Technical info related to Arrakis/Dune

[Prana_Bindu]

Hi all,

New to the forum.  Ginormous fan of Herbert in general. Dune has been a huge influence on me since my teens. 

Anyway, to the point, I'm hoping folks here can provide me with data related to the following or point me in the direction of:

Populations on Dune and their numbers?

Calendars?

Amount of troops during the different eras?

hours in a day?

hours of daylight?

Sandworm migration and frequencies?

etc...

Thanks so much.

[Dante]

I have neither my copy of Dune nor the Encyclopaedia with me, sadly, but I seem to recall that Herbert didn't always specify the details. He mentions a "standard year," for example, which can be compared to the local time measurement on Dune or Caladan, but I don't think it's exact length is ever stated.

Sandworms, though, were enough of a mystery that their behaviour was never well documented. Even thousands of years after the time of Paul Atreides, people still searched for "wormsign" instead of having a way to track the creatures.

I expect someone will be able to find pertinant info from the books, or I will myself when I get my copy back in a few day's time. There are some maps at the start of Dune, anyway. Until then I have to ask, why are you interested in details like this?

[SandChigger]

A Standard Year is 20 hours shorter than a "primitive year". Presumably the latter is our terrestrial year, so a SY is about 8,745 hours and 48 minutes.

The books give the names of only three months of the Fremen calendar (AFAIK): Ramadhan, Laab, and Caprock. (The latter appears to be a translation. Only Ramadhan is an original Muslim month.)

This for a game? ;)

[athanasios]

l

[Prana_Bindu]

A Standard Year is 20 hours shorter than a "primitive year". Presumably the latter is our terrestrial year, so a SY is about 8,745 hours and 48 minutes.

The books give the names of only three months of the Fremen calendar (AFAIK): Ramadhan, Laab, and Caprock. (The latter appears to be a translation. Only Ramadhan is an original Muslim month.)

This for a game? ;)

Sorry for the delay in response.

I have a friend who wants to make an iPhone app like

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

but for Dune.

So as you can see he would need several different criteria of data.  It's quite an ambition.

Any other information would be helpful.

Thanks for the responses so far :)

Any more are appreciated

[SparrowsOfDune]

In the Preludes, Kynes is astounded to find that there are around 10,000,000 Fremen (it think this is just deep desert Fremen).

As for troop numbers, I think armies in these neo-feudal times were very small, with off planet force projection entirely dependant on favour with the Spacing Guild. Homeworld Police forces may well be a different matter. This would be different before the Guild and after the Dissolution of the Empire, the Heretics era, as before they had computers to run spacecraft and after they had the Ixian Navigation machines, so a huge mass of spice for the navigator was no loger a component of the Price.

Someone did the astometry on Canopus, I think an Arrakian year is about 1800 years, based on where the Terrestrial Habitiable zone would lie for an enormous star like canopus.

Not sure of the prescice lenth of Arrkis's day, except that it is about 40 or so minutes shorter than Caladan's.

There may well be a seasonal cycle to the Worm's behavior, but with a "season" lasting 450 years (and on a planet with only a small incline, not 23 degrees like Earth), it would be far too subtle to notice in a normal Human lifetime.

Don't know about the Fremen calendar, the Empire as a whole used one starting from the Foundation of the Spacing Guild, with a year that we assume is very close to a present day Earth Year. Presumably there are months and some sort of standard day too.

[SandChigger]

In the Preludes, ...

Who cares?

Someone did the astometry on Canopus, I think an Arrakian year is about 1800 years, based on where the Terrestrial Habitiable zone would lie for an enormous star like canopus.

Source?

There may well be a seasonal cycle to the Worm's behavior, but with a "season" lasting 450 years (and on a planet with only a small incline, not 23 degrees like Earth), it would be far too subtle to notice in a normal Human lifetime.

Source?

Don't know about the Fremen calendar, the Empire as a whole used one starting from the Foundation of the Spacing Guild, with a year that we assume is very close to a present day Earth Year. Presumably there are months and some sort of standard day too.

The Standard Year (SY) is 20 hours shorter than the Primitive (=Terran?) Year, AS I POSTED ABOVE (read much?). And a calendar is not the same as a dating system.