Dear Vector Prime, how long are arcs and chords from the 2005 IDW universe?
Dear Temporally Triumphant,
While I've previously talked about the Gregevorian calendar, the universe you refer to used a variant of the Jarugarian calendar. Knowing that if I don't explain it in detail now, I'll only cause people to ask, I figure I should cover the full range of units it employs.
In that system, time was separated into Epochs, Annuli, Cycles, Chords, and Arcs.
An Epoch was an irregular length of time, usually marked and named only after enough scholars believe it has become established anyway. However, one of particular importance—the Silver Epoch—was named by Nominus Prime, who had discovered a large supply of sparks preserved in photonic crystals. Seeing this as a chance to create a new golden age, he began what was known as the Silver Harvest, the largest population boom in Cybertronian history. This was around five million years before that universe became known to your scholars, and the Epoch later was renamed the Uprising, as it marked the start of Megatron's rise, even if he wasn't created until twelve annuli into the Epoch.
An Annulus lasts a little longer than a Terran year—approximately thirteen months. These are listed as numbers within each epoch, and each epoch can last many thousands of annuli.
A Cycle comes next, the most well known unit of time. There are eighteen cycles within each annulus, and for most events, knowing the cycle and annulus is a good enough point of reference. Each cycle lasts around three Terran weeks, and is sometimes called a Cybertronian Week.
A Chord comes to roughly fifty hours, and is the length of a Cybertronian day in this universe. There are ten in each cycle.
An Arc lasts nearly an Earth hour, and naturally there are fifty in each chord. They can also be divided into a hundred centi-arcs, the smallest unit typically used in the Jarugarian system. Arcs and centi-arcs are usually only used to record events where extreme precision is needed.
