What is "noon" to a Charisan?

AirTech wrote:...

Going to a clock with 36 divisions takes one step out of the calculations - the conversion from hours to degrees.

runsforcelery wrote:The Safeholdian day begins with the first second of the first minute after Langhorne's Watch, which would be 00:00:01. Noon is 13:00:00 (for clock purposes), and most (not all) Safeholdian civilians start again with "1 in the afternoon" following that and end with midnight (or "13 at night") at 26:00:00. Langhorne's Watch isn't actually part of the day at all, as far as Safeholding timekeeping conventions are concerned, and as Weird Harold suggests, it is centered on celestial midnight so that celestial noon occurs when the sun is highest overhead, regardless of when "13 o'clock" happens to fall.

The Charisian military (and, increasingly, other militaries) use the equivalent of 24-hour timekeeping and count the first hour after noon as 14:00:00 and, as our own military, would call that "fourteen hundred hours." The civilians who use that timekeeping convention (which includes Charisians; one reason it was easy for their military to adopt it) would refer to that as "fourteen o'clock" or simply "fourteen" rather than "fourteen hundred hours".

As for how the Safeholdians build accurate chronometers, they do it by combining and cross-connecting two of them in a single case. One counts the hours and minutes of the official day and stops each day at the instant Langhorne’s Watch begins; the second counts the minutes of Langhorne’s Watch and displays them on an inset face. At the end of Langhorne’s Watch, the second chronometer stops and the first one resumes at 00:00:01. Trust me, it took them a long time to come up with a way that worked, and the . . . complexity of the challenge is one reason watchmakers have always earned a lot of money on Safehold. It’s also one of the reasons Howsmyn’s chief instrument maker was so good at his job.


Does that help?

jgnfld wrote:NOOO...one hour is 15 degrees. God said so. Everyone who has ever learned to navigate knows this. What are you thinking???!!!

AirTech wrote:...

Going to a clock with 36 divisions takes one step out of the calculations - the conversion from hours to degrees.

Hildum wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:The Safeholdian day begins with the first second of the first minute after Langhorne's Watch, which would be 00:00:01. Noon is 13:00:00 (for clock purposes), and most (not all) Safeholdian civilians start again with "1 in the afternoon" following that and end with midnight (or "13 at night") at 26:00:00. Langhorne's Watch isn't actually part of the day at all, as far as Safeholding timekeeping conventions are concerned, and as Weird Harold suggests, it is centered on celestial midnight so that celestial noon occurs when the sun is highest overhead, regardless of when "13 o'clock" happens to fall.

The Charisian military (and, increasingly, other militaries) use the equivalent of 24-hour timekeeping and count the first hour after noon as 14:00:00 and, as our own military, would call that "fourteen hundred hours." The civilians who use that timekeeping convention (which includes Charisians; one reason it was easy for their military to adopt it) would refer to that as "fourteen o'clock" or simply "fourteen" rather than "fourteen hundred hours".

As for how the Safeholdians build accurate chronometers, they do it by combining and cross-connecting two of them in a single case. One counts the hours and minutes of the official day and stops each day at the instant Langhorne’s Watch begins; the second counts the minutes of Langhorne’s Watch and displays them on an inset face. At the end of Langhorne’s Watch, the second chronometer stops and the first one resumes at 00:00:01. Trust me, it took them a long time to come up with a way that worked, and the . . . complexity of the challenge is one reason watchmakers have always earned a lot of money on Safehold. It’s also one of the reasons Howsmyn’s chief instrument maker was so good at his job.


Does that help?

Why would it have taken a long time. Similar clocks were used on earth, with even more complex time keeping properties. The Japanese daimyo clocks tracked time using the Japanese system, where the day and night were divided into the same number of periods, dusk and dawn being the changeover points, which changed length as the season changed. The clocks were built with two escapements, and weights that would be positioned in twenty six positions on the dual escapements. The weighs would be moved every two weeks, changing the speed of the clock every two weeks. At dusk or dawn, the clock would automatically switch between escapements. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock