What is "noon" to a Charisan?

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?

For navigation purposes this complexity would be totally unnecessary, a single dial clock with a celestial time given as a solar angle (in degrees, minutes and seconds) would save a lot of useless complications in a mechanical time piece, with an optional a second scale for calibration in local time would be far more useful, if you want to add complications you could build in a version of the Antikythera mechanism and predict the position of a number of guide stars at a given time relative to your reference port and even optionally enter a guide star elevation and have it calculate latitude and longitude automatically. Having bells and whistles involved in interconnected time piece, or even clutch connected dual displays would be a recipe for loosing seconds per day due to the inherent mechanical slop in such a system, accuracy in a sea borne clock or chronometer requires attention to the basics of the time keeping mechanisms. Mechanical counter systems operating on similar principles are however not too hard to build and I have seen similar interrupted motion designs.
The regulator system in another matter, pendulums for example simply don't work in a moving reference system, unlike a land based clock, as a minimum a temperature compensated dual balance wheel system or similar novel system - this is totally unrelated to the complexity of the display. Issues like this is why hour glasses continued in use on ships centuries after accurate mechanical time pieces where in use on land.

I never said Langhorne wanted to make it easy.

Actually, the importance of chronometers and accurate noon sights for navigation is vastly overrated. The more recent research indicates that until well into the 19th century, DED reckoning (for "deduced reckoning") was the preferred mode for most mariners. A good 15th-16th century navigator, for example, could hit a landfall after a trans-Atlantic voyage within 30-40 miles of his intended destination without ever taking a sight, simply by keeping track of his headings and his estimated speed through the water. Celestial navigation as we know it today (or did before GPS, at least) was a product of the need to nail down where specific pieces of land/territory were, not to figure out how to reach them. And the reason that was important was that Europeans were beginning to stake claims to other people's property all over the world and needed to be able to demonstrate conclusively which bit of property they were talking about. It didn't really supplant DED reckoning for maritime use until the age of flight, and even today a good sailor keeps a DED reckoning plot as a backup in case all the fancy electronics decide to hiccup and quit.

There are still at least a few of the "rutters," or sailing directions, composed by master mariners in the 16th century to allow for currents, wind drift, etc., which will allow you to sail from a point in the Med to one in South America without any instruments other than a compass and a way to accurately estimate your vessel's speed through the water. In fact, what made the Cahrisian merchant marine supreme on Safehold was the fact that there mariners had not only composed more of those "rutters" than anyone else but that the Royal College had collected and combined them more or les a la Nathaniel Bowditch.

runsforcelery wrote:I never said Langhorne wanted to make it easy.

Actually, the importance of chronometers and accurate noon sights for navigation is vastly overrated. The more recent research indicates that until well into the 19th century, DED reckoning (for "deduced reckoning") was the preferred mode for most mariners...

Yes. Especially in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf areas. As I mentioned earlier, Charis doesn't appear to have commerce across Pacific-sized oceans, for example. Blue water voyages aren't terribly long the way the map is constructed.

As one example, much Atlantic commerce (fishing, treasure fleets, etc) used to go east in the spring with the seasonal easterlies and then west in the fall with the normally prevailing westerlies. Historically there was seasonal trade from the Middle East to Asia dependent on specific winds. Without a customized GCM (!) I don't know how the trade winds would act on Safehold given the geographical differences, but I assume such proven routes--contained in the rutters of those proving the routes--exist all over the place seasonally and year round.

I do have trouble believing that anyone using time to navigate or make map calculations wouldn't come up with the concept of a "nautical day" however!

And I do wonder how clock time is related to whatever Hastings used to depict longitude.

Right this minute, BTW, there is a beautiful set of easterlies across the North Atlantic http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wi ... ,14.94,313 I expect the spring fishing fleet from Bristol any moment (I live in Newfoundland)!

Finally, all of the above would NOT be so true of military vessels. They used navigation by time and sights extensively.

jgnfld wrote:(Big SNIP)

Finally, all of the above would NOT be so true of military vessels. They used navigation by time and sights extensively.

Just a minor point - until recently, the majority of naval ships were galleys, and as such mainly coastal....

The idea of Power Projection was limited in scope, and so there wasn't much need for military vessels to go on long open-ocean voyages.

Why still have Earth Standard seconds anyway. The Federation had to have had computers that could have split up the Safeholdian day into 24 even hours and provided the plans for timekeeping devices. I can see keeping 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a hour because it makes the gearing simpler but there is no reason to keep the second the same length. The second is basically an arbitrary length anyway so change it to fit the planet your on. There might be some computers or systems running in the temple that would still run on Earth time but only the priesthood would know about it and it would become a secret holy time or something like that.

I was speaking of Earth military in response to RFCs point about dead reckoning.

Re. Safehold, yes that is relevant.

MWadwell wrote:

jgnfld wrote:(Big SNIP)

Finally, all of the above would NOT be so true of military vessels. They used navigation by time and sights extensively.

Just a minor point - until recently, the majority of naval ships were galleys, and as such mainly coastal....

The idea of Power Projection was limited in scope, and so there wasn't much need for military vessels to go on long open-ocean voyages.

I suspect the use of Earth hours/minutes/seconds and "comp" for Safehold was partially "that's the way we've always done this".

When the Terran Federation settled worlds, the planetary time keeping continued to use Earth hours etc. for the ease of communicating time with "off-worlders".

So when Langhorne and company set up Safehold's time keeping system, their first thoughts were to do it the way "we've always done this".

It's possible that somebody on Langhorne's staff suggested setting up a simpler time keeping system where the Safehold day was equally divided in Safehold "hours" which would be different than Earth hours, David Weber's joke about "I never said Langhorne wanted to make it easy" may reflect the actual truth of the matter.

That is, Langhorne saw the difficulty of creating clocks as a feature not a bug.

I believe some have said that accuracy in time-keeping helped create the modern world but Langhorne wanted to prevent the "modern world" from developing on Safehold.

MPCatchup wrote:Why still have Earth Standard seconds anyway. The Federation had to have had computers that could have split up the Safeholdian day into 24 even hours and provided the plans for timekeeping devices. I can see keeping 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a hour because it makes the gearing simpler but there is no reason to keep the second the same length. The second is basically an arbitrary length anyway so change it to fit the planet your on. There might be some computers or systems running in the temple that would still run on Earth time but only the priesthood would know about it and it would become a secret holy time or something like that.

=2014/04/28=
Hi Guys

One reason to use Old Earth's hours/minutes/seconds might be that all our scientific data and procedures are based on these units.

So, it is easier to remember the difference in the length of a day than it would be to re-learn all the other scientific formulae based on s different time unit.

?? Comments ??

R
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MPCatchup wrote:Why still have Earth Standard seconds anyway. The Federation had to have had computers that could have split up the Safeholdian day into 24 even hours and provided the plans for timekeeping devices. I can see keeping 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a hour because it makes the gearing simpler but there is no reason to keep the second the same length. The second is basically an arbitrary length anyway so change it to fit the planet your on. There might be some computers or systems running in the temple that would still run on Earth time but only the priesthood would know about it and it would become a secret holy time or something like that.

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

kbus888 wrote:One reason to use Old Earth's hours/minutes/seconds might be that all our scientific data and procedures are based on these units.

That sounds like more of an argument against preserving Earth Standard time units. Langhorne wanted to stifle science, not preserve it. That's why Safehold uses (used) localized imperial measurements and roman numerals.