ashkatom:

EDIT: NICER VERSION HERE. You may care to reblog that one.

After nattering EVEN FURTHER with Jess, here’s my tentatively final conclusion on the Alternian calendar. Here’s how we reached the conclusions we did:

Dates are canonically written as so: “the 12th bilunar perigee of the 6th dark season’s equinox”

Rocketmantis and RockPaperTheodore both narrowed down a bilunar perigee to be about two days depending on moon orbits and suchlike. Keeping it in line with the sweep at 2.16 seems to make sense. Plus, well, 612 references. 

RockPaperTheodore further posited that there’s be an equinox about every 15 bilunar perigees. Jess did some math that flew right over my head and informed me that there would be 4 equinox-to-equinox periods with 16 bilunar perigees, and 20 with 15. She then also informed me that the calendar would still be overzealous in creating days, requiring anti-leap years every so often. I recommend asking her about the maths, I was happy to just sit there and let her do it.

1 sweep = 2.16 years is canon. 13/6 = 2.16. No surprises there.

Given the sheer number of seasons in a sweep, Alternia seems to have some serious weirdness going on with axial tilt. The seasons are named after light level, which is why we split the bilunars into 12/36 day/night hours. Trolls probably use hours to refer to times that need to be more specific - e.g., 2700 (from 0000 to 4759) on the 12th bilunar perigee etc etc

As an aside, we went off on a further tangent about the long day/night cycle that’s kind of interesting. Have a summary.

• Working hours would vary by season, obviously
• If we ignore the insect biology hinted at in comic, the trolls are more likely to be carnivores than hunter-gatherers due to the fact that hunter-gatherers need a lot of time to, well, gather their food. Carnivores can just chow down and be fine for ages.
• Much more interesting is if we do take insect biology into account. Insects don’t really sleep, instead entering a state called ‘torpor’ that’s a lot like hibernation. It’s like putting your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down completely. This makes a lot of sense for trolls, given that torpor is essentially made to be able to rest while waking quickly in the event of danger.
• But torpor doesn’t provide a full rest. It’s like running with no maintenance.
• Therefore, to get past the torpor state and into full sleep? Sopor. This would allow the trolls to maintain the long day/night cycle without dying horribly of not enough sleep and brainsplosion.
• Torpor also includes the slow-down of metabolic function, which means without sopor, trolls would wake up frozen and be unable to regulate their body temperature while asleep. Insect biology = no muscle and fatty tissue to generate and keep heat.

Given the axial weirdness, Alternia likely has a very low population, all clustered in the tropical zone. The rest of the planet is barren, on fire, frozen, or both. This scarcity of resources could be Doc Scratch’s whole reason for shoehorning another moon in in the first place, forcing Alternia to look to other planets for resources to support their population.

Seadwellers probably evolved near the poles and lived deep undersea where surface weather wouldn’t affect them so much. Then they realised the tropical zone had food that wasn’t krill and moved there.

Mmmm. Krill.

Oh, and the day/night hours are for the solstices and vary towards the equinoxes. Just like Earth!

I think that is everything we have worked out. Calendars, man. You can extrapolate so many things!