On Sun, 31 Aug 2025 10:05:56 -0400, kaladorn wrote:

>Sometimes you just don't see something because you come to a subject with
>an understanding and thus you don't look at why the subject is as it is and
>whether the way it is construed is never questioned.
>
>I just found myself considering aspects of time in the Universe of
>Traveller.

>*Mortgages: *
>We measure payments based on either a Terran day and month and year or at
>least consider a payment is based on 28 days (4 weeks) of a Terran day
>(24-ish hours). Does this make sense?

>Why would 11,000 systems with so many sophonts (and many not human and with
>a lot of history before humans walked anywhere) choose to use a strange
>reference for time like a planet long removed from the center of power?

I would hold that for any given world, there will be two time standards:
the local standard, whatever it is, and the Imperial standard, for use in
interstellar commerce and in dealing with the Imperial administrative
apparatus.

If Joe Btfsplk goes to the Bank of Elbonia to get a mortgage for his new
home on Elbonia's Southeastern Northwest mudflat, it will be denominated in
Elbonian Mudballs, and for a period measured in Elbonian annos with payment
due every Q Elbonian sols.

On the other hand, if Merchant Captain Massachusetts Thurgood-Smythe comes
into some money, and wants to purchase an Empress Marava trader, he'll go
to an Imperially-chartered bank (perhaps a subsidiary of Hortalez et cie)
on Ish Kabibble, who will write a mortgage denominated in Imperial credits,
for a period measured in Imperial Standard years, and with payment due
every Z Imperial Standard days. This way, he can trade as he likes, and
will not have to return to Ish Kabibble every other trip to make payment;
he can make payment on schedule wherever he is as long as the bank that
wrote the mortgage - or a correspondent Imperially-chartered bank - has
representation at his current port of call.

On the third hand, if "Wild Bill" Williams, IN, ret.,  has retired to
Fletcher's Belt, and decides to try his hand at belt mining, he may not
need a jump-capable ship, so he goes to a local bank to take out a mortgage
on a decommissioned Beowulf with the jump drive yanked out and the space
converted to cargo. Since the primary market for mined minerals is
jump-capable traders from out-system (like Captain Thurgood-Smythe, above),
it makes sense for the mortgage to be written in Imperial credits, but the
period of the mortgage may be measured in local annos with payment due
every J Standard Imperial days. Or not, depending on what the local
government of Fletcher's Belt decided when they set up their local
standards.

>If I bought my ship on planet X with daycycles of Z seconds and where the
>bank that underwrites the purchase is on another planet X1 in the sector
>with daycycles of Z1 seconds and where the ship is at this moment on planet
>X2 in space or on planet with dacycle of Z2 seconds... why in all that is
>holy would you be using an crazy, old, problematic Terran standard from
>TL-5 or less?
>
>Shouldn't we just have a time reference that comes from some invariant
>quantity of space time as the base time unit?

«cue Tevye» Tradition!

Time references come in useful sizes for whatever purpose they have, and
often before high-precision measurement becomes possible. Once that sort of
high-precision measurement becomes possible, the already-extant units
simply get redefined using those high-precision invariants (such as the
meter no longer being defined by a physical platinum standard in a vault in
France or in Washington DC, or by a specific fraction of the distance
between two specific points along a particular arc of a specific planet,
but by a certain fraction of the distance that light travels in vacuum
during a period defined by a certain number of repetitions of a specific
electron transition within a specific type of atom).

As far as using Terra-based units, that falls back to 'tradition' - the
Rule of Man would have used Terran units, since Terra was The Conqueror;
arguably, Sylea would have imposed their measurements on the nascent Third
Imperium, except that (a), canonically, Sylean units were a close match for
Terran, and (b) there might have been a decision made to use Terran units
because of the connection with the Rule of Man, which the Third Imperium
claimed to be the inheritor to.

>And shouldn't we see that reference as the basis of all Imperial time/date
>usages?
>
>We have improved our reference in terms of space and speed by better base
>references. We have come out of a way to have a mass reference that will no
>longer use a bunch of 'almost similar' mass references sitting in vaults
>around the world, but from a more reliable base reference.

Yes, but our units are still nominally "the same" - that is, we don't
actually measure things in Atomic Mass Units, we still measure them in
kilograms; we just redefined the kilogram in terms of AMU. But by and
large, we don't actually _need_ that level of precision in day-to-day life,
because we really don't care if that half-kilogram of bananas that we just
bought is exactly thus-and-so-many AMU; it just has to be close enough for
our banana bread to taste right.

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