In this context, I was mostly recalling older stuff I've read (in The Best of Trek and the like) where I thought people looking at Star Trek (mostly TOS at the time) were themselves being sloppy. I remember one article where the writer took "century" to be +/- 50 years in some cases, +/- 75 years in others, and other lengths at other times, just because he wanted certain ranges to overlap. I was annoyed at seeing him start from the conclusion he wanted, rather than following the references where they would lead and just acknowledging the contradictions.
On the other hand, the opposite extreme can be just as bad. It was often quite silly of the Okudas'
Star Trek Chronology to treat every spoken date as an exact figure rather than an estimate, even when it doesn't make sense. For instance, insisting that the
Valiant must've been launched exactly 200 years before "Where No Man Has Gone Before," in 2064, only 3 years after the first prototype warp flight -- or, in the revised, post-FC edition, only 1 year after. There's no way in hell it makes sense for an expedition to the edge of the galaxy to be launched that early after the invention of warp drive. Good grief, at the low warp speeds available then, it would've taken more than 200 years even to reach the nearest face of the galactic disk. So that's a case where it would've made enormously more sense to assume that "200 years" was rounded up from, say, 180 or so years.
Sometimes this might work, sometimes it definitely doesn't.
Exactly my point. Nothing is "always," except that there are always exceptions to any rule. Even a rule that makes sense to apply most of the time makes no sense to apply inflexibly in absolutely every instance, even when it would be better not to.
Firefly (as an example where I've had to make this argument to a bunch of other people) does not take place in our own solar system at all, and there is only one specific date mentioned in the entire series. It would be way more scientifically realistic to go with the idea that "year" means something different depending on who says it in the series--but it would also make constructing any sort of consistent timeline for the show absolutely impossible.
Well, given that they're occupying dozens of worlds with differing orbits, it would actually make sense to adopt a standard timekeeping system that applies to everyone. An Earth year might well be adopted as a standard because it's independent of any given world in the system and reflects the heritage that all the settlers share. So in that context, it'd actually make a lot of sense for them to use Earth years.
It's different when you're dealing with a multispecies interstellar civilization, since the different species would've had millennia of independent existence to devise their own time standards based on their own worlds' orbits before they started interacting with other cultures. I mean, we're talking about "A Private Little War" here. Tyree has never heard of Earth, except maybe in vague terms from Kirk. The only possible way he'd be speaking in Earth years is if the universal translator is interpreting his local time references into Earth units for Kirk and McCoy's convenience. Which is certainly possible, and how I generally assume it works in my own Trek writing. But if it were preferable to assume that the Klingons only began providing weapons after "Errand of Mercy" -- which seems to be what
Blood Will Tell suggests -- then we can easily resolve the discrepancy by assuming that Tyree was speaking of Neuralese years and that Neural is closer to its star and thus has a shorter year than Earth.
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