Has anyone ever figured out Stardates...

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Try as I might I cannot make heads or tails reguarding Stardates, is there some secret formula that only Commissioned Officers know. Does anyone out there in this really cool Trek BBS have any idea how to figure out how Stardates actually work.

It would not be practicle to base times and dates reletive to Earth's rotation around it's own sun, does it have something to do with the Galactic Core, or some other object in the AQ??

Resistance is Futile

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

it's easy. All you do is add 1 or more if its the next episode, or some fraction of 1 if its the same episode

 

[jamestyler]

I know the five digit dates roughly...

It seems to go in units of a thousand. Say 50250, the 50 would be the amount of years since 0 (the year before being 49, year after being 51 etc) and 250 would be a quarter way in.

Theres probably something more technical to add there, but thats the obvious answer to me as the first two digits go up by one each year.

 

[Timo]

Even the four-digit stardates of TOS can be assumed to work that way. And since TOS spans stardates from about 1300 to about 5900, we could then argue that we saw the entire five-year mission in TOS after all.

The devil is in the details, though: the rate at which stardates progress during an episode is never quite consistent. Sometimes, it's roughly one digit after the decimal per each hour; sometimes, per each day; sometimes, dozens per day. On two occasions of TOS, there is even some overlap between successive episodes.

And then there are a couple of exceptions: the progression of one year per thousand stardates doesn't really work for the time intervals between TOS movies, and both TAS and the first season of TNG are a mess. In TAS, the writers didn't even try. In TNG S1, everything was okay until the penultimate scripts (which can be found at TrekCore), but the final rewrites or ad-libs resulted in nonsensically hopping stardates.

Apart from those details, though, stardates seem to work just fine as simple counters that click forward at a pace of a thousand clicks per year. Although that year seems to be in synch with the Paramount/CBS season, not the Earth calendar year: if stardate zero is somewhere in August rather than January, the rare references to Earth dates work much, much better.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[captcalhoun]

the TNG-era ones work:

4= 24th century (but, no, 5 doesn't mean 25th, it was something Gene did and didn't anticipate over 10 years of stories)
1 = season of the story.
365 = day of the year although of course how you work it out when there's 1000 units per year s anyone's guess.
.3 = dunno, but I operate on a 1/10th fraction of the day.

 

[Hermiod]

^If it did sync up to a calendar year, people in Starfleet must have dreaded Christmas.

 

[captcalhoun]

yeah, i noticed that, everything bad always happens at the end of a year. it's like 3 christmases featuring aliens in Doctor Who!

 

[Crewman47]

There's been a couple of methods of calculating Stardates as others have said above and on the TNG era ones I prefer to go with the 1000 units per year starting in January and increasing by around 2.?? units each day.

Just thinking about it though, if there was ever a chance to ever run into a wormhole or something that takes you into the Star Trek universe this question is going to be the first on my list to ask followed by Warp factors. That would finally end the debate, I think and others with other questions.

 

[SonicRanger]

I recall reading that, during modern Trek, Okuda came up with a list of stardates at the start of the season and gave them to the writers to use so that episodes would be somewhat evenly spaced throughout the 1000-unit span.

 

[voyagerfan]

I keep thinking of them destroyed aliens as snow

 

[Level 2 Diagnostic]

In TOS, it's just random numbers. There are a few cases where the Stardate given in the middle of the episode is smaller than the Stardate given at the start of the episode.

For example: And the Children Shall Lead. At the start of the episode it's 5029.5 when they find Prof. Starnes guy dead. Later they're looking at tapes of him before he died and Starnes says it's 5032.4.