Original length of the centon

[Specter]

I've sometimes heard the original centon, as referenced in the pilot (and about half the time in Lost Planet of the Gods), said to have been about a week. After some ciphering, it occurs to me that it might have been intended as the equivalent of 10 days. This is an educated guess derived from the usage of the "millicenton."

On Carillon, Jolly tells Starbuck's team that they should check in every 4 millicentons. If a centon is 10 days, then a millicenton is 14.4 minutes. That would make 4 millicentons extremely close to an hour.

Now, the Viper pilot played by Paul Coufos says Apollo is vectored to intersect the tylium mine in 24 millicentons, which at the rate of 1 centon = 10 days would be 6 hours. That might seem quite a lengthy journey to take in a landram, but on the other hand there is the reference at the beginning of Lost Planet of the Gods to the dinner's having lasted "nigh on 3 millicentons." Now, using the 10-day equivalent, that's just shy of 45 minutes. Anything shorter than that would seem almost unworthy of Adama's comment about the dinner's taking so long.

Then again, when Starbuck is going into the void to find Apollo, he says he's going to give Apollo "about a millicenton" to voice any objections to his plan, and 14.4 minutes sounds like quite a lot of time for that. But yet in part 2 of Lost Planet, he says "switching off you for a microcenton to scan ahead." At the 10-day rate, a microcenton would be something like .86 of a second; anything much shorter than that would be practically useless as a measure of time.

Incidentally, if you calculate based on New Centons (1 centon = 1 minute), the check-ins on Carillon would have occurred about 4 times per second.

[johnnybear]

Normally I'd have said a Centon was a minute considering how Richard Hatch used it on the show but I'm not really sure the writers knew either! I would guess at it being anything between one and three minutes perhaps?
JB

[Cylon-Knight]

I'd go with a minute too, per ye olden Original Series Writer's Guide.
Now if they used it "correctly" on set after the scripts were written, rewrites, goofs, etc. that's a different story.

TIMES
Centon - (sentonn) - equivalent of a minute
Micron - a tenth of a centon
Yahren - a year
Millenium - a thousand years

Source link: http://kobol.com/archives/wguide.html

[johnnybear]

I always got the jist that a centon was originally meant to be a minute but different writers had different ideas on that like you say which left us none the wiser!!!
JB