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For feedback and/or community/NQ endorsement. Proposed terms: BCE - Before (the) Collision Era CE - (Post) Collision Era AE - Alioth Era Key Dates: 0 CE | (-9854 AE ) - August 8th, 2538 - The Final Collision - Earth is destroyed (0 CE - 9,854 CE) - "The Long Second" - The Arkship is in transit for 9,854 years (310,968,590,400 seconds) before it enters the system containing Alioth. 9854 CE | 0 AE - "Year 0" - Landing on Alioth - Game "Launch" (could be Beta if that's when "Alpha Teams" enter play.) In real life terms, the year 12,392 A.D. Dates after this point will progress as a measure of seconds (Unix style) since the server goes "live". Why? The Gregorian calendar is based on the Earth's rotation around the sun - . The sun no longer exists, making the Gregorian calendar essentially irrelevant at best, and stupidly complicated to implement on a new world at worst. Astronomy (and logically by extension, the astronautical industry) uses the Julian calendar. In astronomy, the Julian year is a unit of time; it is defined as 365.25 days of exactly 86400 seconds (SI base unit), totaling exactly 31557600 seconds in the Julian astronomical year. As a game mechanic - using a static Julian system is a nice way to deal with the idea that Alioth may or may not rotate at game launch. It then becomes a universal reference standard, with any given planet's rotation (if rotation is implemented) being able to, depending on how the game implements objects in space, be measured in seconds and turned into a local Julian (i.e. fixed length) calendar. Feedback welcome.