SFTM Stardates

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I suspect you'd find far more episodes that violate that "rule" from the writers' guide than episodes that follow it. Stardates were never supposed to convey any meaningful information, so I doubt a lot of effort was put into keeping them consistent.

Heck, most TV shows and movies don't even bother to depict seconds consistently. How many times, in Trek and elsewhere, have you heard characters count down the "seconds" but draw it out so that the numbers were far more than a second apart? How many times has a countdown taken five minutes of real time to decrease by 30 seconds? Heck, in ST V, they said it would take over 8 hours to get to the center of the galaxy, but it took less than 20 minutes of continuous story time with essentially no room for a gap. TV and movies are terrible at timekeeping even when it's regular time units, because the priorities of drama and editing and pacing are more important and they know most viewers won't bother to time things. So I doubt they'd put any more care into stardates.

That's what I loved about "24", they tried to maintain a "Everything is in real time" vibe.

Imagine if they did the same thing for Star Trek and "Everything is in Real Time" as much as possible. If they Fast Foreward, they will mention the time jump and list it accurately and go back to "Real Time" mode.

 

[Christopher]

That's what I loved about "24", they tried to maintain a "Everything is in real time" vibe.

Not very plausibly, though, since it often required characters to get from one location to another with improbable speed, or to recover in an hour or two from serious injuries that would take days or weeks to heal from.

The 1990 The Flash did something similar with its episode "Beat the Clock," where the Flash had only an hour to prove the innocence of a man about to be executed. It made sense for the Flash to get from place to place quickly, but other characters were able to move implausibly fast between the various locations in the story.

One of the most memorable "real time" episodes was the M*A*S*H episode "Life Time," which not only had an onscreen countdown clock but was shot entirely from the first-person POV of the wounded soldier who had to get surgery within 20 minutes or risk permanent paralysis. The show's medical advisor actually co-wrote the script, because it depended so much on getting the medical details right. https://www.metv.com/stories/the-m-...-co-wrote-this-notable-episode-with-alan-alda

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Not very plausibly, though, since it often required characters to get from one location to another with improbable speed, or to recover in an hour or two from serious injuries that would take days or weeks to heal from.

The 1990 The Flash did something similar with its episode "Beat the Clock," where the Flash had only an hour to prove the innocence of a man about to be executed. It made sense for the Flash to get from place to place quickly, but other characters were able to move implausibly fast between the various locations in the story.

One of the most memorable "real time" episodes was the M*A*S*H episode "Life Time," which not only had an onscreen countdown clock but was shot entirely from the first-person POV of the wounded soldier who had to get surgery within 20 minutes or risk permanent paralysis. The show's medical advisor actually co-wrote the script, because it depended so much on getting the medical details right. https://www.metv.com/stories/the-m-...-co-wrote-this-notable-episode-with-alan-alda

Well most of the travel time in "24" was in the LA County area and I know how fast typical traffic goes in that area since I live there and drive during Rush Hour alot. It basically made sense, and during boring times like traffic, they just shifted focus to other characters and what they were doing.

I never saw the 1990's "The Flash", I've been keeping up with the most recent one, and they had a "Nuclear Bomb" episode where the Flash had to solve it after he couldn't defuse it, that was also incredibly well done.

I've watched only bits & pieces of M*A*S*H, so I'll take your word for it.

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

I suspect you'd find far more episodes that violate that "rule" from the writers' guide than episodes that follow it. Stardates were never supposed to convey any meaningful information, so I doubt a lot of effort was put into keeping them consistent.

Heck, most TV shows and movies don't even bother to depict seconds consistently. How many times, in Trek and elsewhere, have you heard characters count down the "seconds" but draw it out so that the numbers were far more than a second apart? How many times has a countdown taken five minutes of real time to decrease by 30 seconds? Heck, in ST V, they said it would take over 8 hours to get to the center of the galaxy, but it took less than 20 minutes of continuous story time with essentially no room for a gap. TV and movies are terrible at timekeeping even when it's regular time units, because the priorities of drama and editing and pacing are more important and they know most viewers won't bother to time things. So I doubt they'd put any more care into stardates.

Except in Gamesters Of Triskellion where Enterprise logs go from 3211.7 to 3259.2 and which represents a time period of 2 hours, according to onscreen dialogue.
Or did Kirk forget to wind his star-clock that morning?

It’s not arbitrary, it is in the Writer’s Guide. At least within an episode, time passes at that rate.

At one time, early on, I read, the idea was that stardates were based on a daily count calendar that would just keep going up instead of noting years, months, etc., but it was based on the length of an Earth day. "The Making of Star Trek" had this information, and said that this was a real proposed timekeeping system. It would be interesting to calculate when TOS would take place if that system were used. The problem with that if stardates really worked like that, the original 5-year mission would last 16 years.

With Starfleet Headquarters on Earth, 1000 units equals one Earth year, but remembering that some variance would happen die to warp/high impulse travel, seems reasonable, in that it is not a regular Earth calendar but is not totally foreign either. It may not be quite right to what the characters experience, but it might be close enough for interpolating anything about the show that is not clear from canon for fan works.

As a side note, I have previously suggested that the TOS movies moved the decimal point, that is the stardate of 8128.76 for Spocks death could have been written 1287.6 in TOS. This makes the movies a bit more like the fan system lsited above, a nice touch if that was what was intended in my opinion. The could affect the original poster's work insomuch as it given another option for how to write the stardates.