Time in Star Wars
According to Wookieepedia, there’s a Galactic Standard Calendar and a Galactic Standard time based on Coruscant’s orbit. From here:
- 60 seconds = 1 minute
- 60 minutes = 1 hour
- 24 hours = 1 day
- 5 days = 1 week
- 7 weeks = 1 month
- 368 days = 1 year
- 10 months + 3 festival weeks + 3 holidays = 1 year
- 10 years = 1 decade
- 100 year or 10 decades = century
Apparently, there were 20 different calendars in use during the Old Republic, with a 10-month standard calendar variant being used by the Republic Judiciary right before the Clone Wars (which I guess is where these numbers came from?). There was also an 11-month variant used by archivists and a hexadecimal-based on used by infrastructure. But even if the number of months in a year differ (and therefore introducing variation in the rest of the time measurements), I’d guess that the seconds, minutes, hours, and days would be the same. Oh, the number of days in a week might vary from calendar to calendar, too, I suppose.
Days of the weeks are:
- Primeday
- Centaxday
- Taungsday
- Zhellday
- Benduday
The festival weeks, for anyone who’s curious are: New Year Fete Week (took place before the first month), Festival of Life (between months 6 and 7; included parties and gift-giving), and Festival of Stars (between months 9 and 10, celebrated interstellar space travel; many took vacations to other planets to celebrate).
Anyway, so I would guess that while each planet probably had its own calendar and time measurement system, for interplanetary trade and travel purposes, the Galactic Standard Calendar would be used.
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So what I’ve done, personally, when writing in PT time (because I definitely can’t use BBY, they don’t even know that the battle of Yavin is gonna happen one day) is to use certain notable epochs, that they might use to restart the numbering system of years.
There’s the Ruusan Reformation (1000 BBY) and the Great ReSynchronization (35 BBY). The Ruusan Reformation, once enacted, resulted in the Republic Measures and Standards Bureau resetting the year zero to the year of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan (which is 1000 BBY per the Galactic Standard Calendar).
The Great ReSynchronization was established in 35 BBY by the Republic Measures and Standards Bureau to recalibrate the dating systems (it was disbanded in 25 ABY during the New Republic, so it only lasted 60 years; but I’m guessing that for people living during those years (including the Imperial Empire), they probably went with the new numbering system). So, the Battle of Geonosis took place in year 13, for example. Dates were written [Year]:[Month]:[Day]. Dates before ReSynchronization were written with BrS (before resynchronization; there were no trailing characters after the date for post-resynchronization).
If you look up certain years on Wookieepedia, they’ll tell you the equivalent in these other dating systems. So for example, 32 BBY (the Battle of Naboo) is year 36,421 after the Tho Yor Arrival, year 3,621 after the Treaty of Coruscant, year 968 after the Ruusan Reformation, and year 3:3-4:2 after the Great ReSynchronization. The Wookieepedia page for those years will also list all the events that happened in that year. It’s a great reference.