Star Dates?

[Jag2112]

Has anyone caught a mention of any star dates from the last two episodes? I know none have been spoken since the pilot episode, but I was wondering if any dates may have popped up on some close-up shots of Discovery's numerous displays. I'm slowing going over the episodes on a frame-by-frame basis, but the CBS app makes it incredibly challenging...

I'm trying to fill in the gaps for this page (http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/eps-DSC1.php).

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks-

John

 

[Prax]

Well, I can't see the monitors on my phone, and I can't watch discovery on my TV, but I have a tip:

You could add the stardate to the page tentatively by adding exactly 6 months to the first episode's stardate, and then try to figure out how much time has passed(if any) between the third and fourth episode.

 

[Jag2112]

Well, I can't see the monitors on my phone, and I can't watch discovery on my TV, but I have a tip:

You could add the stardate to the page tentatively by adding exactly 6 months to the first episode's stardate, and then try to figure out how much time has passed(if any) between the third and fourth episode.

That's not a bad idea, but I can't seem to find a consistent approach for approximating days (or months/years) into star dates... so I'm not sure how much to 'add' to 1207.3 to account for the six month span since the pilot episodes...

 

[BillJ]

That's not a bad idea, but I can't seem to find a consistent approach for approximating days (or months/years) into star dates... so I'm not sure how much to 'add' to 1207.3 to account for the six month span since the pilot episodes...

You can't add much, as "Where No Man..." takes place in 226X and is only in the "13" range.

Captain's log, Stardate 1312.4.

 

[Prax]

Well, did they give an actual date in Discovery, like "Oct 10th. 2251"? In the reboot films, the statdate was simply the year, add a decimal.

 

[Ronald Held]

Isn't the last episode in 2256?

 

[Prax]

Ok, so memory alpha says it's May 11th, 2256, so we could say December 11th, then go to one of those snazzy online statdate calculators, and figure out the statdate.

 

[Longinus]

Ok, so memory alpha says it's May 11th, 2256, so we could say December 11th, then go to one of those snazzy online statdate calculators, and figure out the statdate.

It doesn't work. Only TNG+ era stardates make some logical sense. TOS ones really don't.

 

[BillJ]

It doesn't work. Only TNG+ era stardates make some logical sense. TOS ones really don't.

Those don't either really, in universe. Unless we believe every major event happens on or around New Year's Day every year.

 

[Kor]

Stardates just give a futuristic flavor. They were never meant to convey consistency across different episodes; only within a single episode as the point at the end increases. The original idea was that stardates would also take into account your physical location as well as relativistic effects, etc. So, depending on the circumstances, you might have to record your captain's log with a lower stardate than you did last week!

From the 1967 Star Trek writer's guide:

STARDATE
We invented "Stardate" to avoid continually mentioning Star Trek's century (actually, about two hundred years from now), and getting into arguments about whether this or that would have developed by then. Pick any combination of four numbers plus a percentage point, use it as your story's stardate. For example, 1313.5 is twelve o'clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon of the next day. Each percentage point is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of one day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don't worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode.

Kor

 

[The Wormhole]

Those don't either really, in universe. Unless we believe every major event happens on or around New Year's Day every year.

"What are your plans for New Year's?"
"Same as yours, fighting the Borg."

 

[Sir Stewart Wallace]

"What are your plans for New Year's?"
"Same as yours, fighting the Borg."

"Oh, not this year. Gonna kick it with Mark Twain."

 

[David cgc]

You can't add much, as "Where No Man..." takes place in 226X and is only in the "13" range.

There is a theory that stardates (especially TOS stardates) have additional digits we don't see, a bit like writing the current year as '17. In that case, it fits pretty well with the 1000-dates-per-year guideline of the TNG era. WNMHGB is "actually," say, stardate 7451312, and "The Vulcan Hello" is stardate 7441207.

 

[The Wormhole]

I just had an amusing thought about the Equinox survivors realizing that New Year's passed them by while they were caught up in the excitement of finding Voyager, betraying them and their ship getting destroyed and realizing they now need to think up New Year's Resolutions.

 

[Sir Stewart Wallace]

I just had an amusing thought about the Equinox survivors realizing that New Year's passed them by while they were caught up in the excitement of finding Voyager, betraying them and their ship getting destroyed and realizing they now need to think up New Year's Resolutions.

Well, at least they may have fulfilled the previous year's resolutions.

1. Find another Starfleet ship in huge quadrant of space, even though it defies all logic.
2. Betray them.
3. Get our own ship destroyed.

Good for them if so.

 

[Jag2112]

Well, I re-watched Context is for Kings, pausing every time a display was shown. Outside of some clock displays and other gibberish, there weren't any star dates listed. Going to re-watch Butcher... tonight to see if I can catch any...

 

[Beamer]

I have a feeling that since the writers describe this season as a 15 hour story, they only wanted one log entree at the very beginning in episode 1 to set the stage like any other Trek episode. It's also explained by the fact that she's been court martialed and there's no logical reason for her to continue recording logs for Starfleet.

Honestly I'm kinda bummed that they don't have more of them, but if these are their reasons why, I can see where they're coming from.

 

[C.E. Evans]

There was an old fan idea--back in the day before TNG debuted--that each ship had individual stardates and that they were more like "mission clocks" rather than universal timekeeping systems. As such, in 2260, you could have one ship in the first year of its deployment have a stardate of 1071.3 and another in the fifth year of its deployment have a stardate of 5473.2. On Earth, it'd simply be a Thursday.

 

[Longinus]

There was an old fan idea--back in the day before TNG debuted--that each ship had individual stardates and that they were more like "mission clocks" rather than universal timekeeping systems. As such, in 2260, you could have one ship in the first year of its deployment have a stardate of 1071.3 and another in the fifth year of its deployment have a stardate of 5473.2. On Earth, it'd simply be a Thursday.

Damn. That would have been a great idea.

 

[Timo]

...That sort of went out of the window the first moment the writers needed to refer to a past event. Which I guess was in "Conscience of the King", with Kodos doing this-or-that on "stardate" despite being presumed dead long before Kirk's mission began.

The thing about New Years is that those on Earth probably don't coincide with the stardate ones, even if one stardate year (that is, a thousand units) is one Earth year long. After all, while we never get a solid stardate for a Christmas, we can see it's late summer in the vineyards of France in TNG "Family", just after the last three digits roll to zeroes. And annual Earth events like the Festival of Light or Thanksgiving or Halloween seem to fall on specific dates in synch with the Hollywood season which begins right after the summer...

Of course, a stardate in the X200 range then ought to be in mid-autumn and not May 11.

Timo Saloniemi