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Everything You Never Even Wanted to Know About Both Klingon Calendars and the Day of Honor!

ryan123450

ryan123450

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
I will admit that I probably went a bit overboard on trying to make everything fit here, and as all my Treklit projects do, it took alot longer to finish than I had originally anticipated. But I'm proud of this addition to the Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Guide.

A complete examination of the Klingon Calendar!

https://startreklitverse.yolasite.com/klingon-calendar.php

I'll mostly let it speak for itself, but I will say that I started with the information Christopher provided in the Watching the Clock annotations and went from there, examining every instance of Klingon dating on screen, in books, comics, etc. I also did a bit of digging and found the origin of the Klingon month names that have been used in Trek Lit over the last decade or so.

There's also an easy ten step formula for converting from Earth dates to Klingon dates or vice versa. If anyone here with the knowledge wants to work with me on using this formula to create a calculator that will automatically do these ten steps and just give the output, that would be amazing. I'm envisioning something exactly like the stardate calculators found a few places online, where you can put in a date and it will automatically convert it to a stardate, or the other way around.

And lastly and probably the most nit-picky, I figured out how to take all the random information given over the years in episodes, books, and comics about when the Day of Honor takes place, and organize it into a coherent (though somewhat complex) system for when the Day of Honor is celebrated. That page has a lot of explanation, extrapolation, and sample calendars.

I hope some folks will find this interesting. Some people here I've shown it to already were blown away, especially with it's implications for dating stories that mention Klingon dates (for all of you chronology-minded folks out there.)

And I hope this can be of use to future authors, to keep Klingon dating as consistent as possible in future books and comics.

Qap'la!
 
Yeah I plan on getting back to that conversation you brought up a while back, but might not have a chance today.
 
I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay right now, it's already midnight anyway, so for the next eight to ten hours I'm okay with not reactivating tha conversation.
 
@ryan123450,

That’s a very nicely-presented explanation of the Klingon calendar, with some interesting speculations. And there’s a link to my stuff!

During my long searches for information about stardates, I did come across one for “Soldiers of the Empire”: 50839.2. Although I’m not at all sure where it came from, my best guess is that it was on the packaging for the German VHS tapes. That seems to be where a lot of mysterious “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” stardates originated, since the box label required a stardate, whether there was one or not. Luckily they aren’t compulsory, because they often don’t fit where they’re supposed to, including this one. A list of them were posted by @The_Keymaster (in 2013) here:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/chr...-ds9-voy-stardates-found.212584/#post-8112445

I’d offer to help with a calculator, but if you’ve ever looked at my bodged-together date conversion spreadsheet, I’m really not sure how much help I would be. I have made a spreadsheet for my own purposes that calculates @Christopher ’s Vulcan and Klingon dates, and I’d be happy to post it somewhere so you can download it, if you’d like a copy. There are no guarantees that it’ll work all that well, though.

I’m constantly amazed at how well you manage to tie all the contradictory evidence together and end up with a timeline that makes sense.

Timon
 
Thanks for your comments @jimcat. I was sorry that I couldn’t make my speculations line up with yours more, to create more of a ‘concensus’. Glad to hear from you though. Haven’t had much activity in this thread, as I know I’ve gone off the deep end into super niche-y territory here.

I’m always excited to see anything someone wants to send me, but that’s just up to you.

Hopefully someone with the coding knowledge to help me build the page I’m imagining will pop up eventually, or I suppose I will someday search out someone to pay to do it.
 
@ryan123450,

You can get a copy of my spreadsheet at this page:
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/calendars:clbcalendar

I got the distinct impression that this version of the Klingon calendar was originally developed to allow “Earth” dates to be expressed in a “Klingon” way, which is why the days and years bear such a similarity to ours. As usual, when I looked at it I decided I wanted to try something different!

Oddly enough, some elements of my system are getting more similar to the “mainstream” view. Based on the extra information in the re-mastered version of TNG, I found that I needed to make “1,000” stardate units last 365 days. It was a conclusion I’d been fighting against because I wanted stardates to be more of a day-counting system than a “decimal calendar.” But you can’t ignore the facts forever, and so my 24th-century dates are probably a lot closer now to the “received wisdom” than they used to be.

Of course, “Star Trek: Discovery” has confirmed that there’s no way to know what the stardate is in the 23rd century unless you’re told. I’m still not quite ready to give up, though.

Timon
 
Took me a while to get a chance to look at your spreadsheet @jimcat, but now that I have, WOW! The main page works so perfectly. It seems the only difference between your dates and mine was the issue where I called A'Kahless the last month of the previous year, instead of the first month of the following year.

And then I looked at the "behind the scenes" pages underneath and I can see the insane amount of figuring and Excel mastery that you did to make all that work. All that is way beyond my level of mastery of Excel. If only we could figure out how to make that into a webpage. Again, I'm not sure how to make it work but you've certainly gotten alot closer than I ever could.
 
Hi @ryan123450,
I’m glad you liked the spreadsheet, although I think if anyone who really understands excel looks at it, they’ll think it’s all a bit of a mess. There are still certain points where things go wrong, but I’ve found having something to spit out the right dates without a lot of calculating extremely handy. I’ll try and work a variant up that uses your version of the Klingon calendar, and maybe some of @Christopher ‘s other ones, too. That’s something I was intending to get round to anyway, sometime.

Timon
 
Hello @ryan123450,

Before this thread fades quietly away, I’ve posted a revised spreadsheet here:
http://atavachron.wikidot.com/calendars:clbcalendar

This one is a purely “books” version.

Spreadsheets are very unforgiving, and I found that I had to “tweak” several of the calendars to make the dates I wanted come out. My guess is that hitting the exact dates is more useful than getting a near miss through trying to stick too exactly to the instructions, although that’s a matter of personal opinion.

That’s the reason there is a slight discrepancy between the two Klingon calendars, since the “K-B” version is set up as closely as I can manage to your webpage, and I didn’t go back and revamp my own earlier attempt. I’ve tried to avoid making mistakes, but I’m sure there are probably some if you look for them, or inadvertently just put a date in that breaks my calculator.

Finally, none of this should be taken as any kind of criticism of @Christopher ’s work. I’m just amazed at how much effort he’s put in to getting these (and many other) background details to work consistently, and then been generous enough to share his methods.

Timon
 
@ryan123450, I'm super-impressed by this! Even though I think the novelists that cemented the idea that one Klingon year = exactly one Earth year made a really dumb decision.
 
@jimcat That’s great. I’m gonna try to find time soon to look at what you’ve come up with. Really busy lately. But I will be sure to also post a link to your creation on my calculations page. I will post again after I get a chance to look at what you’ve done here.

@Stevil2001 Thanks! Yeah that makes for a really unlikely coincidence. It’s seems KRAD and Martin/Mangels were the ones who locked things in to that interpretation. Previous authors, like the author of Day of Honor: Her Klingon Soul, pointed towards different lengths. A straightforward interpretation of Her Klingon Soul vs the Day of Honor novelization would imply the Klingon year is about 1.5 Earth years.
 
ryan123450 said:
@Stevil2001 Thanks! Yeah that makes for a really unlikely coincidence. It’s seems KRAD and Martin/Mangels were the ones who locked things in to that interpretation. Previous authors, like the author of Day of Honor: Her Klingon Soul, pointed towards different lengths. A straightforward interpretation of Her Klingon Soul vs the Day of Honor novelization would imply the Klingon year is about 1.5 Earth years.
Click to expand...

Well, one of the last episodes of Discovery had a holographic globe of Qo’noS where you could clearly see South America, so maybe the Klingon Homeworld is one of those freaky perfect duplicates of Earth, like from "Miri."
 
Stevil2001 said:
@ryan123450, I'm super-impressed by this! Even though I think the novelists that cemented the idea that one Klingon year = exactly one Earth year made a really dumb decision.
Click to expand...
The alternative was to do more math than I really wanted to do for the sake of a dating system that 90% of my readership weren't even going to notice.

Having said that, I apologize to the remaining 10% (which likely includes everyone reading this thread).
 
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