IS the okuda timeline canon?

Well, to be fair Picard spells the word knife without the K, we all have our little problems.

This (or something like it), the "class of 78" doesn't have to be a reference to a year.

 

Riker was challenging the authenticity of Data's officer commission. It would be pretty natural for the android to point out that he has 77 witnesses to the commission being for real!

Or then Data graduated from the class of Seventy Eight, the famous great-grandson of Gary Eight.

Timo Saloniemi

 

As rationalizations go that one's a doozy.

 

Indeed.

I don't need it rationalized. It's clearly a reference to the year, which was later retconned. That's good enough for me.

 

Thanks to the Great Bird of the Galaxy we have stardates instead of traditional calendar dates to refer to.


Nice "class of 78" speculations presented here, maybe there had been a class in 2178 that became famous because it had the best of the best students and eventually became a colloquialism for the best classes in Starfleet in the subsequent years.

Thus Data wasn't providing information regarding the actual year but only that he had been privileged to be in the best class, the "Class of 78"

Bob

 

Maybe it was class of stardate xxxx78? Though that would be problematic too.

 

Thinking about it a little more, I wonder if the answer is much simpler. Maybe in D.C. Fontana's mind, the show took place exactly 400 years in the future (2387, four hundred years after "Farpoint" was written). Class of '78 would make perfect sense in that case.

 

So Data graduated yesterday, from Riker's point of view? That would certainly make his rank of Lieutenant Commander "honorary" like Riker suspects, undermining the point that Data supposedly is making.

Timo Saloniemi

 

2378 to 2387 would be eleven years. At least in my neck of the woods.

 

I'm glad you caught that because I sure in the hell wouldn't have!

 

...Oops in any case, for me not seeing the 78/87 thing.

("Oops" is "Sorry" in Finnish, BTW.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

It's reassuring for me to see everyone here is as bad at math as I am.

And then he spent a couple of ice ages stuck at commander.

 

Greg Cox addressed/fixed this onscreen discrepancy in his excellentnovel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh (Book 3 of the "Khan trilogy"), in that the "fifteen years" figure mentioned by Khan in the film are actually fifteen Ceti Alpha V-years, not Earth-years.

At the time The Wrath of Khan was produced, the perception of ST's timeline was far more fluid and less-established than it became in later years, so that figure was valid at the time, but later onscreen dating referents in episodes of TNG contradicted this (one canonical source versus another canonical source).

Cox's fix was elegant and works amazingly well, and appears in a fantastic story, to boot.

 

"Onscreen discrepancy" ?!?

Kirk is also a citizen of Earth and hasn't seen Khan for "15 years" (and in the extended version, IIRC, Dr. Marcus makes another "15 years" reference).

Obviously Mr. Okuda didn't pay attention or didn't care, it's as simple as that, and therefore his job to properly work these 15 years into his timeline somehow, if he ever chooses to correct his mistake.

Bob

 

Although bear in mind too that we're actually talking about something in the neighborhood of maybe 17 Earth-years or thereabouts -- if Kirk was simply rounding down instead of up, it still tracks as an impromptu, ballpark conversational-figure.

 

I have little doubt that Khan, who still considers himself to be the "king" of Earth, counted his days in exile (child's play with the help of his superior intellect) in solar days and solar years.

Also, Chekov didn't protest his "15 years" statement. Just this second an image popped up in my mind with Mr. Okuda taking Chekov's place and saying "Incorrect. It was only 12 years".

Khan: "Make that two [Ceti Eeels] for this character!"

And, for what it's worth, assuming they had intended 1.000 digits to equal one solar year, the difference between Stardate 3.143.3 ("Space Seed") and [1]8130.4 (ST II) is 14.99 years.

Bob

 

Stardates in ST:TMP don't follow such a pattern, nor do those in the later TOS movies. So it need not be worth much - but it may still have been intentional this rare once. Points for Meyer!

Anyway, fifteen years is certainly a figure in the category of "possibly rounded up or down" - anything ending with 5 or 0 meets those criteria. In contrast, none of the dialogue references fall in the category of "characters would feel obligated to correct an inaccuracy".

Timo Saloniemi