From the TNG era onward the various Writer's Bibles took an approach of 10,000 days per season to make the math easy if a script was given a Stardate in the right season and plenty of room for all the scripts in a season to have their own Stardates. If the Stardate day is a 24 hour Earth day equivalent then seasons were expected to take roughly 3 earth years. Or was that a sign that the Stardate day was about a third shorter than an Earth day and "five-year mission" did still just refer to Earth standard years?
There are all kinds of fan theories. Some weird things in canon. Some weirder things in the books and other bits of Beta and Gamma "canon".
(I did a bit too deep of a dive into Stardates recently as an offshoot of getting the idea to try to display a Stardate-like calendar and date stamps in the configurable calendar system of the Fantasy Grounds TTRPG hosting application.)
It basically turns the "range" of communication into relative velocity, as relative time dilation shifts transmission frequency beyond processability. An intermediary with lower relative velocity to both can act as MITM.
> Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex - and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series (starting with Dauntless) has a lot of time involved, due to military fleets/flotillas maneuvers at light-hour distances:
Fleet A jumps into a system. Fleet B is 6 light hours distant across the system. B won't see light from A's arrival for 6 hours. A won't see B's reaction for 12 hours, less any distance covered. Ships can engage in combat at up to 0.2c relative velocity, at a maximum distance of about 1 light second.
Fleet A accelerates to 0.1c, Fleet B does the same and they approach. Time to contact is 30 hours, and the books discuss how difficult it is for humans to rest and focus on other things during that time. Our instinctive fight/flight/fawn/freeze reaction doesn't translate well to waiting 30 hours!
Fleet A and B approach, but because the ships take a few seconds to pivot/roll/yaw to maneuver, so there's a critical time period where A or B can change position and the opposing fleet won't have time to react before the fleets clash. This is used to great effect by the skilled fleet commander of the Good Guys.
The lost fleet books also discuss maneuvering fleet formations when everyone is at light-minute or multiple light second distances. There's lots of orders like "at time 15, Echo One pivot formation down 30 degrees and starboard 15 degrees". Learning to bring all your firepower to bear on the enemy at a single moment, while denying them the same opportunity, is a very difficult skill to learn in these books.
Aaand I've written way too much. And probably not done the fantastic combat in the lost fleet books any justice at all.
Yeah, I deeply hope someone can write it one day. I've tried thinking about how you'd model and calculate such behaviour, but it's mostly beyond me.
Thank you for the compliment :)
It is a heavy game. https://youtu.be/eqn7F97M8XA
I'll also mention Dread Empire's Fall by Walter Jon Williams - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Empire%27s_Fall
You again deal with long communication distances and most fleet actions are done with missiles. This then has the challenge of "how do you control the missiles / select the targets at such distances (no AIs)" and there is a class of pilots that fly a 'pinnace' which is a small, one person ship that is capable of doing high acceleration to keep up with the missiles.
During peace times, the pinnace pilots tend to be more about prestige and racing.
There was also an instance of moving a jump point thingy that _really_ messed up a fleet action (since the fleet, traveling at high speed to the edge of the system missed the "go here to jump to the next system" and instead had to turn around and go back ... which represented a lot of time and acceleration (not all species in the universe don't have the same tolerance for acceleration).
And then I got sneakier and would send a false fleet to attack the wrong planet in turn X, and the real fleet would show up one or two turns later on the opposite side of the victim’s empire, just after they had committed every spare ship in their navy to a jump in the wrong direction, tying up their logistics until after the fight was over and I was rebuilding planetary defenses, preparing for the counterattack.