The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The Slylandro use the 'Drahn' and 'Drahnasa' units for time-keeping.
During the game they will explain how they relate to the rotation time of their planet, but we don't actually get the chance to scan it.
We could only estimate these units by comparing their use by the Slylandro to describe historic events to what we know from the manual and the game.
But with the source, we can figure out these units in much more detail. All we have to do is remove the Slylandro, and we can scan the planet.
Ofcourse TFB might not have bothered to match the actual rotation time with the story, as noone would ever see it in the game, but it turns out that it matches the estimates perfectly.

The result you can see in the image below.
(http://www.stack.nl/~svdb/sc2/Beta%20Corvi%20IV.png)

So we know:
A Beta Corvi IV day (rotation) is 0.59 earth days, and
a Beta Corvi IV year (revolution) is 8.04 earth years.

(At least this is what is printed. Internally in the game the rotation period is stored in tenths of earth hours, which is 142 for Beta Corvi IV, which provides some more digits, but they're not significant anyway.
The revolution period is calculated from the distance to the sun and ends up at 4117/512.)

The time intervals that are described by Drahns are fairly large, so it could be that the rotation time has changed a little during that time, but for a planet which is old enough to harbour life, this is likely to be negligable.

Ok, now let's hear what the Slylandro have to say about Drahns:

Which brings us to:
Drahn = 0.59 * 4000000 / 365.25 = 6460 earth years
Drahnasa = 0.59 * 2000 / 365.25 = 3.23 earth years

So now we know what exactly the Slylandro mean when they talk about Drahn and Drahnasa. I've collected those remarks here:



(about the brown Ur-Quan)




(when asking about the other races that have visited over the years)


So they first saw the Precursors around 265000 years ago, and last around  252000 years ago.
The manual mentions "The Precursors who designed your flagship 250,000 years ago", which gives some credibility to our calculation.



A final remark: The probes, when estimating their numbers over time, talk about Drahnasa in the PC version, but years in the 3DO version.

wow, very cool stuff, meep-eep!  It's interesting that TFB actually paid that close attention to the orbit length.

There is also, I suppose...

Star Control II fact #2.5:  SC2 fact #2 was lost when SourceForge's webserver got hacked and all dynamic content was erased.  This was when the UQM Forum was hosted on sc2.sf.net, and therefore was deleted as well.  Thankfully Mika had a backup of the forum, but it wasn't as up to date as possible so about a week of posts were lost, including Star Control II fact #2.

Perhaps these interesting tidbits about the internal workings of SC2 should be converted to HTML and put up on the main page so that something like that doesn't happen again?

I was going to ask what fact #2 was...or rather where it was...

Does anyone happen to remember what fact #2 was about...maybe someone could go through and redo it based on the direction that was going and post it?

I might have missed it, but what was  Star Control fact #2?

Yeah, I'm lost too...

Pkunk resurrection rate? (50/50, but what's more surprising to me is taht it is determined before the fight starts!)
Slylandro spawning rate?

If I remember right it starts out at 2% or something, and then rises to 8% per I'mnotsurewhichtimeunit.

I remember reading about the spawning rate on this board. It just tried do give suggestions which one could have been SC2 fact #2

Spawning rate of slylandro probes was 100% per day until you visit the Starbase, then it drops to 2 % a day. Each day it rises 1 % up to the max of 8%. When you get the selfdestruct code, the rate drops each day 1% until it reaches -8%, if I remember correctly and your numbers are correct (which i do not remember any more).
Greetings, fellow slave!

I already am collecting these... the previous ones....

http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/history/sc2_facts_uqm.shtml

I learned something about colors, now that I note the code for the Melnorme.
Scientists from Duke did research on the colors that catch the eye the most while shopping, and guess what one caught the most? Good old purple. So perhaps, with the Melnorme knowing this fact, capitalized upon it to make you desire to purchase more product.

Man, imagine if the Druuge knew about that... :-X

IF the Druuge would care, they would know that the appearance of the Sales(wo)man would be very important to (most probably) all other races in the universe. Things like a mask are making curious, but drooling around?

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