In a setting with nearly infinite worlds, each with their own rotation and orbital periods, tracking time can be extremely complicated. Fortunately, one of the Galactic Alliance’s first acts as a government was to institute a universal system of measurements to keep everything running smoothly.
When someone refers to an hour, day, or year, they’re usually referring to Galactic Standard Time. Under this scheme, a day has 24 hours of 60 minutes each. Through an astronomical anomaly, this happens to match the day-night cycle on an alarming number of major worlds, as well as the shift schedule on Edras Station, hence its adoption. The length of the year—365 days, with 52 weeks in a year—is based on the length of Edras Station’s orbit around it’s sun, Cere. When people want to refer to a particular planet’s rotation or orbit, they generally use terms like “local day” or “local year.”
Modern history records years in AG, which stands for “After Gap,” referring to the number of years since the end of the Gap, when memory and history once again became reliable. Events that occurred before the oldest edge of the Gap are often referred to as PG (“Pre-Gap”) and measured in how many years before the Gap they occurred, with a date like 300 PG meaning the event occurred 300 years before the onset of the Gap.
The names of days, weeks, months, and even years differ vastly from one planet to the next, so they are generally not used on a galactic scale. Instead, anything needing to be recorded or referred to universally is measured in number called a Galactic Phase, sometimes shortened to just 'phase'. The number is formatted as follows: "Space Sector Designator"\\"System Identifier"\\"Planetary Code"\\"Galactic Standard Time Code"\\"GST Day.365"\\"GST Month.12"\\"GST Year.AG". An example phase is X251B\\VK1\\6\\1100.00.00\\52.365\\2.12\\714.AG, which would be translated as seen in the chart below.
| Phase Section |
Value |
Translation |
| Space Sector Designator |
X251B |
Sector X251B |
| System Identifier |
VK1 |
The Veskarium |
| Planetary Code |
6 |
Vesk-6 |
| Galactic Standard Time Code |
1100.00.00 |
11AM, 0 secs, 0 msecs |
| GST Day.365 |
52.365 |
The 52nd day of the year |
| GST Month.12 |
2.12 |
The second month of the year |
| GST Year.AG |
714.AG |
The 714th year After Gap |
On some worlds, however, scholars use the pre-existing local calendars for events before the Gap. Those researching the cultures from ancient Edras, for instance, sometimes uncover documents referring to dates in AS or “After Shattering,” a measurement believed to have been used for countless millennia, starting with the sacrifice of a now mostly forgotten deity of the Brisingelion. Dating anything within the Gap is always a highly dubious proposition, and those who attempt to make claims about such things usually count forward or backward from the nearest edge, such as “roughly 500 years after the onset of the Gap.”
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