Imagine how fucking complex it would be arrange an appointment with somebody on another planet.
“See you at 11 o clock then?”
“Eh, we’ve only got 10 hours in a day. Spins like a motherfucker.”
The very first BattleTech novel, Decision at Thunder Rift, tried this.
It’s set on a planet in fairly close orbit of a red dwarf star, so its year lasts three local solar days, and the whole thing takes like four Earth weeks. There’s a whole section near the beginning of the book that explains it.
Most of the rest of the series uses the modern Gregorian calendar.
I mean Starfield, for all its many flaws, tracks local time for your current plant and location and universal time. Didn’t see why that wouldn’t be the standard. Anyone who only interacts locally only knows the one, but most people just always have two clocks that don’t match.
Starfield is an interactive video game, you can render the sun(s) in the sky, hang clocks on the walls, do all kinds of things with GUIs. And the player can look for the information they need at the moment.
Decision at Thunder Rift is a novel. It goes on and on about the orbit of this planet and its effect on the weather, and they still have to convert to days/weeks/months for the benefit of the reader. The very next book doesn’t bother; it’s a direct sequel to the first with the same author and main characters, and I don’t remember it even mentioning the local timekeeping system, other than maybe talking about “long summer evenings” or some such.
By the time you get to the Blood Of Kerensky trilogy every chapter starts with something like “Luthien City, Luthien, Pesht Military District, Darconis Combine. March 12, 3050.” They might occasionally mention “local winter” or something but seldom delve into how the local clocks and calendars work.
Also even though events take place light years apart, it doesn’t bother with stuff like relativity. It’s March 12 everywhere at once.
