Star Frontiers® Conundrum #2: Time & Space, GST Style

The Galactic Standard Time (GST) system used in Star Frontiers® is very different from Earth’s timekeeping system. That causes all sorts of silliness that I feel obligated to point out. Some of the silliness, I actually have solutions for, and the others, I’m just guessing. There really is some useful information in here. Honest.

Personally, I thought the speed of light was constant.

Here in Earth’s neighborhood, light travels 299,792.458 kilometers per second. According to the Alpha Dawn Expanded Game Rules rules (page 52), one GST second is defined as "the length of time needed for a beam of light to travel 300,000 km through a vacuum." Either light is faster on the Frontier, or their seconds are about a tenth of a percent (one-thousandth of an earth-second) longer than ours. I vote for the later, because changing the speed of light makes my head hurt. Besides, using a nice round number for the speed of light made the calculations for my first Campaign Conundrum a lot easier.

Anyway, the GST minute is 60 seconds and the GST hour is 60 minutes. That makes a GST hour 2 Earth seconds longer than our Earth hours. (Sounds like another megacorp scheme to extract more work from the masses, if you ask me. Fortunately, the workers rebelled by demanding 3-day weekends — ADEGR, page 55).

(By the way, "Sage Advice" got that wrong in Dragon Magazine #135, when the Sage suggests a Frontier week is 5 days long.)

The GST day is 20 hours (72,049.8 Earth seconds, instead of 86,400 Earth seconds for an Earth day), and a GST year is 400 days (28,839,889.45 Earth seconds, only 91.45% of an Earth’s 31,536,000 second year).

The merry, merry month of…5

A small but common question about the Frontier calendar is: Do they have months? Nothing in the Alpha Dawn rules mentions a GST month, but dates given in SF4: Mission to Alcazzar and SFKH1: The Dramune Run appear to be in mm/dd/yy format. (Both modules were written by Douglas Niles.) SF4 states that Alcazzar (Rhianna) was discovered on 12/21/61. The data readout for the Gullwind in SFKH1 contains several dates, including a Cargo Manifest with 6 months of departure and arrival dates.

Comparing the dates on the manifest to the regular travel times of the Frontier Map reveal that months 3,4, and 8 have 30 days each, while months 5, 6, and 7 have 31. (The travel times for the last two entries are one-half and one-third of what they should be — they apparently represent ADF2 and ADF3 Risk-Jumping — see Star Frontiers Campaign Conundrum #1: Interstellar Travel Times.) The module itself begins on 9/15/61.

(I briefly considered the idea that all Frontier months are strictly planet-specific phenomena (based on the revolution of local moons), but that theory is inconsistent with the The Dramune Run cargo manifest. The Gullwind is based on Inner Reach, but the months in the manifest are obviously much longer than a "Inner Reach month" — the moon of Inner Reach orbits the planet in only 20 days.)

My best guess is that a GST year has 13 months of around 30 days each — some have to be longer to fill the 400-day year; some could, of course, be shorter. The simplest possible calendar (compatible with the modules’ dates) has 10 months of 31 days and 3 of 30 days (which, again, would be months 3, 4, and 8). Since I don’t really feel the need for a complex GST calendar, that’s precisely the calendar I used for my campaign.

Just how a prime number like 13 got stuck into the otherwise very divisible Frontier calendar is beyond me. I vote that we all consider it some relic of a pre-Frontier calendar, and avoid mentioning it from now on. I refuse to even discuss the issue of naming months.

(Zebulon’s Guide refers to months once…)

Your year, or ours?

This got me to thinking: All those maps of the Frontier are labeled in light-years, a light-year being the distance light travels in one year. Is that an Earth year (making a light-year 9,460,530,000 kilometers), or a GST year (making a light-year 8,640,000,000 kilometers)? I’ll bet five credits that the TSR designers didn’t even think about the GST calendar when they made the map, so it’s probably "our" light-years.

You know what? I’m still going to tell my future players (if I ever have future players) that a light-year is 8,640,000,000 km, because I don’t want to restart the old "Are the Humans from Earth?" argument again. What you chose to do is entirely up to you. So there.

I just flew in from Hargut, and boy, are my wingflaps tired!

Speaking of time and travel reminds me: Why don’t any science fiction games include rules for jet lag? There’s no way that all those planets out there can have synchronized day/night cycles. One of these days, I’m going to the library and look for some good research on jet lag. Promise.

(Then again, maybe Frontier scientists have developed really good anti-lag technology….)

He’s still older than he looks.

Hoping the preceding observations about Frontier timekeeping will make PC lifespans more believable? Sorry, but even correcting for the calendar differences, Frontier Humans live 182.9 Earth years. They must take a lot of those anti-aging vitamins I keep hearing about….

Anyway, those of you with large magazine collections might remember Peter C. Zelinksi’s article "Old Yazirians Never Die" in Dragon® Magazine issue #108, which provided some aging tables (modeled on the First Edition AD&D® aging tables) for the four original Star Frontiers races. Even if you don’t use the age-based ability score modifications (I don’t anymore), the starting and dying ages can be useful campaign details for characters. I eventually had to reverse-engineer his tables so I could extend them for new PC races. If you’ve been adding races, you can derive all the age categories from the race’s average lifespan. Here are the ratios Zelinksi built his table on:

• The Mature category ranges from 10% of the race’s average lifespan (with fractions rounded up) to 30% of the average lifespan (rounded to the nearest multiple of 5).
  
• The Middle Aged category ranges from 1 higher than the maximum for Mature to 45% of the average lifespan (rounded to the nearest multiple of 5).
  
• The Old age category ranges from 1 higher than the maximum for Middle Aged up to 70% of the average lifespan (rounded to the nearest multiple of 5).
  
• The Venerable category is any age higher than the maximum Old age.
  
• The Starting Age is the minimum Mature Age, minus 1 year, plus 1d10 (i.e. Human starting ages were 19+1d10, because 10% of their average 200 year lifespan is 20).
  
• The Maximum Age (where the character dies of natural causes) is the tricky one. The base number is 78% of the average lifespan. The highest possible age is 118% percent of the average lifespan. Divide the difference between the two numbers by 10 to discover how many d10s are rolled (and added to the base number) to determine an individual character’s Maximum Age (i.e. for humans, the base age is 0.78 x 200 = 156, the highest maximum is 1.18 x 200 = 236, and 236 – 156 = 80, so the Human Maximum Age is 156 + 8d10.
  

If that sounded too complex, relax. Here’s a table providing age categories for the new character races from Zebulon’s Guide To Frontier Space, plus the Saurians from Dragon Magazine issue 103, and the Zethra from Dragon Magazine issue 84.

Two special notes:

1. Remember, the Humma change to their third gender when they "approach 170 years of age" (ZG, page 1). If you want to randomize that a little, try 165+1d10 years.
2. The original article about the Zethra actually listed their average lifespan as "unknown; thought to be 400+ years", so the numbers on this table represent the low end of the possibilities. Yikes.
   

Yo, Ref! When’s my birthday?

It’s probably more detail than you need for short-term campaigns, but if you really feel the need to randomly generate character birthdays, here’s how to fake a d400:

1. Roll a d100. This result is just the base number.
2. Roll a second d100. On a result of 1-25, the base number stands as the birthday. On a result of 26-50, add 100 to the base number to determine the birthday. On a result of 51-75, add 200 to the base number. On a result of 76-00, add 300.
   
3. The result is the day of the year the character was born on — you can convert it to GST months on your own. The character’s birth year, obviously, is derived from the character’s initial age roll.