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Brom
2011-07-25, 12:05 PM
According to this web page (http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_year), the Imperial Year in the Warhammer universe is split into 1000 equal parts. I'm going to insert some answers of my own in place of what isn't there and assume that it's dividing the 365 day year we're familiar with into 1000 equal parts. Forgive me, I'm running on little sleep and have always been horrific at math, but what would 365/1000 be? How long would each year segment be?

kamikasei
2011-07-25, 12:17 PM
365/1000 = 0.365

A year isn't exactly 365 days long. Let's use the Julian year, which is used in astronomy, and conveniently is exactly 365.25 days long - that is, it includes the leap day fraction, but not any other adjustments made for Earth dates.

24*0.36525 = 8.76600 - so just over eight and three-quarter hours per unit.

Yora
2011-07-25, 12:19 PM
A year is about 365 days and 6 hours (plus/minus 10 minutes, depending on how you measure it). That makes 8766 hours.
1/1000th of an earth year would be 8,766 hours, or 8 hours and 46 minutes.

Erloas
2011-07-25, 01:01 PM
The numbers are mostly meaningless though as you're working with the assumption that the Warhammer world's solar design is anything at all like our own.
That world might spin faster then ours so a day/night cycle could be much shorter, such as 9 hours, but that is significantly faster. The world could also spin slower so a day/night cycle would be 30 hours instead.

Then the length of a year is based on how fast the planet orbits around the sun. Both the speed the planet is moving and the distance it is orbiting, the farther from the sun the longer the year. Change that speed and the length of a year increases or decreases. There is also not much of a reason for a year to begin or end at a set point in the day, we just happen to have it be fairly close, but as stated, not exact so we make minor corrections every 4 years.

One thing to note though is that if the world had a very circular orbit and spun on an axis perpendicular to the sun then you would have almost no changes at all in the seasons and without very good astronomy wouldn't have any easy way to figure out when one orbit completed. Earth rotates in an elliptical orbit and the axis of rotation is something like 15degree from the sun.

The most likely case is that the warhammer world probably spins a bit faster and either orbits much slower or is farther from its sun, or both.

kamikasei
2011-07-25, 01:06 PM
The numbers are mostly meaningless though as you're working with the assumption that the Warhammer world's solar design is anything at all like our own.
This is 40k, not vanilla Warhammer, and so its year is (maybe?) Earth's. There is no "Warhammer world", there's a galaxy.

Brom
2011-07-25, 01:25 PM
Here is the game that made me stop to ask the question, in case any of you would like to look at that:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=208793

At any rate, I believe I'm just going to go with the idea that I don't need to know the timeline to have fun with Dark Heresy and call it good =P

Thank you for those who answered. Mostly I asked because of how ODD a year divided into a thousand equal parts was to me O.o

Erloas
2011-07-25, 01:48 PM
I just assumed Fantasy because 40k, as you said, is an entire galaxy, and as such there wouldn't be a whole lot of frame of reference to figure something like that out. And of course I didn't check the link because at work most sites are blocked (luckily GITP I don't think is tagged for anything so no filters catch it).

I'm not sure what the tie in is between 40ks Terra and the real one. I think the idea used to be that it was the same but I think the official canon has it as its own, completely unrelated, universe now. Considering that the Imperium hasn't been planet bound in 10s of thousands of years they probably adopted a new calendar system not tied to any celestial bodies and simply picked an arbitrary but even number of hours for a day and number of days for a year.

Brom
2011-07-25, 02:27 PM
The link was to another place on the GITP board =P

Erloas
2011-07-25, 02:34 PM
The link was to another place on the GITP board =P

The first one wasn't. Most wiki's besides wikipedia are blocked, though had I looked at the link address then it would have been clear that it was 40k even if I couldn't visit it.