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Topic: Star Control II fact #3 - Drahn and Drahnasa (Read 9280 times)
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meep-eep
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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.
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:
The Drahn is our primary unit of time.
It lasts for an interval equivalent to four million rotations of our planet.
A Drahn is subdivided into two-thousand Drahnasa.
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:
We have gotten so few visitors over these many Drahn In the last five Drahn, we've had only one visitory. and now you have come twice in a single Drahnasa. And visitors usually only show up every few Drahn You don't know how monotonous living on a gas giant for three or four Drahn can be.
(about the brown Ur-Quan)
They used to come visit us regularly about three Drahns ago Well, I guess a lot can happen to a species in three Drahn like turning green and evil.
You know, it's funny. We hadn't heard from the outside galaxy in a whole Drahnasa and then the Melnorme come by and sell us a probe and just a few hundred rotations later, YOU show up!
(when asking about the other races that have visited over the years)
Years? Oh.. you mean Drahn.
Well, let's see... there was the Melnorme just a few rotations back then we go all the way back over three Drahn ago to the Ur-Quan and the other Milieu guys... the Yuli and the Drall, I think. The Yuli, the Drall, the Taalo, the Mael-Num, the Faz and the Ur-Quan who lived across a wide section of the galaxy.
They talked with us fairly frequently for almost half a Drahn then suddenly the visits stopped and we haven't heard from them since.
Yes, there was another race... a highly sophisticated species of shaggy giants who made repeated trips to our world over a period of several Drahn. I wish I knew more of the information you seek, Traveller but we last saw the Shaggy Ones just over 39 Drahn ago and very little from that era has remained intact in our history chants. When the Shaggy Ones first arrived over 41 Drahns ago The Shaggy Ones taught us most of the New Words and after they departed we remembered them for the many long Drahn until ships from the Sentient Milieu arrived. 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.
Our world, which we call Source has been home to our species for many thousands of Drahn.
A final remark: The probes, when estimating their numbers over time, talk about Drahnasa in the PC version, but years in the 3DO version.
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« Last Edit: September 15, 2003, 08:05:00 am by meep-eep »
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“When Juffo-Wup is complete
when at last there is no Void, no Non
when the Creators return
then we can finally rest.”
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youBastrd
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It's real velour, just let yourself go.
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wow, very cool stuff, meep-eep! It's interesting that TFB actually paid that close attention to the orbit length.
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Parker
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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?
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Captain Smith
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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?
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Yehat_Sympathizer
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jie2 do1ng fe1ng
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I might have missed it, but what was Star Control fact #2?
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« Last Edit: September 17, 2003, 05:47:28 am by Yehat_Sympathizer »
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Krulle
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*Hurghi*! Krulle is *spitting* again!
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Pkunk resurrection rate? (50/50, but what's more surprising to me is taht it is determined before the fight starts!)
Slylandro spawning rate?
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Yehat_Sympathizer
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jie2 do1ng fe1ng
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If I remember right it starts out at 2% or something, and then rises to 8% per I'mnotsurewhichtimeunit.
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Krulle
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*Hurghi*! Krulle is *spitting* again!
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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!
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Krulle
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*Hurghi*! Krulle is *spitting* again!
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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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Defender
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Mods-
Stickey This Please
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