A Lit-verse based TOS chronology

[Therin of Andor]

It seems that Dayton and Kevin just have a fundamentally different interpretation of TAS chronology than I do.

I can't recall the specific problems I encountered trying to shoehorn TAS between TOS and TMP in a chronology, but Alan Dean Foster's "Star Trek Log" order definitely much worked better than airdate order, production order, or as-aired stardate order.

ADF rejigs the stardates completely and (in Logs 1-6) strings episodes into each other.

 

[Idran]

Not quite the issue we're talking about here, Therin; we're talking about the issue with "Where Time Stands Still". It's set shortly after Time Trap, but it features the USS Lovell, forcing the placement of Time Trap as during TOS as the Lovell is destroyed in late 2268. So it means you either split Time Trap from the rest of TAS and have it be somewhere between mid-season 2 and season 3 TOS, intersperse all of TAS throughout TOS, or find a way to handwave the involvement of the Lovell.

In my own timeline, I just split it apart from the rest of TAS; it didn't include Arex or M'Ress that I noticed, no life support belt, nothing specifically TAS era that made placing it apart from the rest of TAS feel too off for me. Christopher instead originally tried for a Lovell handwave, and now is just giving it a shrug and not worrying about the conflict (also a valid resolution).

 

[ryan123450]

Coming back to this now that I have actually read almost all the issues of DC Volume 2. I do see the need now to scrunch alot of the later issues farther back from The Undiscovered Country, but I still prefer to spread them out over 2290 and 2291 instead of simply 2290. I've moved a few other things around lately as well. Here's my revamped version of the STV thru STVI years.

2287

• The Final Frontier
• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 1-12 (DC Continuity)
• Unspoken Truth (Note 1)
  
• In the Name of Honor (Note 2)
• The Rift (DC Continuity)

2288

• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 13-15, 17-19 (DC Continuity) (Note 3)
  
• Foul Deeds Will Rise (Note 4)
  
• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 22-24 (DC Continuity)

2289

• Raise the Defiant (DC Comics Volume 2 Special #2, Part 1) (DC Continuity) (Note 5)
• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 25-28, 30-33 (DC Continuity) (Note 6)

2290

• Forged in Fire (Note 7)
• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 35-45 (DC Continuity) (Note 8)
• Blaise of Glory (DC Comics Volume 2 Special #1, Part 1) (DC Continuity) (Note 9)
• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 46-50 (DC Continuity)

2291

• Miasma (Note 10)
• DC Comics Volume 2 Issues 51, 53-60, 65-72 (DC Continuity)
• Cacophony (Note 11)
• Convergence (DC Comics Volume 2 Annual #6, TNG Annual #6) (DC Continuity) (Note 12)
  
• Mere Anarchy: The Blood Dimmed Tide (Note 13)

2292

• A Question of Loyalty (DC Comics Volume 2 Special #2, Part 2) (DC Continuity) (Note 14)
  
• Bloodline (Wildstorm Special)

2293

• The Undiscovered Country

1. Ends almost one year after The Voyage Home.
   
2. The first storyline of DC Comics Vol 2 and In the Name of Honor both claim to be the first mission of the Enterprise-A after STV. I will leave reconciling the timeline and the different political situations with the Klingons to another day.
   
3. All the issues missing in this section and all the other DC sections are because those issues are either 5YM tales or are not specifically linked to the other issues by references or shared characters. I would include most of them in my personal continuity, and they would take place in the obvious years, but they aren't included on my Lit-verse Reading List since they aren't specifically linked.
4. I changed the date here to 22 years and some odd days from "The Conscience of the King" instead of 20 years and that given amount of days. That date is self contradictory as we discussed upthread.
   
5. Placed this story by stardate.
   
6. All the pre-Sulu-on-Excelsior issues I simply divided in half between 2288 and 2289.
   
7. Forged in Fire and the first few issues of this next section of DC comics both claim to tell the tale of Sulu's first mission on the Excelsior. Reconciling that is left to all my fellow continuity nerds.
8. Memory-Beta places the remaining 40ish issues of the DC series in 2290. I see now that I've read A Question of Loyalty that there must be some good amount of unchronicled time both before and after that story, but there still seems to be no reason not to spread the issues between 2290 and 2291, leaving all of 2292 and half of 2293 almost untold before TUC.
   
9. Based on it's stardate.
   
10. This upcoming story takes place about 5 years after Spock's death and resurrection.
11. Memory-Beta puts this is 2291, I assume because it's stardate would fall then based on thier assumptions of surrounding stories. Putting it in stardate order according to my assumptions about the surrounding stories puts it here, which is nicely also 2291.
12. I assume this takes place after the numbered run of issues, both due to Stardate and publication order.
13. Takes place 18 months before TUC, which is in June/August.
14. Gives time for Spock to start his budding diplomatic career, and seems to take place about a year before TUC.

 

[Jinn]

Personally, for me a stardate based chronology and the Vanguard novels work pretty perfectly, that contradicts the Crucible and DTI novels so I placed them in 2 different timelines.

 

[Jinn]

Personally, for me a stardate based chronology and the Vanguard novels work pretty perfectly, that contradicts the Crucible and DTI novels so I placed them in 2 different timelines.

I mean TOS episodes and movies with production stardate, TAS episodes with novelization stardates and all the Vanguard novels work without any continuity issues (so far) but contradicts DTI and Crucible.

 

[Idran]

Crucible was never meant to be compatible with the Litverse anyway, it was a separate series. But wait, you mean putting TOS episodes in stardate order? Are you saying that's compatible with Vanguard's internal references to individual episodes and novels as well as just the Historian's Notes? I'll admit that I never actually checked if that would fit together, but I'm really surprised that it does if so; I don't think any Treklit author uses stardate order for dating TOS stuff, just production order. And how do you deal with cases of overlapping stardates?

It's also weird that you have it as compatible with Vanguard but not with DTI; as far as I recall, Christopher used Vanguard's dates as a basis for the dates in DTI.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, Vanguard went with production order for TOS, and I tried to stay consistent with their timing as best I could.

 

[Idran]

All right, a quick glancing over a stardate-sorted list of TOS shows that it mostly works with Vanguard, since for the most part Vanguard managed to by coincidence only specifically reference episodes that happened to stay in about or exactly the same positions in stardate order as in production order. Unfortunately, there is one exception: stardate order would put "Spectre of the Gun" all the way at the end of S3, but we know from What Judgements Come that "Spectre of the Gun" has to come before "The Tholian Web". Fairly significantly before.

 

[Jinn]

It's also weird that you have it as compatible with Vanguard but not with DTI; as far as I recall, Christopher used Vanguard's dates as a basis for the dates in DTI.

The City on the Edge of Forever has no stardate mentioned on screen, but according to Memory Alpha the original teleplay (Whatever that means) was supposed to cover stardates 3134.6-8. Errand of Mercy begins at 3198.4 and plays concurrently to with Precipice chapter 15 which plays in march. Therefore plays TCotEoF before march. DTI:Forgotten History chapter 1 pages 26-33 are set in april and stardate 3135.6. If we assume that stardates are correct April occurs before March in 2267.

I should have phrased it better: either TOS Stardate order and Vanguard, TOS stardate order and DTI or DTI and Vanguard fit with each other, but only 2 at a time.

 

[Jinn]

stardate order would put "Spectre of the Gun" all the way at the end of S3, but we know from What Judgements Come that "Spectre of the Gun" has to come before "The Tholian Web". Fairly significantly before.

Spectre of the Gun plays around stardate 4385.3, The Tholian Web at 5693.2. This doesn't seem to be a problem.

 

[Christopher]

Stardate order makes no sense, because stardates were never supposed to make sense. The makers of TOS wanted to be vague about when the series took place, so they deliberately invented a gibberish placeholder for dates, a system consciously designed to convey no actual chronological information of any kind. Stardates aren't a calendar, they're lorem ipsum for numbers. They never bothered to maintain more than a very rough numerical increase from season to season; even in production order, the dates don't go consistently upward. Roddenberry himself handwaved that stardates don't represent linear time because of the relativistic nonsimultaneity of time perception across interstellar distances and between observers moving at different speeds.

 

[Idran]

Spectre of the Gun plays around stardate 4385.3, The Tholian Web at 5693.2. This doesn't seem to be a problem.

Oh, you're right, I must have missorted the list.

But yeah, Christopher's right, TOS stardates were meaningless. I'd rather fit DTI and Vanguard together than force them into different timelines because of some made-up numbers pulled out of a hat in the 60s.

But then again, it's your timeline! Everyone makes their choices for how to do theirs, so don't let that be any discouragement on yours.

 

[Jinn]

Stardate order makes no sense, because stardates were never supposed to make sense. The makers of TOS wanted to be vague about when the series took place, so they deliberately invented a gibberish placeholder for dates, a system consciously designed to convey no actual chronological information of any kind. Stardates aren't a calendar, they're lorem ipsum for numbers. They never bothered to maintain more than a very rough numerical increase from season to season; even in production order, the dates don't go consistently upward. Roddenberry himself handwaved that stardates don't represent linear time because of the relativistic nonsimultaneity of time perception across interstellar distances and between observers moving at different speeds.

That is of course the Real Life reason but I feel that there has to be a in-universe reason for every Captain (and First Officers etc.) telling the computer a (random) 4 digit number. Also the fact that it is called "stardate" implies some kind of linear time. It wouldn't make much sense, in-universe-wise, to use a form of date if it doesn't work universal. Then again there are different time zones on Earth but that also seems unnecessary since.. SPAAAACE.

 

[Idran]

That is of course the Real Life reason but I feel that there has to be a in-universe reason for every Captain (and First Officers etc.) telling the computer a (random) 4 digit number. Also the fact that it is called "stardate" implies some kind of linear time. It wouldn't make much sense, in-universe-wise, to use a form of date if it doesn't work universal. Then again there are different time zones on Earth but that also seems unnecessary since.. SPAAAACE.

Yeah but relativity warp drive n-dimensional hyperspheres technobabble etc. etc. Plus you've also got stuff like "Dagger of the Mind" happening in the middle of "Miri", or Tasha Yar being dead, then alive, then dead in TNG S1.

Again, not saying you shouldn't do it, I've felt that temptation too, but it is kind of troublesome to timeline when none of the writers cared about it.

 

[Jinn]

Yeah but relativity warp drive n-dimensional hyperspheres technobabble etc. etc. Plus you've also got stuff like "Dagger of the Mind" happening in the middle of "Miri", or Tasha Yar being dead, then alive, then dead in TNG S1.

Again, not saying you shouldn't do it, I've felt that temptation too, but it is kind of troublesome to timeline when none of the writers cared about it.

If you count Tasha Yars stardate order apperances after her Skin of Evil and add those 3 to the 11 STO missions Denise Crosby synchronized, 2 TNG episodes where she appears due to timeline stuff, Star Trek Armada, the 3 Sela appearances in TNG we've got 19 episodes/missions/games in which Denise Crosby appears/snychronizes she did more Star Trek stuff after her "main" characters death than before.That was off-topic...

I kinda wish they would do the release some kind of novelization with correct/better stardates like TAS.

 

[Christopher]

That is of course the Real Life reason but I feel that there has to be a in-universe reason for every Captain (and First Officers etc.) telling the computer a (random) 4 digit number.

But that's what I'm saying -- it's a placeholder for whatever the actual date would be. This isn't a live broadcast from an alternate universe, it's a dramatization of a hypothetical set of events, and some details are substituted with nonsense so as to avoid being too specific. Like how every TV/movie phone number these days is required to be between 555-0100 and 555-0199. (It used to be just 555-whatever, but the FCC restricted it further a while back so that the other 555 numbers could be freed up for actual use.) Obviously it's impossible for hundreds of millions of Americans to all have the same 100 phone numbers (area codes aside), so it's implicit that the numbers are just an empty placeholder that we're not supposed to take literally or pay attention to. That's what I meant by lorem ipsum. It's gibberish text made to take up space but not actually mean anything. You can often read such text in books or newspapers or screen graphics in movie/TV scenes, but you're not supposed to take it literally; it's just a substitute for whatever the real information would be.

So yes, presumably in-universe, the characters are giving date information that's actually meaningful to them, but there's no way to derive that meaning from the gibberish numbers that are spoken in the dramatization we see on TV, any more than we can trace a fictional character's location from their 555-01xx phone number.

 

[Jinn]

But that's what I'm saying -- it's a placeholder for whatever the actual date would be. This isn't a live broadcast from an alternate universe, it's a dramatization of a hypothetical set of events, and some details are substituted with nonsense so as to avoid being too specific. Like how every TV/movie phone number these days is required to be between 555-0100 and 555-0199. (It used to be just 555-whatever, but the FCC restricted it further a while back so that the other 555 numbers could be freed up for actual use.) Obviously it's impossible for hundreds of millions of Americans to all have the same 100 phone numbers (area codes aside), so it's implicit that the numbers are just an empty placeholder that we're not supposed to take literally or pay attention to. That's what I meant by lorem ipsum. It's gibberish text made to take up space but not actually mean anything. You can often read such text in books or newspapers or screen graphics in movie/TV scenes, but you're not supposed to take it literally; it's just a substitute for whatever the real information would be.

So yes, presumably in-universe, the characters are giving date information that's actually meaningful to them, but there's no way to derive that meaning from the gibberish numbers that are spoken in the dramatization we see on TV, any more than we can trace a fictional character's location from their 555-01xx phone number.

Ok so apparantly I missunderstood your previous post (in my defense it was like 11 in the night). Then still the TAS stardates in the novelizations make sense apparantly. That's why I would support some kind if similar treatment for TOS.

 

[Idran]

I've actually just outright personally rewritten the occasional stardate in my own timeline here and there, myself. Just 24th century stuff so far, and trying to limit things to a transposition or single digit "correction", as though the "historical recreation" just got it down wrong, but I can't see any reason why the same couldn't be done for TOS stardates in your own if you really want things to be in order in yours.

Which yeah I totally get. Who doesn't see a list of numbers out of order and want to find a nice way to arrange them?

 

[Christopher]

There are so many number schemes in Trek that have no logic or consistency to them because the various writers weren't working to a single set of assumptions -- stardates, ship registries, starbase designations, distances, travel times, chronologies. I long ago decided just not to take the numbers too seriously, because there's just no real way to make them coherent.

 

[Idran]

Haha, some of us are just too stubborn to admit that to ourselves, I suppose.