Star date system plz explaing??
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The short answer is that it's inconsistent and doesn't make any sense.
But in TOS and TAS it was four digits and seemed as though 1000 units roughly corresponded to a year, depending on how accurately you think the production and airdate order reflected the passage of time for the crew. In TMP it's four digits but starts with 7 seeming to indicate that maybe the first two digits might have something to do with the year, or decade. From Star Trek II on that seems to hold true, except that the data tape that Carol Marcus records starts with a 7 too.
In the TNG-era they started the show with the five digits, the first one was 4 for the 24th century and the second one was for the season number. The other three digits progressed roughly sequentially from the beginning of the calender year to the end. So stardate 41000.1 was on January 1st, 2364. Once nine years in the same time frame came and went they just rolled it over to starting with a 5. If you backtrack the change in the stardate system was probably in 2323 (when Picard was a freshman at the Academy) depending on if they just started at 00000.0. If they started at 10000.0 then it would have been ten years later.
Another quirk in stardates is that sometimes a whole number is used to represent a specific date. But if you divide 365.2422 (the number of Earth days in one year) then you get 2.74 stardate units per day.
On one hand it's very Earth-centric to have 1000 units equal one Earth year, but stardates may have an equalizing factor on the day and year lengths on other Federation planets. The original explanation was that stardates had something to do with the effects of warp drive on the perception of time.
But really it's all just a cool, futuristic-sounding, way to record log entries.
But in TOS and TAS it was four digits and seemed as though 1000 units roughly corresponded to a year, depending on how accurately you think the production and airdate order reflected the passage of time for the crew. In TMP it's four digits but starts with 7 seeming to indicate that maybe the first two digits might have something to do with the year, or decade. From Star Trek II on that seems to hold true, except that the data tape that Carol Marcus records starts with a 7 too.
In the TNG-era they started the show with the five digits, the first one was 4 for the 24th century and the second one was for the season number. The other three digits progressed roughly sequentially from the beginning of the calender year to the end. So stardate 41000.1 was on January 1st, 2364. Once nine years in the same time frame came and went they just rolled it over to starting with a 5. If you backtrack the change in the stardate system was probably in 2323 (when Picard was a freshman at the Academy) depending on if they just started at 00000.0. If they started at 10000.0 then it would have been ten years later.
Another quirk in stardates is that sometimes a whole number is used to represent a specific date. But if you divide 365.2422 (the number of Earth days in one year) then you get 2.74 stardate units per day.
On one hand it's very Earth-centric to have 1000 units equal one Earth year, but stardates may have an equalizing factor on the day and year lengths on other Federation planets. The original explanation was that stardates had something to do with the effects of warp drive on the perception of time.
But really it's all just a cool, futuristic-sounding, way to record log entries.
I just accepted that 1000 units equaled about one Earth year. I never thought that it was exactly one Earth year or that 45000.0 was January 1st at midnight. In fact, I thought that the first episode of season 1 took place in 2363, not 2364.
Well there are inconsistencies, such as in the last season of Voyager where they celebrate First Contact Day and the stardate doesn't match up to what it would be for that day and year, but generally the next 1000 units starts at January of the next year. I guessed that it corresponded to the calender year because I'm fairly certain I remember seeing episodes that gave evidence to that fact. Maybe it was just that most of the chronologies place the calender year in the same year as a particular season. It's possible that it's fanon for now, but until I hear otherwise, it seems a neatly organized enough system.
As already mentioned, stardates are really little more than technobabble. While they did follow a regular pattern of sorts during TNG-DS9-VOY, they were more or less made up numbers on the fly, with the only rule being that they get progressively bigger. Because of their semi-arbitrary nature, there are inconsistencies between any devised system and various holidays mentioned in the various Trek shows. So depending on what theory you like, each new stardate year either begins on January 1, May 8, or sometime in September...
So they couldn't be bothered to do the maths and make a date system so they just put any random sequence of numbers?? lol it really makes Star Trek look cheap
The "maths" would be a waste of time, since there'd be no way to figure out a "real" system that would work in a political alliance of people flying around with a fictional faster-than-light technology (at least, not without specifics about how that technology works that we don't have).
Roddenberry on stardates:
I think this is good solid technobabble, by which I mean that while he admitted to not being quite certain what it meant, it sounds like it may mean something, introduces credible uncertainty and variation to the fictional system, and allows me to accept that stardates are something useful in the Trek universe that we haven't the time, tools or need to fully explicate.
Well, again, the reason for the seemingly random nature of the numbers is that it's a completely different time-keeping system than what is used on Earth. It probably takes into account the exotic physics involved with space and time and also the political implications of dozens of Federation planets. It probably doesn't correspond exactly with Earth's Gregorian calender. Even on Earth there are calenders based on the moon rather than the sun so Chinese New Year falls on a different day every year. It's probably the way the Federation reconciles all the myriad time-keeping systems of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.
And anyway, they did have a guy in charge of that, Eric Stillwell was in charge of stardates on TNG. On DS9 and VOY, they simply didn't make as many log entries, so it wasn't quite as big a deal. On DS9 it was a little tricky however because not every episode had the same story time but when they did have stardates they did usually correspond to when they fell in terms of a fraction of a season.
And anyway, they did have a guy in charge of that, Eric Stillwell was in charge of stardates on TNG. On DS9 and VOY, they simply didn't make as many log entries, so it wasn't quite as big a deal. On DS9 it was a little tricky however because not every episode had the same story time but when they did have stardates they did usually correspond to when they fell in terms of a fraction of a season.
So they couldn't be bothered to do the maths and make a date system so they just put any random sequence of numbers?? lol it really makes Star Trek look cheap
Well, honestly you can't blame them. They never really expected people to "use it" in such a manner.
And -IIRC- TNG just arbitraily used Stardate "40xxx" as being any date that took place before Season 1. But not necessaoilry the year before Season 1.
In TNG the second number denotes the Season they're in (41xxx is TNG's first season, 45xxx is TNG's fifth season, etc.) and they kept this system through the end of Voyager. Voyager's final SD is 54973 or in what would be TNG's 14th season.
Really the stardates mean nothing and are just away for the writers to put in a date, a date that "sounds futuristic" and fixes it so they don't have to have any chronological contnuity. There's a couple instances in TNG where an epiosde actucally takes place BETWEEN previous episodes! (The episode that follows TNG's Birthright 6th season two-part episode has a SD that places it between the two parts. Not a "problem" until you realize Worf is on the bridge in this episode when in the Birthright episodes he was off the ship!)
For what it is worth (and it isn't much) in my personal fan-fic I've been working on on and off for years now I've "mapped out" what SD each day of the year falls on and even the correct time and if I ever really get it "off the ground" and make a web-series with it like I plan on I hope to be consistant and "accurate" as possible with the dates.
So basically there's no need to explain it to the viewer as it's complicated and not really relevant, because all the viewer wants to see is ships being blown up and no techno rubbish lol, still it will be nice if us fans understood it
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So basically there's no need to explain it to the viewer as it's complicated and not really relevant, because all the viewer wants to see is ships being blown up and no techno rubbish lol, still it will be nice if us fans understood it
Well, not so much the watch things blow up and such, since Trek is more story-driven than that. It's just that they didn't want to tie the writers down with having to keep track of dates because of Trek's episodic nature.
They wanted to leave it open so that in rerun-syndication the episodes didn't have to be aired in order for people to follow the stories and if you want to keep the "log entry" motiff you need a date system that people can't understand so there's no contnuity.
Now, there IS an obvious contnuity and chronology because the SDs do, mostly, seem to make sense but someone *cough* in the Production wanted things to be episodic for syndication which is one of the more major reasons why TNG and Voyager don't have arcs -how DS9 got away with it I'm not sure but I think it's mostly because the *cough* someone wasn't heavily involved with things and more concerned about Voyager.
"Fortuantly" someone wised up with Enterprise and decided to have a logical progression with the dates, even going as far as to use Earth dates as opposed to Stardates.
In terms the shows it's best to not try and to connect the stardates to any calendar date and only "roughly" assume they're sequential -as while that mostly makes sense there's a few "mistakes" and examples of it not being the case- and that 1000 correspond to a year. It correspond to 2 years or six months for all we know.
Stardate xx001 could be April 23rd for all we know and not January 1.
(I think someone had once calculated that the turn-over date for Stardates was somewhere in April and that this theory mostly lined up to the few times a Stardate is linked with an actual date.)
Also note that most of DS9 and Voyager ignored the concept of dates altogether (again, likely to allow things to be aired in second-run syndication without having to wore about an order) and just used the log entry "supplemental." More than a few DS9 and Voyager (and a couple TNG episodes) start off with a "supplemental" log entry and not giving a numerical Stardate at all!
Here's my $0.02.
There was an explanation I read once (from a web site I can't remember the name of)... that frankly made a heck of a lot more sense than The Bird's given reason.... Let's see if I can't make it sound reasonable....
The gist of it is... Starfleet used a certain system in the TOS era where the thousand's and hundred's place in the date (as in, 3536.4) corresponded with a month, the ten's and unit's places, for fractions of said month. The number after the decimal was either a day, or (more likely) a crew shift.
The dates were individual from ship to ship, and all Starfleet was required to keep track of each starship's dates, so they could carry on a conversation. The dating started with the beginning of said ship's five-year (or whatever) mission, beginning with Stardate 1000.0.
Some time before the first movie, Starfleet decided to use a single date system, to make things less complicated. They took the Enterprise's last logged stardate (out of repect for the ship and crew), and continued on from there, slowwwwwwwwwing the date progression, so that it took years to get from 8XXX.X to 9XXX.X.
Finally, in the mid 24th century, Starfleet through up their hands, and re-vampped the stardate system. A certain date (Midnight, January 1, 2323) was chosen to be Stardate 00000.0. The thousand's place became a year number; the ten-thousand's place, a decade number; the hundred's, ten's, and unit's places, fractions of a year. (Thus, Stardate 41153.7, the date for "Encounter at Farpoint", works out to early 2364, which is consistent with Data's line in "The Neutral Zone".)
This system, which is much more efficient and much more useful, was used from that point on.
And... as for all those occasional mistakes in the dating system (like having Tasha in a few episodes which are "dated" after "Skin of Evil".), they were quite frankly put in because of writer's ignorance. Fortunately, the TNG second season on, this ceased to become a noticable problem.
We can rationalize the mistakes like The Bird did, without any real problem --sometimes, warp drive puts normal time outta whack, but the problem eventually got corrected.
PHEW! How's that for an explanation, eh?
There was an explanation I read once (from a web site I can't remember the name of)... that frankly made a heck of a lot more sense than The Bird's given reason.... Let's see if I can't make it sound reasonable....
The gist of it is... Starfleet used a certain system in the TOS era where the thousand's and hundred's place in the date (as in, 3536.4) corresponded with a month, the ten's and unit's places, for fractions of said month. The number after the decimal was either a day, or (more likely) a crew shift.
The dates were individual from ship to ship, and all Starfleet was required to keep track of each starship's dates, so they could carry on a conversation. The dating started with the beginning of said ship's five-year (or whatever) mission, beginning with Stardate 1000.0.
Some time before the first movie, Starfleet decided to use a single date system, to make things less complicated. They took the Enterprise's last logged stardate (out of repect for the ship and crew), and continued on from there, slowwwwwwwwwing the date progression, so that it took years to get from 8XXX.X to 9XXX.X.
Finally, in the mid 24th century, Starfleet through up their hands, and re-vampped the stardate system. A certain date (Midnight, January 1, 2323) was chosen to be Stardate 00000.0. The thousand's place became a year number; the ten-thousand's place, a decade number; the hundred's, ten's, and unit's places, fractions of a year. (Thus, Stardate 41153.7, the date for "Encounter at Farpoint", works out to early 2364, which is consistent with Data's line in "The Neutral Zone".)
This system, which is much more efficient and much more useful, was used from that point on.
And... as for all those occasional mistakes in the dating system (like having Tasha in a few episodes which are "dated" after "Skin of Evil".), they were quite frankly put in because of writer's ignorance. Fortunately, the TNG second season on, this ceased to become a noticable problem.
We can rationalize the mistakes like The Bird did, without any real problem --sometimes, warp drive puts normal time outta whack, but the problem eventually got corrected.
PHEW! How's that for an explanation, eh?
^^ That's more or less how I thought it was. That seems like a totally reasonable explanation. I betcha January 1, 2323 was when they changed the warp scale too. That might have something to do with changing the stardate system.
The short answer: it's a made up system that really doesn't mean anything.
For a while I recall many fans using another "Stardate" system:
yymm.dd (yy=year, mm=month, dd=day). Using this method, today's Stardate is 0808.27 or even 200808.27. It is still more logical than the above or even GR's explanations (not to mention much more practical).
For a while I recall many fans using another "Stardate" system:
yymm.dd (yy=year, mm=month, dd=day). Using this method, today's Stardate is 0808.27 or even 200808.27. It is still more logical than the above or even GR's explanations (not to mention much more practical).
Except that if it were that close to the Gregorian calender it would be completely superfluous. There would be no reason to change from present day notation such as using hyphens or slashes. And it wouldn't be more practical because it serves a different function than the Gregorian calender. It's there for what appears to be two reasons:
1. to compensate for the distortions in time and space due to warp (and possibly other forms of FTL) travel.
2. to serve as a universal timekeeping standard for the UFP. It would be monumentally arrogant for Earth just to say it's the 23rd or 24th century just because we say so.
But again, while I like the in-universe explanation Rush Limborg detailed, it's simply a neat sounding thing that makes it all vaguely futuristic. Remember, TOS was deliberately not pinned down to a specific point in our future. That was another reason for stardates.
1. to compensate for the distortions in time and space due to warp (and possibly other forms of FTL) travel.
2. to serve as a universal timekeeping standard for the UFP. It would be monumentally arrogant for Earth just to say it's the 23rd or 24th century just because we say so.
But again, while I like the in-universe explanation Rush Limborg detailed, it's simply a neat sounding thing that makes it all vaguely futuristic. Remember, TOS was deliberately not pinned down to a specific point in our future. That was another reason for stardates.
We could also say that the TOS dates were the exact same as the TNG dates, that is, 1000 SD units per year and probably starting in August or something (to correspond with the Paramount season rather than with the Earth year).
It's just that in TOS, the people were in the habit of dropping the first of the five digits, much like we might speak of the "seventies" and drop the 19 from there because we know it's not the 1870s or the 1270s.
It works very well that way, really. Events separated by a thousand stardates in TOS indeed appear to be separated by one year, for example. And since TOS spans stardates from the low 1000s to the high 5000s, we essentially get the entire five-year mission there in those three seasons.
The two things that don't work all that well with the idea of 1000 SD/yr are TAS (because the stardates there are out of sequence with TOS, even when one inserts the "missing" first digit) and the later movies (especially ST6:TUC). But basically everything else, from TOS to TNG DS9 to VOY, works within the single system.
That is, it works even though it obviously isn't intended to. It's just by chance that TOS makes so much more sense when viewed in stardate order...
Oh, and as for the "starts in August" thing, there are three or four episodes that require this sort of thinking, but not a single episode that would actually require us to believe that stardates roll over in January. Which is why I vastly prefer the August interpretation.
Timo Saloniemi
It's just that in TOS, the people were in the habit of dropping the first of the five digits, much like we might speak of the "seventies" and drop the 19 from there because we know it's not the 1870s or the 1270s.
It works very well that way, really. Events separated by a thousand stardates in TOS indeed appear to be separated by one year, for example. And since TOS spans stardates from the low 1000s to the high 5000s, we essentially get the entire five-year mission there in those three seasons.
The two things that don't work all that well with the idea of 1000 SD/yr are TAS (because the stardates there are out of sequence with TOS, even when one inserts the "missing" first digit) and the later movies (especially ST6:TUC). But basically everything else, from TOS to TNG DS9 to VOY, works within the single system.
That is, it works even though it obviously isn't intended to. It's just by chance that TOS makes so much more sense when viewed in stardate order...
Oh, and as for the "starts in August" thing, there are three or four episodes that require this sort of thinking, but not a single episode that would actually require us to believe that stardates roll over in January. Which is why I vastly prefer the August interpretation.
Timo Saloniemi
With the help of a little software called TClockLight, it's exactly what's written in my status bar next to the clock.The short answer: it's a made up system that really doesn't mean anything.
For a while I recall many fans using another "Stardate" system:
yymm.dd (yy=year, mm=month, dd=day). Using this method, today's Stardate is 0808.27 or even 200808.27. It is still more logical than the above or even GR's explanations (not to mention much more practical).
So they couldn't be bothered to do the maths and make a date system so they just put any random sequence of numbers?? lol it really makes Star Trek look cheap
Only to someone so incredibly anal-retentive that they sit down and try to figure out whether or not the string of numbers that they heard once in an episode actually works out to a standard Gregorian year if each season of 26 episodes is considered to unfold evenly across the year.
Very few people are willing to do that. Most people think that it's bad writing, bad acting, bad sets, or bad visual effects that make something look cheap, not the random bit of technobabble that only the most die-hard of geeks care about.
