What is the |value| of captured enemy systems?

Joat42 wrote:I don't see a problem for coordinating an attack down to the second.

The TF's transits to their respective staging areas in advance, take stellar readings, compensate for distance between the different areas and calculate the time down to microseconds.

Absolutely Impossible.

There are just too many opportunities for error to be introduced into any calculations, then comes error introduced by the conversion. And this is all dependent on a particular system's track of time to be dependable to your needs. Heck, Grayson's stubbornness to maintain Old Earth's A.D. Anno Domini is the type of problems you can expect. Then there's the error introduced by a second being added back in on Sol time, the actual revolution of Earth, yatta yatta yatta.

Consider this site and all of the potential pitfalls that can conspire to make you unfashionably late for the party. . .



What Is International Atomic Time (TAI)?

I'd be flabbergasted to learn that all three planets in the Manticore Binary System have perfectly synchronized time.

cthia wrote:I'd be flabbergasted to learn that all three planets in the Manticore Binary System have perfectly synchronized time.

I can't resist. I'm sorry

You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.

Kael Posavatz wrote:

cthia wrote:I'd be flabbergasted to learn that all three planets in the Manticore Binary System have perfectly synchronized time.

I can't resist. I'm sorry

You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.

You can't simply assume that all of your officers can even tell time.

Pavel Young didn't know it was time to grow up.

Elvis Santino didn't know it was time to make a plan or plan to fail.

Henke didn't know when it was time to take the bull by the horns.

Eloise didn't know it was time to come out with the truth about the diplomatic notes.

Even Hamish didn't know it was time to change the rules of war.

The SLN certainly didn't know what time it was in the galaxy.

And the Honorable Reginald Houseman didn't know when it was time to STFU.

Even my best girl didn't know when it was time to tear up the rice paper her Doctrine was written on. I'd been sending her love notes for months. . .

"It's time to rip the rice paper up Honor!"

Only the MA has a better handle on the hands of time, they play with centuries.

Treecats are the only species that can accurately tell time by counting it in base₆. That's how Honor knew when it was time to strike Burdette. Nimitz told her the time. Hey, a treecat is a lot better than a Rolex. LOL


Couldn't resist either.

cthia wrote:

Joat42 wrote:I don't see a problem for coordinating an attack down to the second.

The TF's transits to their respective staging areas in advance, take stellar readings, compensate for distance between the different areas and calculate the time down to microseconds.

Absolutely Impossible.

It's absolutely possible.

cthia wrote:There are just too many opportunities for error to be introduced into any calculations, then comes error introduced by the conversion. And this is all dependent on a particular system's track of time to be dependable to your needs. Heck, Grayson's stubbornness to maintain Old Earth's A.D. Anno Domini is the type of problems you can expect. Then there's the error introduced by a second being added back in on Sol time, the actual revolution of Earth, yatta yatta yatta.

Consider this site and all of the potential pitfalls that can conspire to make you unfashionably late for the party. . .

What Is International Atomic Time (TAI)?

I think you don't really grasp how you go about synchronizing clocks on a galactic scale. You don't care about what a particular systems track of time is - you just choose one to use as the common time reference. Then measure a couple of pulsars, they have a known decay rate measured in milli- and nanoseconds per day and that means you can compare their spinrates and pulse dispersion to get an accurate time comparable to an atomic clock - plus you get an accurate spatial position.

If you don't believe me, you can read about the basics in Binary and Millisecond Pulsars by Duncan R. Lorimer.

Joat42 wrote:I think you don't really grasp how you go about synchronizing clocks on a galactic scale. You don't care about what a particular systems track of time is - you just choose one to use as the common time reference. Then measure a couple of pulsars, they have a known decay rate measured in milli- and nanoseconds per day and that means you can compare their spinrates and pulse dispersion to get an accurate time comparable to an atomic clock - plus you get an accurate spatial position.

If you don't believe me, you can read about the basics in Binary and Millisecond Pulsars by Duncan R. Lorimer.

Just watch out for those unpredictable starquakes that speed up pulsars: Starquake

Joat42 wrote:I think you don't really grasp how you go about synchronizing clocks on a galactic scale. You don't care about what a particular systems track of time is - you just choose one to use as the common time reference. Then measure a couple of pulsars, they have a known decay rate measured in milli- and nanoseconds per day and that means you can compare their spinrates and pulse dispersion to get an accurate time comparable to an atomic clock - plus you get an accurate spatial position.

That solves the problem of getting an accurate clock. I wonder if it solves the problem of synchronization between points that are many light years apart (even several hundred). Do you need to pick pulsars that about equidistant from the two points? How accurate is the spatial positioning, I assume we are using triangulation?

PS. AAC describes the Moriarty system, it does not mention the system defense called Mycroft.

cthia wrote:I'd be flabbergasted to learn that all three planets in the Manticore Binary System have perfectly synchronized time.

But that's easy if they cared to. They know exactly how far apart the planets are at any given time, and even Gryphon is close enough a high power radio time signal could cross the several hundred light-minutes between Manticore-A and B. There's no significant relativistic effects to worry about and you can adjust for light-speed lag trivially if you know the exact distance.

So standing up some atomic clocks (or whatever even better reference time source exists in the modern day Honorverse) on each planet and bringing them into sync is quite straightforward. (Assuming you didn't want to bother independently syncing each of the three to a common chosen pulsar using the method Joat42 shared)


Of course that just gets your UTC equivilent seconds linked up. There's still all the local adjustment for time zones, seasons, local planetary year and day lengths, etc. Knowing that it's been 1.596e+10 seconds since Manticore was founded doesn't tell you if it'd be the middle of the night if you sent a message to your friend over on Sphinx

tlb wrote:That solves the problem of getting an accurate clock. I wonder if it solves the problem of synchronization between points that are many light years apart (even several hundred). Do you need to pick pulsars that about equidistant from the two points? How accurate is the spatial positioning, I assume we are using triangulation?

PS. AAC describes the Moriarty system, it does not mention the system defense called Mycroft.

Depending where you are you will get different times from each pulsar because the difference in distances, so you kind of use them as GPS-satellites.

If you measure a pulsar from Earth then travel 100 ly closer in FTL to it, the measured spin-rate will have increased which gives you a single point of datum. Now, if you measured a dozens of pulsar at Earth and then FTL in any direction a couple of ly's and measure again all the spins will have changed. Some will have increased (decreased distance) some will have decreased (increased distance). You can then use the differences to calculate the time and spatial position even though you may have been subjected to relativistic effects during your travels.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:I'd be flabbergasted to learn that all three planets in the Manticore Binary System have perfectly synchronized time.

But that's easy if they cared to. They know exactly how far apart the planets are at any given time, and even Gryphon is close enough a high power radio time signal could cross the several hundred light-minutes between Manticore-A and B. There's no significant relativistic effects to worry about and you can adjust for light-speed lag trivially if you know the exact distance.

So standing up some atomic clocks (or whatever even better reference time source exists in the modern day Honorverse) on each planet and bringing them into sync is quite straightforward. (Assuming you didn't want to bother independently syncing each of the three to a common chosen pulsar using the method Joat42 shared)

Of course that just gets your UTC equivilent seconds linked up. There's still all the local adjustment for time zones, seasons, local planetary year and day lengths, etc. Knowing that it's been 1.596e+10 seconds since Manticore was founded doesn't tell you if it'd be the middle of the night if you sent a message to your friend over on Sphinx

I thought the Manticore system had an FTL-communication network? Then you can use the NTP-protocol to synchronize clocks. The protocol takes into account lag and round-trip times to keep clocks synchronized fairly accurately in the sub-second range. It also handles multiple source-clocks (stratum 0 in NTP-speak).