 4 long watches (6hr) per day but normally on a 3 watch sleep rotation, resulting in an 18-hour personal day.

the UK's RN also used and sometimes still uses the same watch system.

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/questions/bells.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/nrtc/12018_ch3.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_system

Normally, I wouldn't cite Wikipedia, but the illos are excellent, and it shows a diversity of watchstanding time-systems. I can't find my old Bluejacket's Manual to look at what it says - but I recall it had 3 different watch rotation systems.
 
But, you'd still want some standard local time based on planetary rotation time, orbital time, that sort of thing as it would be very inconvenient for those living there to have to deal with when sunrise and sunset are in terms of the day.

Sure, for points on a planet you'd have local times. When you arrive on the planet's surface you'd switch over to using local time for that location, or at least would ahve to bear it in mind.

But it doesn't make sense to say that you arrive in a system to find that it's the middle of the day. That concept doesn't mean anything at the system level. To my mind 'system' time will be universal zulu time, at least in the Imperium.

Simon Hibbs
 
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