Something about TOS I never realised before...

... sequentially in Stardate order, the first stardate we're given is 1312 (Where No Man Has Gone Before), and the last is 5943 (All Our Yesterdays). So it appears we do get to see the five year mission in TOS's three seasons... if we are to assume that 1000 stardate points roughly equal a year.

I've never noticed that before. Strange that it never occured to me to really look at the Stardates in any great detail.

Also, Catspaw (SD: 3018) evidently takes place before Space Seed (SD: 3141), meaning that the oft quoted 'continuity error' of Chekov not being on the Enterprise when Khan first visited her must not be true. Chekov is seen on the bridge on the earlier Stardate, ergo he was obviously there (off-screen) when they discovered the Botany Bay.

 

Finally the universe makes sense.

 

Yeah, we can all go home now.

 

The only downsides: one or two cases of stardate overlap in the early episodes (mainly, "Miri" vs. "Dagger of the Mind", but Kirk may have been too consumed by the illness to get the last stardate right in "Miri"...), and then a problem that doesn't go away even with the extra years allowed by the stardates.

That problem is from the stardate-free "Day of the Dove", where Klingons think they have upheld the peace signed after "Errand of Mercy" for three years. It's not even two between the airdates of the episodes, so one'd think the stardate model would bring some relief here. Alas, "Errand" has a stardate of about 3200, so "Day of the Dove" ought to take place around SD 6200. Which isn't impossible by any means, but a bit annoying, when the stardate order would otherwise have TOS end with a bang - the supernova explosion of "All Our Yesterdays".

Timo Saloniemi

 

Klingon years could be shorter.

 

I did, but then that would mean that the production order is not the chronological order, which is, while possible, weird.

 

Maybe the star date numbers are chosen like in the lottery.

 

I realized this some years ago. Nice how that fell together, eh?

 

I actually feel better now about the whole Khan/Chekov thing. Finally, I can get some sleep.

 

Grant me one assumption and I can prove anything.

 

I think the writers just thought of a random number and added, say 100, onto it to get a Stardate.

Its all bollocks really.

 

1000 star dates equal a year roughly... Is this not defined somewhere? I feel silly for not know this but what is the breakdown of a star date?

 

Since it holds together so amazingly well for TOS, it may be the people slapping stardates onto those episodes did indeed think in these terms. Or at least some of the people did.

Basically, though, 1000 SD/season was decided upon for the first season of TNG, and they stuck to it thereafter - the big question is, does a season equal a year? In most writing, it does, but sometimes the writers make mistakes there, and sometimes it's more convenient to claim that five years have passed rather than the actual three seasons if it allows an older child actor to be used for Molly O'Brien...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I never tried figuring it out and just ran with whatever number they threw at me. It hurt my brain too much trying to sort out events and dates into something that resembled real time.

 

It is my belief that stardates work in a way similar to time zones. To wit, while those onboard a starship in one part of the galaxy might be experiencing stardate 2700, it might be stardate 3000 on another starship in a different part of the galaxy at the same moment of real time. This is so the dates can be related to one central focal point, maybe Earth or the center of the Federation.
This explains such oddities in TOS such as the "overlapping" of certain stardates, as stardate 1514.1 occurring in both "The Corbomite Manuever" and "The Man Trap". These two episodes happened very close to each other in real time, but the repition in stardates happened because the Enterprise was in a slightly different part of space in each episode. It's kind of like a person flying from the East Coast to the West Coast getting to relive the same hour twice in one day.
In the case of the odd stardate for the animated episode "The Magicks of Megas-Tu", the Enterprise in that episode was said to be investigating the center of the galaxy. This area may have been so far removed in distance from the center of Federation space that the stardate used to represent it had to be a much lower number than what it might have been had the Enterprise been closer to Earth.
This is just my explanation for certain oddities in the stardate timeline, anyway.

 

Now has anybody a n episode list to watch them in stardate order and see if that makes a difference somehow in the experience?

This requires the experiment.

Another thought: would that mean, that the stardate system was only started more or less with the five year mission?

Edit: This would also explain the stardate system in the new movies, since they basically converted earth dates into a single number instead.

 

It is problematic if we include The Animated Series. "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" has got a stardate which predates the entire original series. I would be intrigued to try watching just TOS in stardate order sometime though just to see how it turns out.

 

Apparently not. After all, past events such as Kirk's birthdate in "Where No Man" or something relating to Kodos the Executioner in "Conscience of the King" are both given in the four-digit stardate format as well.

We do have to speculate that the four digits represent truncation, though. But that's a pretty natural assumption: we are comfortable with saying "Hitler invaded Poland in '39" or "My great-grandmother was born in '98" when the century and millennium are obvious to us anyway. And indeed TNG later shows people using five digits, adding an explicit "decade digit", while implying that a "century digit" and more are available if the need arises.

The same system is used in the 2230s on the Kelvin and in the 2250s on the Enterprise, though, so it's not mission-specific or ship-specific in any fashion.

I guess the smart thing to do is to decide that a system of giving Earth years plus a string of decimal points for Earth days was in use until the 2230s at least, after which the TOS timeline adopted a new system (and applied it retroactively to past dates) but the nuTrek timeline kept the old system...

Or then it's from the next decade, making it one of the very last Trek adventures before ST:TMP.

Timo Saloniemi