Approved Submission Yamataian Calendar (YE system)

Sounds fine to me.

A fitting compromise, I think, with a sufficiently BS'ed IC justification.

Brills!

I think it's also important, if these changes are being implemented, (1) to make sure there's an announcement within Yamatai noting the slightly different annual pays and monthly calculations; and (2) to make it clear that this change does not affect back-pay or 3-year pay increases for SAoY. Even though IC Yamatai is moving from a 365-day calendar to a 315-day calendar, maybe the government has always operated pay and promotions using the 9-month calendar, so a character is not getting paid more per day then they previously were. Or you can just leave it and ignore it. Just something to think about for a time-measuring change like this, because if all the sudden the US government changed the number of days in the annual calendar the first question would be how it affects military retirement benefits based on time in the service.

EDIT: Ignore half of this. I've suddenly remembered that we left the pay/day the same, so the pay/year has dropped by some percentage. However, the note about whether it applies to 3-year benefits still applies. Either it needs to be stated that calculation of the 3-year period will consider 315 days from the time of enlistment, or that from the start of YE 39 it will be 315 day years and any years measured before that are locked.

EDIT2: Did we ever come to an understanding about age as well? Should character ages be re-calculated based on the 9-month calendar (a character previously measured as 18 is now measured as 24)? Are we going to pretend that they've always been measured that way? Is age measured by 12-month years before YE 39 and 9-month years after?

Regarding age: The current YE is still 38 and your character was still born in the year they listed at approval. But our relatively ageless dudes are still a little "younger" than we collectively thought.

EDIT: Ignore half of this. I've suddenly remembered that we left the pay/day the same, so the pay/year has dropped by some percentage.

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Actually, since years matter a lot more to us than days or months, I'm thinking it might be better to keep the same yearly pay and just divide it by 9 for the months. I'm okay with this giving soldiers a "pay boost" of 40 days IC--but OOC it'll be the same as everyone's used to.

Are we going to pretend that they've always been measured that way?

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Probably for the best? I don't think ages need to be adjust unless they pose some logic problem. We can just say that until recently the Star Army was hiring people at "cabin boy" age lol.

Wes said:

We can just say that until recently the Star Army was hiring people at "cabin boy" age lol.

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Finally this thread has reached my level.

I -- I MEAN, INAPPROPRIATE

Gosh

I've added a Conversions section to the page, in which I'm adding handy charts to match the YE years to other calendars. So far I have the Iroma and the Abwehrans.

What we really need is conversions to the Elysian calendar, but I haven't figured them out yet, because conversion to their calendar is a goddamn nightmare.

YE to AR has never been so simple! Thanks, Wes!

I'm satisfied with the adjustments made thus far.

There are things I want to know, though.

Kotori was born on October 25th, which was also her OoC creation date. Her Zodiac sign (which seemed like it was a thing in SARP, especially considering the Zodiac-class stations) is Scorpio.

How is this reflected in the new calendar? I figure I can still add 1 to Kotori's age every OoC October 25th, but how does that reflect ICly?

Kotori's birthday on the Yamataian calendar is 12日 8月, jūni-nichi hachigatsu (12th day of the 8th month), which always falls on 金曜日 (kin'yōbi) which makes her Friday's Child. The Zodiac makes no sense in SARP since we are in the Kagami Galaxy which is clearly not the Milky Way and therefore we don't have any of the same star constellations. So Zodiac signs would be the same (use conversion to OOC years). We could make up a new zodiac chart but that would be a whole new article I think.

Then perhaps the in-universe justification for the Zodiac stations bearing that name might be because KFY had assistance from the NDI into fielding a different type of starbase other than the Iori type.

The thought of Kagami-based constellations makes me somewhat leery. The star formations named so far have mostly whimsical names that are hard to take seriously. I'd rather have astrological signs that don't belong in the Kagami galaxy than ones which go like "Sword", "Bucket", "Snot cloud".

Then again, the 'signs' may not need to be based on astrology. The chinese zodiac assigns a roster of animal, per year. So far, we do have Terran animals on Yamatai (or at least have made free references to them and their byproducts). Again, it can be something the Yamataians picked up from the contact with the Nerimians. The Empire is still not 40 years old, and it's very much like nekos to draw examples from humans. Yamatai also still has unmistakable asian roots, with Shinto religion present on Yamatai.

So, say the YE zodiac calendar puts the chinese leap year first, it would make YE 1 to 40 look like:

YE 1 Rat
YE 2 Ox
YE 3 Tiger
YE 4 Rabbit
YE 5 Dragon
YE 6 Snake
YE 7 Horse
YE 8 Goat
YE 9 Monkey
YE 10 Rooster
YE 11 Dog
YE 12 Pig
YE 13 Rat
YE 14 Ox
YE 15 Tiger
YE 16 Rabbit
YE 17 Dragon
YE 18 Snake
YE 19 Horse
YE 20 Goat
YE 21 Monkey
YE 22 Rooster
YE 23 Dog
YE 24 Pig
YE 25 Rat
YE 26 Ox
YE 27 Tiger
YE 28 Rabbit
YE 29 Dragon
YE 30 Snake
YE 31 Horse
YE 32 Goat
YE 33 Monkey
YE 34 Rooster
YE 35 Dog
YE 36 Pig
YE 37 Rat
YE 38 Ox
YE 39 Tiger
YE 40 Rabbit

Kotori's zodiac sign would be Tiger, because she'd be born in the Year of the Tiger, YE 27.
It's also a silly coincidence: Kotori's mother Kôsuka's samurai monicker is Tiger Mother.

YE 22
Yui: "You're telling me I should try this 'chinese zodiac' at home for fun when my sign is rodent vermin?"

Haha.

Fred said:

YE 23 Dog

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Yukari was born YE 23 ... the year of the dog ... so that makes her a HAHAHAHAHA

This requires immediate funding. Wow.

The year names Fred suggested are so...agricultural. Most calendars had roots in agriculture because it was really important that you planted and harvested the crops at the right time of year. But having a calendar that was started in the middle of a sci-fi age name years mostly after animals you'd find on a small farm seems off to me.

I feel like we've reached a pretty good community consensus on the calendar and there's been almost 2 weeks for everyone to have a chance to comment so I'm pretty set on approving it at this point. We can always make minor tweaks if we feel the need to add more things in the future like cooler month names or year names.

Also, note that the Elysian calendar had no year listed on it at all, so I made YE 29 line up with the Elysian year 4000, which was totally arbitrary. It seems silly Elysians got their calendar approved in 2005 and for the last 11 years no one, not even the Elysian FMs, knew what year it was on that calendar. But it's true.

Okay, but what do we do about the astrological signs then?

Fred said:

Okay, but what do we do about the astrological signs then?

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We probably need to acknowledge that they never made sense for SARP in the first place and stop using them IC.

If that's what you want.

I will however express my doubts. Technically, the babylonian based zodiac makes no sense to us and people still get a kick out of looking at their horoscopes in the newspaper.

With Chiharu's death, a spiritualistic religion was developped. And honestly, my reading since to indicate that it happened because Yui - namely - didn't really want to believe that Chiharu was really gone (and ironically, appearance of characters like Michiko and Koharu seem to be rewarding any such faith). There's defenitely a place for a belief system in Yamatai and while the military (your usual lens looking into your faction) may not put much stock in it, the Empire has an immense civilian population that seek to put meaning in their lives, if only as a matter of trivia.

Philosophy is important in the Empire, is it not? The prestige system does seem to impose less drudgery on the civilian population. If you neither work nor sleep, then what you pursue is either art or entertainment.

I'm willing to acknowledge the desire to do away with astrological signs in your setting if that's what you want; but I stand fast to the notion that believing such has no place is myopic. I don't feel keenly enough on this to make a stand, but if this is discarded, it will smell of intentional oversight to me.

That's true, but making a zodiac system is not what this submission is about at all, and that belongs in a separate discussion and submission, and I'm not going to hold up the calendar waiting for a zodiac because the calendar is important and the zodiac is optional fluff.

I'm amenable to that. If you actually take care of it.

It's not something I mean to champion. My outlook on it is that if you're going to change the calendar system, then it should be a smooth transition. If zodiac signs were asked as extra fluff before - and there were based on that calendar system - then it is only thorough to make sure there's some equivalent. Either way, going from one state to another regardless of if it is creating our own or doing away with it, needs to be ICly reflected/justified.

Aside from that, I'm okay with approval of the current setup for the calendar itself.

We can put the zodiac in the hands of Nepleslian tradition instead of Yamatai's culture. Concurrent interpretations utilized by people within a culture is nothing new, and official calendars regularly ignore the concurrent ones.