The stardates in TOS clearly point to the last few episodes being in the fifth year and the TAS episodes with the six or seven stardates tend to dirty the picture somewhat! 
JB
JB
Does the Animated Series Complete the 5 year mission?
- Thread starter Antonovus
- Start date
The first digit of TOS stardates doesn’t map to the mission year.
Yes, I personally would like to think of the five- TOS and TAS as the five-year mission, even though there is really no hard proof.
Aside from two Season 3 script errors, the stardates from TOS are a path to new enlightenment.
What do you mean by this statement?
All stardates are explainable except two instances:
In And the Children Shall Lead, Starnes gives log dates 5025.3-5038.3 in his video logs. Kirk gives a log stardate 5029.5, which is in the middle of Starnes' range. Even if Kirk's log was live, then it took Kirk almost 9 stardates (over three days) to beam down and find Starnes before he makes his last video entry and dies in Kirk's sight. This didn't happen rather, it looks like they find Starnes shortly after beam down. We have conflicting dates. If Starnes was on same stardate clock, either his clock was running fast by a few of days, delusional about the time (possible) or Kirk’s entry is wrong. Kirk's log entry should be around 5039.5 to make sense.
In Spock's Brain, one of Kirk's log entries is stardate 4351.5, it should be 5431.5 based on the other log sequential entries in the episode since he gives stardates 5431.4, 4351.5, 5431.6 and 5432.3. The 5 was probably typed out of order.
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"And The Children Shall Lead" begins with Kirk's log entry:
In the next scene the landing party transports to the site and Professor Starnes, the last surviving adult, drops dead.
Later, on the Bridge of the Enterprise:
There are no other stardates given in the episode.
Kirk's log indicates that the landing party would beam down immediately after making the long entry on stardate 5029.5 and thus Professor Starnes should have died when the stardate was still 5029.5. The three stardates quoted from professor Starness logs are 5025.3, 5032.4, and 5038.3. The latest of those is 8.8 stardate units higher than Kirk's stardate for when Starnes died, and Starnes died after making at least another log entry.
Thus it would appear that the stardates used by the Starnes expedition were set at least 8.8 stardates higher than those used on the Enterprise.
In "The Menagerie Part 1" Captain Pike address the crew of the Enterprise:
And later when they meet survivors of the Columbia on Talos IV:
These two statements imply that in the era of TOS the warp drive, or at least an important component of it, warps time in some way to make a starship reach its designation sooner and/or to make the duration of a voyage seem shorter to the passengers & crew.
Since the Starnes expedition may have taken a much different route to reach Triacus than the Enterprise did, it is possible that time has been warped differently for the two groups and that efforts to re synchronize the time and thus the stardates of the two groups with time on Earth or some other standard planet have been almost completely successful but not totally successful and thus there is still a minor difference of a few stardates left between the stardates of the Starnes expedition and the Enterprise.
In "Spock's Brain" there are several stardates given:
The problem is that the second stardate 11 minutes after the first has gone down by 1079.9 stardate units.
There seem two possible explanations:
Explanation One: For some reason stardates can go down to lower amounts as well as go up to higher amounts. Such a belief is necessary for any theory that TOS episodes happen in airdate order or in production order instead of in stardate order. And according to "Spock's Brain" it would be possible for stardates to decrease by 1079.9 units in a few minutes.
Explanation Two: Stardates always increase over time and thus the second stardate was between 5431.4 and 5431.6 but Kirk, worried about Spock, spoke the wrong number when making his log entry. Kirk could have accidentally moved the five that was supposed to be first digit to the third place, which would make the actual stardate Kirk should have said 5431.5.
If 11 minutes equals 0.1 stardate units an entire stardate unit would equal 110 minutes or 1.8333 hours or 0.076 days. Thus there would be about 13.0909 stardate units per day and about 4,77781.4545 stardate units in a year. Except that, for example, the first stardate Kirk gave, stardate 5431.4, might have actually been stardate 5431.495 and the second stardate, 6431.5, could have actually have been stardate 5431.524, making a difference of 0.029 stardate units in 11 minutes. That random example would make a stardate unit equal 379.31034 minutes, or 6.321 hours, or 0.263 days, and there would be 3.79636 stardate units per day.
The latest stardate in the episode, stardate 5432.3, is 0.9 stardate units higher than the first one, stardate 6431.4, which was only 8 hours and 40 minutes before time would run out for Spock. So there seem to be fewer than 0.3611 days, or 8.66 hours, or 520 minutes, in 0.9 stardate units. Therefore a stardate unit should be less than 577.78 minutes, or 9.6295 hours, or 0.4012 days, in length, and there should be at least 2.4940 stardate units in a day.
Of course if Kirk could have said an inaccurate stardate in "Spock's Brain" by misplacing a digit Kirk and other persons could have done the same in other Star Trek episodes and movies.[/QUOTE]
I think the only thing it implies is that they were still making up the terminology in "The Cage" and it was just early-installment weirdness.
Doug Drexler or someone on the Enterprise art/technical staff interpreted the "time barrier" as a timing issue with synchronizing the nacelles, preventing them from getting above a certain warp factor. The module between the nacelles on NX-01 was meant to be a sort of regulator for the timing problem, and breaking the time barrier meant designing improved warp engines that didn't need the regulator and could go faster as a result.
As for stardates, the only explanation is that they were expressly intended to convey no actual chronological information whatsoever, to be empty noise that just pretended to be chronology. They were never meant to make sense, so I long ago stopped worrying about them.
Saturday Morning cartoons had notoriously short life-spans the majority of the time. So I think the two seasons was NBC thinking, "We have enough episodes!" and then moving on.
If TAS had gone into a third season, it still would've been the "five"-year mission. If TOS had gone into a sixth season, I think it still would've been the "five"-year mission.
It's just like MASH, as was mentioned upthread. Or That '70s Show, which took eight seasons to get from the middle of 1976 to the end of 1979, even though there were Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Holiday episodes every year. As long as the show was a success, they were never going to let it hit 1980.
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I've always said the same thing - I take it one step farther, and speculate an entire unseen season with the "No Man" cast, with (the pilot we saw) being the *shocking season finale.* Corbomite would be the "2nd" season premiere. I always wanted a fan outfit to film that first season.... and I definitely consider STC as the 5th.
Thats very interesting - I just started Enterprise (for basically the first time)..... thats good info to have for my perspective when viewing. Thanks!
I don't think it makes sense for "Where No Man" to be part of the 5-year mission. A mission to the rim of the galaxy would probably take months, and a single dedicated mission that long seems like something that would be assigned separately from a general "5-year galaxy investigation and patrol" assignment. Plus the ship was obviously refitted between WNM and season 1, and a refit's more likely between missions than during one.
Yes, that's me too. WNMHGB is part of the first season, while The actual season one we have now is the second season. I'm also committed to finding a way to fit a second five year mission (Phase II) between the hypothetical Season 5 and TMP.
I want the Phase II 5 year mission in TMP guise and watch it transition to WOK. There is room for a big, dramatic story that bumps Kirk from the bridge of his second 5YM back upstairs, increases tensions with the Klingons, militarizes the Federation and changes the uniforms.
The idea of a 2nd pre TMP mission annoys me, honestly. It messes up the timelines for the next two movies and the ages. IMO, If you are going to do two consecutive 5YMs, it has to be an alternate reality where TMP never happens, the Enterprise ages out into a training ship, Kirk has been an Admiral since the 5YM, and it always looked the way it did (ie, the TOS ship always looked like the refit ship.)
I'd love a whole season of Mitchell, Kirk, Kelso, Doc Piper, youngSpock, Sulu and Scotty. Maybe hold over Colt from Pike's Enterprise and retcon Dehner in a bit earlier.
Growing up, it seemed Super Friends would keep going forever.
The thing is, a typical animated show back then only lasted a season or two, but Hanna-Barbera tended to revamp and rebrand its shows every couple of years, so that what seemed like a continuous run was technically several consecutive, distinct shows about the same characters (something Filmation only did with The Archies). So Super Friends was technically seven different shows, only one of which ran more than one season:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Friends
Similar things were done with Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, and some other H-B properties.
Some of them were full length stories, but a lot if them were just short segments. As a kid in The 80s I was much happier with the longer episodes and was always disappointed when an episode of short segments aired instead, since by the 80s they were all being mismatched together in weekday syndication, while the "new" episodes of the "Super Powers" were airing on Saturday mornings.
What do you mean by this? Are you referring to TAS?
No, the previous post, referring to other cartoons of the period, specifically the Super Friends and Scooby Doo related ones.
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