Mechyrdian Calendar

The Mechyrdian calendar is the calendar used in the Empire of Mechyrdia. The calendar groups thirty-two days each into eight months. Years are exactly 256 days long, as the early Mechyrdians altered their planet's speed of revolving to where that would be possible using a massive series of rockets around the equator.

Structure

The calendar is based on a base-2 system, where the lengths of each temporal unit (years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds) are based on powers of 2. Months range from 0 to 7, as do days of the week.

Names of months and days of the week

The months use Mechyrdian names based on Latin, albeit different from the original Roman names for months:

Menþ Unil (First Month)
Menþ Duil (Second Month)
Menþ Aresi (Month of Ares)
Menþ Aþenas (Month of Athena)
Menþ Giuli (Month of Julius)
Menþ Augusti (Month of Augustus)
Menþ September (Seventh Month)
Menþ Octóber (Eighth Month)

The days of the week use the names of Tylan deities, except for the first and second days, since the Tylan week has only six days in it:

Degj Štelas (Day of the Stars)
Degj Mundas (Day of the Planets)
Degj Iquesras (Day of Ikesra, the Tylan goddess of love, passion, and defensive violence)
Degj Tyras (Day of Tyra, the Tylan god of war and strategy)
Degj Augari (Day of Augar, the Tylan god of history and ancestral wisdom)
Degj Ciahnari (Day of Tzachnar, the Tylan god of law and order)
Degj Wregias (Day of Vregja, the Tylan goddess of agriculture)
Degj Ligas (Day of Liha, the deified empress of the Lihann Empire)

Format

The typical date format is "(100)/(0-7)/(00-37)"; the first group is the year in hexadecimal (currently 100₁₆ or 256₁₀), the second group is the month in octal, and the final group is the day in octal.

Days last 16 hours, starting at the 0th hour and ending at the F-th hour. Hours are 64 minutes, each of 64 seconds. The time format is "(0-F).(0-7)(0-7).(0-7)(0-7)"; the first group is the hour in hexadecimal, the second group is the minute in octal, and the optional final group is the second in octal.

Binary format

For storing the date in binary, a 64-bit signed integer is used to count the seconds since/until the beginning of year 0, marking the moment when the Empire was founded: the lowest 6 bits are the second, the next 6 bits are the minute, the next 4 bits are the hour (time of day can be stored in a single 16-bit unsigned integer), the next 3 bits are the day of the week, the next 2 bits are the week of the month, and the next 3 bits are the month of the year (thus 8 bits can be used to represent the day of the year). The highest 39 bits are the current year, with the sign bit representing the PC/UC (Pre Ciarstuoþ "Before the Empire", U Ciarstuoþ "In the Empire") divide when the Empire was founded. A 1 in the sign bit indicates PC, and a 0 indicates UC. With that amount of precision, the years can go as far back as 274,877,906,944 PC and as far forward as 274,877,906,943 UC.

Year 0

Year 0 is the year starting at the day when the Empire of Mechyrdia was founded, at Earth's 5:00 AM GMT on January 1, 2640 AD. Neither UC nor PC, this year is encoded by setting all 39 bits of the year in the 64-bit date and time (including the sign bit) to zero. Years in PC are encoded using two's complement, thus year 1 PC has all 1s in the year bits, and year 2 PC, 3 PC, 4 PC, and so on count down in binary.

Length of a second

The Mechyrdian calendar second is defined as 31,556,925.14 / 16,777,216 times one standard Earth second. This means that the Mechyrdian year, at 16,777,216 (256 days × 16 hours × 64 minutes × 64 seconds) Mechyrdian seconds, is equal in length to a Gregorian year. Traditional Earth seconds are also counted for purposes of short-duration timekeeping, such as in sports and other games.

Continuing usage of the Gregorian calendar

While the Mechyrdian calendar is used for actual timekeeping, the Gregorian calendar is still used for tracking most holidays, such as Missa Christi on December 25 (previously known as Christmas), or Dies Pacis Mechyrdicae on October 12 (the anniversary of the Ilkhan Commune's surrender at the end of the Great Galactic War).

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