SFTM Stardates

[Falconer]

Friends, has anyone ever figured out what Franz Joseph had in mind with his Stardates? I know the ones beginning in “73” and “74” are references to 1973 and 1974. I’m more interested in the ships which were commissioned in 0965 (original articles of the Federation), 3669, and 5099. But maybe he had in mind in-universe dates for the 7300s+, too.

 

[Mysterion]

Trying to make sense of stardates - FJ's, TOS/TAS, etc. - is a losing proposition (TNG=era forward, they were a bit more thought-pout, but still with some anomalies). That way lies madness.

 

[Albertese]

The dates on the drawings are straight up the dates he drew the drawings, for example, the Heavy Cruiser one sheet TO:01:04:10 dated to stardate 7304.15 was drawn by Franz Joseph on April 15, 1974. Just for funsies, I made a spreadsheet listing the order in which he drew all of that stuff.

The in-fiction dates, though I couldn't say, except I would point out that The list of alllllllllll those heavy cruisers, doesn't conflict with dialog, as we hear about "twelve like her in the fleet" at an earlier stardate than 3220, when the second batch was authorized...

--Alex

 

[Christopher]

The dates on the drawings are straight up the dates he drew the drawings, for example, the Heavy Cruiser one sheet TO:01:04:10 dated to stardate 7304.15 was drawn by Franz Joseph on April 15, 1974.

I think you mean 1973.

And yes, that was a common fan conceit back then, to convert ordinary calendar dates into stardate format, YYMM.DD. There were some Star Trek "Stardate Calendars" that did that too. It wasn't meant to actually work in-universe, any more than actual stardates were. It was just playacting, writing down present-day dates in a Trekkish-looking way so as to pretend you were in Star Trek.

 

[Albertese]

I think you mean 1973.

....

Yes, sir, you are correct. 1973. A typo on my part.

--Alex

 

[Falconer]

Yeah, I’m just trying to come up with a playable system for my roleplaying game campaign. I want to be able to use the SFTM as a more-or-less reliable resource for my game, but if a year is about 1,000 stardates, then it looks like Starfleet was commissioning dozens or hundreds of ships every year. That can’t have been what FJ had in mind, is it?

 

[Albertese]

I would argue that the Federation was authorizing dozens or hundreds of ships for a number of years. Not necessarily building them. It could well be that the funds were allocated but later diverted to other projects or deferred to later dates, if you don't want to have all those ships flying at once. In the Ships of the Star Fleet books, they tell us that a lot of those requisitioned Heavy Cruisers were actually built as various other cruisers (Tikopai, Ashanti, Enterprise, Constitution (II), Endeavor, and Achernar-class ships) that were in service by the 2280s.

On the other hand, if you really want to stick with the FJ dates, then the United Federation of Planets is pretty dang new, having been legally established on stardate 0965, which, given 1000 stardates a year, would make the founding mere months before the start of Kirk's five year mission. Now, this doesn't conflict with any material on-screen in TOS, and there are some schools of thought among fans that certain lines said in the show actually support this idea. Though, obviously, later Star Trek didn't go this direction and your players probably will think the FJ timeline is weird.

But good luck with the game!

--Alex

 

[Boris Skrbic]

DSC has established 0141.7 for 2155 (Terran Empire) and TOS-like stardates in 2256-58 (apparently with a rollover towards 1xxx between seasons one and two), so it’s no longer a stretch to accept FJ’s numbers regardless of calendar year.

(Note that his YYMM.DD did have that in-universe feel before TMP was released with 741x.x, which is why fans of that style could continue with 1YYMM.DD in order to make it seem like it’s the time after the original films, eg. 12003.28 for today. Then again, 2003.28 does look like a DSC stardate, so take your pick.)

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, I’m just trying to come up with a playable system for my roleplaying game campaign. I want to be able to use the SFTM as a more-or-less reliable resource for my game, but if a year is about 1,000 stardates, then it looks like Starfleet was commissioning dozens or hundreds of ships every year. That can’t have been what FJ had in mind, is it?

The "1000 stardates per year" formula wasn't invented until TNG. So naturally nobody creating Trek-related material in the 1970s would've been aware of the concept. And it probably didn't apply in-universe either, since if you project the TNG-era stardates back, they reach zero in 2323. So the stardate system used in TOS can't be the same one used in TNG.

The one and only purpose of stardates in TOS was to convey no actual chronological information of any kind. Roddenberry wanted to be vague about how far in the future TOS was (so that his predictions of the rate of progress wouldn't seem either too optimistic or too pessimistic), and about how much time passed between episodes (since there was no way to control what order the network showed them in), so stardates were just numerical lorem ipsum, intentionally meaningless placeholders just conveying the vague impression of being a dating system. There was a loose, general upward trend in the numbers over the course of the series, increasing by nearly 2000 units from the beginning to the end of the first season, about 1700 in the second, and about 1500 in the third, but nothing more consistent than that. (For that matter, if you project them back, then they must've only just started the calendar less than a year before, since it starts at 1312 in the second pilot.)

And there was no evidence that a season's worth of episodes actually lasted a year in-story anyway, since shows back then tended to be deliberately vague about the passage of time (e.g. Run for Your Life, a 3-season series about a man with 18 months to live, or M*A*S*H, an 11-season series about a 3-year war). TOS episodes rarely referenced previous episodes, and when they did, they never specified how long ago they happened.

 

[Falconer]

Thanks, guys. Alex, I’ll stick with what you said, that those ships had been authorized, but not by any stretch of the imagination all or even most commissioned.

Well, I think for me the most practical solution is just to go with one earth day = one stardate. I chose as my reference (for reasons specific to my game) Stardate 3497 from “Friday’s Child.” If you advance the date by ten years, it yields Stardate 7149. This doesn’t sync perfectly with the movies, but if you squint, it’s close enough to feel right.

Plus you can do the whole thing of .5 = noon.

.0 - 12:00 midnight
.1 - 2:24 AM
.2 - 4:48 AM
.3 - 7:12 AM
.4 - 9:36 AM
.5 - 12:00 noon
.6 - 2:24 PM
.7 - 4:48 PM
.8 - 7:12 PM
.9 - 9:36 PM

Maybe re-express this as ranges.

Depending on how timekeeping is kept in the campaign, this might be good enough it might be more practical to stick with 24-hour time, or even bell time for a bit of fun (if probably too much work; unless a converter is programmed). After all, there would still presumably be 8-hour watches.

 

[Christopher]

Since The Making of Star Trek said that stardates could vary from location to location due to relativistic nonsimultaneous mumblemumble handwave handwave, I once made a list of episodes/movies that took place in the same location (for instance episodes and movies set at Earth, "Balance of Terror" and "The Deadly Years" near the Neutral Zone, "City on the Edge" and "Yesteryear" at the Time Planet, "Amok Time" and TVH at Vulcan) and tried to work out the stardates vs. real-time intervals -- though of course my results depended on the assumptions I made about the dates of the respective episodes/films, many of which were inconsistent with current chronological assumptions. (Since my list only went up to TVH, I assume I made it sometime between 1987 and 1989.) Anyway, although there were some outliers, the majority of my results were in the range of 2.5-2.8 stardate units per day, surprisingly close to the TNG standard of 1000 units/yr (about 2.7 per day).

However, we do have one data point that allows a precise, unambiguous calculation of stardate time intervals, namely the flight recorder playback in The Search for Spock, which has the computer calling out stardates to two decimal places in a playback of Spock's death scene from TWOK. By timing that scene, I came up with a ratio of 3.248 stardate units per day, though my surviving notes only have the result and not the computation. Anyone who's curious can surely try it for themselves and compare their result to mine.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

If you advance the date by ten years, it yields Stardate 7149

But why not do it like just like the writers’ guide says? If a campaign is like an episode, pick any four digits (though I’d narrow it down to something that looks right for 2277, say 77xx.x), then keep going consistently at one unit per day during your campaign. Say you wanted 2279 for a different campaign: the stardates jump to 79xx.x, and then it’s a unit per day again. Or you can mess up even the first two digits a bit if you don’t want to reach TWOK, go up or down as needed as long as that once-a-day order is maintained within a single campaign.

 

[Falconer]

… pick any four digits … something that looks right … then keep going consistently at one unit per day during your campaign

That is almost exactly what I am doing. I just get a private kick out of the way I generated the date (adding 3652 units to Friday’s Child’s stardate because my first session was set ten years later on Capella IV), but if it hadn’t “looked right” I wouldn’t have gone with it.

 

[aridas sofia]

I think TMoST says that stardate indicates not only time and location but also speed. Since four to five base ten digits and two decimals can only impart so much information, you’re stuck with two digits for each variable time, location, and speed. That’s 99 possible data points for each - hardly enough to impart much information.

I think the stardate we hear is just a mission clock - a decimal measure of the total mission- stardate 10000.00 would be the complete mission. So stardate 4737.29 is nearly halfway through the mission (which will happen at stardate 5000.00).

Stardate is thus unique to a ship. To equate it to “real” time, you need to take that stardate, the ship’s initial departure “real” time and date, and its planned mission duration, and all the data on speed and location traveled, and come up with an equivalent “real”, “universal” date.

 

[Christopher]

I think TMoST says that stardate indicates not only time and location but also speed.

Rather, Roddenberry's all-caps explanation says "this time system adjusts for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel's speed and space warp capability" -- i.e. relativistic non-simultaneity, the fact that two observers in differently moving frames of reference would measure the flow of time differently. "The star date specified in the log entry must be computed against the speed of the vessel, the space warp, and its position within our galaxy, in order to give a meaningful reading." (TMOST p. 198) So Roddenberry was saying that stardates measure shipboard time, which elapses at a different rate from Earth time, and the ratio can only be calculated if you happen to know the ship's course and speed and can do the relativistic math to compare it to time flow on Earth or some other reference frame. He wasn't saying that information was in the stardate itself; in fact, he was saying the exact opposite, that the stardate in the log only gave local time and you would require additional information beyond the stardate if you wanted to know the equivalent Earth date. After all, as Roddenberry says at the start of that same passage, he created stardates because he deliberately wanted to avoid being locked down to specific dates and times.

Although, of course, this explanation doesn't really work, because if it's purely a measure of shipboard time, then it wouldn't sometimes decrease between earlier and later episodes. It was just Roddenberry's handwave for viewer questions about why the dates weren't consistent.

Also, as we now know from Miguel Alcubierre's work, a "warp drive" spacetime metric would not be time-dilated.

 

[aridas sofia]

He wasn't saying that information was in the stardate itself; in fact, he was saying the exact opposite, that the stardate in the log only gave local time and you would require additional information beyond the stardate if you wanted to know the equivalent Earth date. After all, as Roddenberry says at the start of that same passage, he created stardates because he deliberately wanted to avoid being locked down to specific dates and times.

Yes, that’s good. So my understanding was less my invention and more recalling what he intended.

“Stardate is thus unique to a ship. To equate it to “real” time, you need to take that stardate, the ship’s initial departure “real” time and date, and its planned mission duration, and all the data on speed and location traveled, and come up with an equivalent “real”, “universal” date.”

As far as it increasing or decreasing between episodes, that assumes the episodes are sequential. Certainly TAS draws that into question. What DOES draw my “mission clock” interpretation into some question are the times when stardate is said to be unknown. If it is a mission clock, it is observer based, on the ship. Off the ship, on the Guardian planet? Sure. Stardate is unknown. But on that ship? I don’t think it should ever be unknown.

 

[Christopher]

As far as it increasing or decreasing between episodes, that assumes the episodes are sequential.

It "assumes" nothing. It merely acknowledges that stardate order creates too many continuity and logic problems. It puts "This Side of Paradise" immediately after "Amok Time," which rather undermines the impact of Spock's experience of emotions in TSOP. It puts "Tomorrow is Yesterday" immediately before "The City on the Edge of Forever," which beggars coincidence. It puts "The Practical Joker," in which Romulans are using Klingon ships, considerably before "The Enterprise Incident," where this is noted as a new practice. It puts "Mudd's Passion" only seven episodes after "I, Mudd," way too short a time for his intervening escapades. Not to mention the inconsistency of interspersing episodes from different seasons (including TAS) where there were notable differences in set design.

 

[aridas sofia]

It "assumes" nothing.

I don’t know what you are trying to say, Christopher. Weren’t we all discussing stardates “in universe”. The “story” of the mission is not being told in order if the stardates are out of order. The story itself might not make as much sense that way, But you are then talking about the logic of the storytelling. I am talking about the logic of the stardates. If the episodes are shown in order 1, 2, 3, 7, 4, 5, 17, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 13, we can assume they are being shown out of order, since the stardates are numerical and thus sequential. The story has nothing to do with it. Roddenberry said how it was to make sense. Either change the stardates on the episodes, drop them altogether, assume they are bouncing around in time, or accept that stardate has no logical meaning.

 

[Christopher]

I don’t know what you are trying to say, Christopher.

It's perfectly clear. I was not assuming the episodes had to be in a specific order, merely pointing out that assuming they were in stardate order is problematical. Questioning one model is not the same as blindly embracing a different model. That should be self-evident and not require further explication.

 

[aridas sofia]

All our discussions get tense. Someday we need to sit down at some mutually convenient location and have a drink. I like your writing and your thoughtful approach, so I suspect something is just getting lost in translation somewhere.