What is the date format used by EWL?
great question! so here's a screenshot from B1 chorus 4 featuring the EWL's date format:
this is something i've spent a lot of time thinking about and that i'm entirely uncertain how if ever to incorporate into the narrative proper, but basically-- the EWL is a coalition of outcasts from every conceivable species across all realities. this includes creatures whose lifespan is extremely brief to those whose lifespans are nigh immeasurable. and while many in the Legion are god tier & thus conditionally immortal, just as many are not. add to this the fact that every planet has its own day/night cycle, and every society its own concept of time, suddenly you've got a huge logistical nightmare in terms of maintaining the Legion's day-to-day function.
for all these reasons and more, the EWL relies on a squishier and more subjective view of time in its own record keeping. to wit, the Legion deliberately historicizes itself through the lens of an ongoing serialized anime narrative. S6A8E089 above means Season 6, Arc 8, Episode 089. these designations are often determined retroactively, as "an episode" can contain anywhere from a few hours to several months worth of activity, depending on how narratively eventful that interval of time was. these ultimately correspond with the "official" EWL anime that fictionalizes major events in Legion history with a goal of highlighting up-and-coming figures in the organization, some of whom get their own spinoffs. this is a manifestation of the Legion being a society run on hero worship that relies on the youthful desire to prove oneself. we've already seen some of this with how Dane idolizes Silverbark in B1.
[an important addendum to the above information is that the EWL is huge and contains many satellite organs that operate on different expectations. this is about the core of the EWL focused on the Universe Engine Intervention Program, which occupies a tremendous amount of attention and resources within the EWL both as content-generation for entertainment products/history and for recruitment of more godly orphans to the cause. this is cynical and pretty dystopic, but it's important to clarify that this is not the only nor even the *expected* route for a new member to take, especially a younger one. i promise it's not child soldiers all the way down lmao]
then there's the second value after the numbers and letters. RST stands for Relative Subjective Time, and it exists to more directly address the issue of polychronological bureaucracy and timekeeping. the idea is that anywhere you see that blue field with courier bold text in it, that is an objective marker in time being automatically translated into whichever timekeeping system you're used to. this particular document reflects military time because that's what makes sense for the kind of document it is-- but it's highly unlikely that the crew of the Hours Badger utilized a 24 hour clock in their own operations, even despite the timepiece-themed nature of the ship itself.
management of time is a tremendous challenge within the Legion, which is why an inordinate amount of resources are assigned to precisely this task. RST functions automatically on the user end, but it only functions as a consequence of the tireless work of Legion Syncopators. every member has a Syncopator assigned to them whose job it is to synchronize the lifecycle and subjective experience of time with the shared consensus established within EWL culture. the result is that a member in need of 8 hours of rest and a member in need of 30 hours of rest may to go to bed at the same time, sleep the exact amount they need, and still wake up at the same time as though they shared the same objective time stream. RST is just one of many ways the EWL produces a shared subjective reality among disparate peoples by utilizing god tier powers to massage objective reality to their whims.