Chronologies
As can best be determined, it is many thousands of years since humanity first left Earth and ventured to other star systems. Earth itself and that history has been lost to time, and records from before the Founding are virtually non-existent. What remains is fragmentary and hard to decipher. What can be known for sure is that humankind found itself in the two 1Gen star systems just under one thousand years ago (see note below on Unitary Time) in strange circumstances.
Six periods of expansion have followed, each known as a Generation. Hence 1Gen for First Generation, 2Gen for Second Generation and so forth. These Generations of exploration equate to the discovery of new Heliospheric Arrays—clusters of star systems that share mutually navigable slip points. Each Gen thus equates to a particular array or arrays, though slipoints between heliospheres continued to be discovered within and between arrays dating from previous generations of discovery. These generations are uneven in time and dispersal.
As it seems that no new Heliospheres can be discovered, we are set in the 6Gen, though there are advocates for this post-Gen period to be called something else.
With humanity occupying worlds, and starships, across a hundred star systems, each with several rotational periods, orbits, and other movements, there are as many timing and dating systems as there are settlements. Trying to establish a singular system on every heliosphere was one of the aims of the New Earth Tyranny, which proved impossible to enforce. Only those that move from sphere to sphere need to know the different systems, and many of them maintain their own dating and timing schedule so that they don’t have to change the clocks every time they slip to a new system!
Local year counts tend to date from settlement or discovery, either of the heliosphere or the constituent population center. The longer the heliosphere has been around, the higher the likelihood that a single ‘administrative year’ has been adopted sphere-wide even if local ‘years’ and ‘days’ vary.
Unitary Time
Unitary Time is a concept conceived when the first slipways were opened, and popularized in recent centuries through its use by Unitas Consortium and Affiliated Prefectures. UT is based on the conditions of the 1Gen world of Palingena, New Sol. A UT year is one Palingena orbit, approximately 375 rotations, and is the basis for this guide.
