Confused about time references

[DeMonk]

How long is a cycle?
In Grail Jinxo gets 300 cycles to pay his debt to Deuce.
In TKO Walker Smith gets 3 cycles to prepare for his fight.
It seemed like three days to meà except, it can't be: in Grail the cycle seems to indicate a much shorter timeframe.
Does anyone know?

[Garibaldi's Hair]

To some extent it depends on the race. In 'The Geometry of Shadows'(?), Garibaldi figures that they can lock the green and purple Drazi apart because the conflict only lasts one cycle, and assumes that it refers to a Drazi week - whereas is actually refers to a Drazi year.

[Jan]

Does anyone know?

I don't think it was ever nailed down. JMS wrote:

At one time we were working out what the time-reference would be on B5.
One of the early things we talked about were cycles, but in fairly short order
I decided against it because it didn't seem to mean much. But this was,
sadly, after "Grail" had been produced, and we couldn't dub over the cycle
references with anything else, so it stayed. It won't be appearing anywhere
else henceforth. One of our few continuity glitches.

Jan

[David Panzer]

I was never sure about the "cycle" thing on B5. I just assumed it meant a complete revolution of the station.

[SLerman]

It's probably analogous to the term "month". Even in the standard (Gregorian? Or am I making stuff up?) calendar, a month isn't always a constant length of time. In other calendars it might be something different, such as a lunar calendar defining a month as the time from one new moon to the next, which is pretty much always the same.

[Capt.Montoya]

I thought cycles was just a technobabbling name for hours.

Witness this JMS post: http://jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-8876&query=300%20cycle

If it means cycles of the station, it cycles once every minute to maintain 1g. So 300 cycles is only 300 minutes.

I don't think JMS ever said how long a cycle really was. Heck, given that it was a term dropped maybe they never actually decided how long a cycle was.

I take it as hours. That way Walker had three hours to prepare (sounds reasonable, if brief) and Jinxo had 12 days and 12 hours to pay (I think there was another reference in Grail, where the countdown had advanced, maybe that could help to see if cycle=hour fits).

Another possibility would be that cycle was one orbit of the station around Epsilon 3... that could be several hours, maybe closer to an Earth day... If the background image of the planet is always the same a planetsynchronous orbit can be assumed, and knowing the size of the planet the orbit period could be calculated... (Or we can consider that if the image of Epsilon 3 never changed it was all to do with rendering convenience, not a hard science fiction detail.)

Maybe we should just dismiss cycles as a continuity glitch.

[David Panzer]

I think the Whitestar took the place held by "cycles" in B5. I would pose whether "the speed of plot" is the same as the length of time on B5, but "the time of plot" doesn't sound catchy.

[grumbler]

I think the Whitestar took the place held by "cycles" in B5. I would pose whether "the speed of plot" is the same as the length of time on B5, but "the time of plot" doesn't sound catchy.

A cycle lasts exactly long enough, and no longer.

[David Panzer]

So a "cycle" equals the length of time left in a given episode?

[SLerman]

So a "cycle" equals the length of time left in a given episode?

Divided by the number of cycles left in the episode.

[Dr Maturin]

JMS's cycle is like BSG's centon.