History Main / UniversalUniverseTime

** Mentioned several times in the fluff, particularly ''Literature/GauntsGhosts'' and the ''Literature/CiaphasCain'' series, where regiments will adjust their clocks and routines to that of the planet they're travelling to as soon as they board a troopship.

* Averted in ''VideoGame/NoMan'sSky''. Where each "day" varies in lenght depending the planet you are on. In game each cycle is called a sol and currently there is no universal time measuring unit.

** ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Deep Space Nine]]'' did slightly avert this trope by also making the station follow the Bajoran calendar, operating on a 26-hour day. (What time zone on Bajor its day corresponds to is never addressed.)

** Antarctic bases tend to use the time zone of the places their supply flights take off from. So some of them use daylight saving ''during the months in which the sun never sets''.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time UTC]] is used for various purposes where worldwide uniformity is more important than matching the local time zone. It is essentially a more precisely defined substitute for Greenwich Mean Time, which was previously for such purposes (and is still referenced in less formal usage as more or less equivalent to UTC).

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** The 2009 [[TheFilmOfTheSeries film of the series]] ''Film/StarTrek'' retcons the format of stardates again to make it correspond with the Gregorian calendar -- thus, Stardate 2258.42 is the 42nd day (i.e. 11 February) of the year A.D. 2258.

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* Averted in the ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamWing'' novel ''Frozen Teardrop'', which takes place on Mars. Though Mars' day is roughly the same length as Earth's, its year is twice as long. This leads to Mars using a different calendar (MC, with MC 00 = AC 182, when the Mars terraforming began) from Earth, based on the Martian year. Mars dates are correlated with Earth's by the use of Earth's seasons, with Martian years divided into eight seasons to correspond to the seasons on Earth.

* ''TrippingTheRift''.

And this is ''before'' you take [[RealityIsOutToLunch relativity]] into account.

* In ''Fanfic/TheWrongReflection'', Eleya's hometown in Kendra Province is shown to be in daytime, but it's nighttime in the capital city of Ashalla.
* Played similarly in ''Fanfic/CreateYourOwnFate'' (same author, different {{Verse}}). Eleya is woken up on a lazy weekend morning in her apartment in Kendra City, but it's after midnight in Hathon.

* Averted in ''Manga/GalaxyExpress999''. It's an important plot point at times- the 999 stops for whatever constitutes a 'day' on each station's planet, and then leaves, missing passengers be damned. This is explained to the protagonist as early as the second episode of the series.

* ''Series/BabylonFive'': References to "sunrise" on a space station in "Day of the Dead" make no sense... unless, perhaps, Babylon 5 is in a synchronous orbit, and they really mean SURFACE sunrise.
** A first season episode averts this trope as a plot point. G'Kar is worried about losing face because he wasn't able to perform a religious ritual that must be performed at sunrise in front of a specific mountain on a specific day, whether you're actually at the site or not. Sinclair points out to G'Kar that Narn is a little over 10 of their light-years from Babylon 5, meaning that the light that appeared over that mountain 10 Narn years ago will be reaching the station soon. G'Kar uses this loophole to perform the ritual for his people on the station.
** Justified, since the station is sometimes shown orbiting into the shadow of the planet, with hull 'night' lighting turning on to compensate. An example is in the closing minutes of the season 3 finale.

** In the [[StarWarsTheCloneWars The Clone Wars]], troopers are heard using the term "rotation" to refer to the local day.

* Thoroughly averted in the ''Literature/RedMarsTrilogy'' by Kim Stanley Robinson, where the calendar requires some rethinking. The year is 669 days long (that's Martian days, by the way). The year is divided into twenty-four months, each 28 days long, with every eighth month being 27. They deal with this by using the name of every month twice, prefaced with 1 or 2 depending on which half of the year it is. They also measure the year in degrees for simplicity's sake, with the Spring Equinox being used for 0/360. The seasons are six months long. Oh, and Martian days are about 24 hours and 40 minutes. They don't bother reworking the timekeeping system though, they just stop the clock for forty minutes at midnight (they call this the "Timeslip").

** It's not [[FasterThanLightTravel Hyperspace]] that lets the StarWars universe have standardized time, it's the [[SubspaceAnsible Hyperwave Transciever and Subspace Radio]], which allow literally instantaneous communication between any two places in broadcast range. When a communications relay in a strategically important location is destroyed and a message needs to be sent there in the Literature/NewJediOrder series, this becomes a plot point. As the second-fastest thing the protagonists have after the currently-down instant communications, a starship--the ''Millennium Falcon'', naturally--gets sent to deliver the message instead. This opportunity is conveniently used to deliver some {{Exposition}} about how the communications systems work in StarWars, and they ''can'', actually, coordinate clocks across the galaxy with the clocks in the Senate Hall or the Imperial-slash-Chancellor's Palace on Coruscant. And they ''do'', since any place that's not on the surface of a planet uses that timezone of that planet as a standard.
** The use of "universal time" is complained about in one of the RogueSquadron books, when one pilot (an escaped prisoner) realized he's stranded on a planet that's so idiotically in thrall to the Empire as to set its clocks to Coruscant Standard Time. [[spoiler:He shortly realizes that he's actually been on Coruscant itself the whole time.]]

* In ''OrionsArm'' people have given up on trying to establish any such system, even with the help of wormholes.

->"US Naval Observatory ''Master Clock''. Eastern Standard Time, 2 hours, 1 minute, exactly. Universal time 7 hours, 1 minute, 5 seconds."
-->-- ''For a good time, call'' 202-762-1401