Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Galactic Standard Time

sparth.com
Galactic Standard Time (GST) is a standard of time units taken from the Imperium. While there has been discussion with the Federation employing its own standard time units, this was discarded to ensure uniformity in research and development (mostly due to substantial influence from megacorporations that wanted to avoid additional production costs). One hour is 60 minutes, and one minute is 60 seconds. A standard GST day is 20 hours. A week is 8 days, five weeks comprising a 40 day month, with a standard GST year being 400 days.

Even though GST is used, most systems employ different times for days and years entirely dependent on the rotation of the major planet within that system. While seconds, minutes, and hours are always GST, the notion of a 20 hour day is flexible. Weeks and months retain the same GST, but additional months (or a partial month) is utilized to make up observed year variations for different systems. Hence most systems employ a Planetary System Time (PST) as well as GST.

All PST days are split between an even day/night cycle. Most personal data units offer a quick conversion application to translate between GST and PST. Commonly information that is interstellar in nature relies on GST, while more local events rely on PST.