Why "Langhorne's Watch"?

Julia Minor wrote:Apologies if this has already been discussed.

Safehold's day is 26 hours 31 minutes long, according to Old Terra's calculation of time. Hence the existence of "Langhorne's Watch", known on every other colony planet as "Compensate", inserted to make Safehold's day mesh up with Terran timekeeping.

But wouldn't it have been easier for Langhorne and Company to simply split one Safehold day into an even 26 hours? If my math is correct, that would have made a Safehold second just over 10% longer than a Terran second. It should have been simple enough to tell the command staff's computers to convert Terran time to Safehold time before displaying a clock, and definitely would have made the colonists' mechanical clocks easier to build.

It just doesn't make sense for Langhorne to keep Compensate around when he's already decided humanity will never leave Safehold, and thus will never need to worry about synchronizing clocks to different planetary rotations.

I'd also love to know how the Writ justified the Archangels picking an odd number like that for the length of the day. But we've only got tiny fragments of the Writ -- it's entirely possible "Holy Langhorne" is said to have done something during Creation that 1) rated daily commemoration and 2) took 31 minutes.

Dilandu wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:

Part of it was force of habit, but don't forget what those extra minutes are called on Safehold. It's not "Compensate," as it is in the Honorverse, but rather "Langhorne's Watch." In other words, God created a day which was 26 hours long and then set aside a special 30-minute period in which His people are supposed to show their reverence for him and during which His presence on Earth (or, rather, Safehold) is most strongly felt and commemorated.

Also a bit of just technical problems. While the lenght of day is generally of no technical concerns, the definition of second was clearly hardwired in all Archangel's high-tech equipment. Changing it would require to recalibrate just nearly everything they have, and it would be enormous waste of efforts & resources (not to mention, that it may led to potential software bugs & crashes).

dobriennm wrote:
A technical problem? Yes and no.

You are quite correct that it causes problems when you (one of the Angels) are doing calculations (like using your computer or high tech equipment). So when you as an Angel are doing things, you just keep using Earth Standard seconds on your equipment.

But when you are interacting with a muscle bound society using Roman numerals for numbers (not base 10 numbers like ours) keeping time/speed in the "new seconds/minutes/hours" shouldn't be that hard since you can have your clocks/velocimeters simply display that. After all, they had to have that kind of display conversion for their calendars since that's different from Earth Standard. (different day/month/year length). More than likely, they had to have that kind of display conversion for the sejjinn's gadgets so they wouldn't be confused.

I think we as persons accustomed to telling time done to the second on our watches, having speed displayed in 0.1 m/s increments, etc, that we forget that a muscle bound society doesn't think that way (no, they're not stupid, it's simply not needed in day to day life for pretty much everyone).

So yes, changing the definition of second on the computer/equipment would mess up everything and the Angels wouldn't do that.

But for display and interacting with the unaware colonists, the Angels had to do some display conversion anyway to keep synchronized with them. (even doing length conversions from meters to feet, etc)

But, the Author is right (well, the author is always right, obviously) that throwing in a daily reminder to show reverence to God is a much more powerful influence to help freeze the society in place. So that's the winning argument, really

Whitecold wrote:And generations of Safeholdian clockmakers produced mechanical clocks which skip 31 minutes each day...

It honestly surprises me that no clockmaker came up with a mechanical calculator yet.

Whitecold wrote:And generations of Safeholdian clockmakers produced mechanical clocks which skip 31 minutes each day...

It honestly surprises me that no clockmaker came up with a mechanical calculator yet.

jlrice54 wrote:I suspect it was simply habit on Longhorne’s part. He reverted to the long dead English measurements of inches, feet, miles, pounds, ounces and probably pints, quarts and gallons. Why would he want to change the length of time measurements? I suspect that even if the Gbaba never existed, Langhorne would ha e been a Luddite.