Rihannsu (Romulan) Time-keeping and Calendar

This page was created from a time reference given in Diane Duane's book "The Romulan Way", and a logical, mathematical structure derived from a line in Margaret Wander Bonanno's book "Strangers From the Sky". This was another little exercise I did after creating my Kendans, their star system, and time-keeping, for figuring out my own Rihannsu and giving them their own culture-specific 'constants'. I have yet to use these workings in a story, but I'm only just at the start of my writing career. In the future, I plan to get more deeply involved with the everyday aspects of my race, and this is a good starting point.

Okay, here's how it came about. A siuren is a Romulan minute, and equal to 50.5 Earth seconds. That is a 'fact' given by Duane herself in the glossary of her aforementioned book, so I took that and created a logical structure of time increments (seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc) in base 10. Base 10 is only reasonable, as most 'humanoids' have ten fingers and ten toes, so that is how they learn to count. I disregarded the 'degrees per arc' calculations of Human time measurement, as that may just be a Human-specific system, and 100 seconds-per-minute, 100 minutes-per hour, and so on are far easier to calculate in your head anyway.

Keeping to the theory that Class-M planets will have, by definition, days of similar length to Earth and their orbital distance from their star will give them years of similar length too, we have a framework.
So, with that basic structure in mind, I created the system detailed below. The Rihannsu names of other time-keeping conventions were taken from a fan-created Rihannsu site I cannot find now (it was several hard-drive crashes ago), so credit for that goes to them. However, I did not like the system they had created, and so made my own up as previously described.

I originally had the Rihannsu year being twice as long as the Terran one, at 20 months. This was in line with my theory that a Romulan (or a Vulcan) would mature more slowly because of their greater lifespan. I originally went with the idea that a Romulan of 16 Romulan years was an adolescent and exhibited all the behaviour and afflictions thereof. However, that Romulan would be roughly 32 Earth years old.

A discussion about this with my friends at Taldren persuaded me to go along with the more widely-held view that all the races matured at the same rate and then just lived longer. This is supported by on-screen evidence, such as Spock entering Starfleet at 18, Sela being in command of a Warbird at 24, and such like.
Also, it fits in with the orbital distance from the sun – the 'habitable zone', of you will. A planet with a two-year orbit might be too far out to be warm enough to support life. Mars has such an orbit, so we'll let that decide you one way or the other – habitable, but only with terraforming or environment domes.
I still think that my idea is more reasonable and makes more sense for maturation rates, but if it's on-screen, it's 90% canon for me and has to be honoured. (I need the 10% off to fudge things a little. *grin*)

Well, there we have it. Another of my little detail-obsessed infobytes gets an airing. So, without further ado, here you are.

Rihannsu Time Calculations