Stardate for Dummies

[C.E. Evans]

All I can say is this:

These kids seem pretty close to graduation. So much so that McCoy is already assigned as a senior medical officer aboard the Enterprise and that Uhura is treating her posting to the Farrgut as a permanent assignment.

Later in the movie both Kirk and Spock give the Stardate as 2258.42.

It makes more sense (to me) to equate 2258.42 as June 2nd,2258 than February 11,2258.

YMMV

We actually don't know when cadets graduate from Starfleet Academy nor what stage everyone was at in the Academy by the time of the crisis on Vulcan. In that regard, February is no worse or better than June.

But it's really the writers' call as they're the ones making this stuff up. They may yet come up with something different still for Star Trek XII, in which we'll have to adapt accordingly to as well, IMO...

 

[beamMe]

All I can say is this:

These kids seem pretty close to graduation. So much so that McCoy is already assigned as a senior medical officer aboard the Enterprise and that Uhura is treating her posting to the Farrgut as a permanent assignment.

Later in the movie both Kirk and Spock give the Stardate as 2258.42.

It makes more sense (to me) to equate 2258.42 as June 2nd,2258 than February 11,2258.

Or it's late October 2258.

 

[Vance]

TOS stardates were four random, meaningless numbers. Four numbers that mean something is an improvement.

Actually, not quite. With a couple of exceptions, the first two numbers were related to the production number of the show. The second two were 'incremented' to show time moving within a particular episode. The decimal point was the 'time of day' with .5 being noon and .0 being midnight. This lasted, again with an obvious exception, even throughout TAS.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

After y'all make sense of stardates, go to work on "warp factors."

I'm gonna go roll this rock up that hill over there, and I'll be finished afore ye.

 

[beamMe]

After y'all make sense of stardates, go to work on "warp factors."

I'm gonna go roll this rock up that hill over there, and I'll be finished afore ye.

Okay, Sisyphus.

 

[Merky]

All I can say is this:

These kids seem pretty close to graduation. So much so that McCoy is already assigned as a senior medical officer aboard the Enterprise and that Uhura is treating her posting to the Farrgut as a permanent assignment.

Later in the movie both Kirk and Spock give the Stardate as 2258.42.

It makes more sense (to me) to equate 2258.42 as June 2nd,2258 than February 11,2258.

Or it's late October 2258.

Did it dawn on anyone that maybe Starfleet Academy doesn't follow the same structure as a traditional college and that maybe these cadets could possibly be graduating in the Winter, which then would make sense if you look at the plausibility that each month there's a new class of recruits. Which isn't that far of a stretch...

This is making such a straight forward system more complicated than it should be....

 

[Vance]

Did it dawn on anyone that maybe Starfleet Academy doesn't follow the same structure as a traditional college and that maybe these cadets could possibly be graduating in the Winter, which then would make sense if you look at the plausibility that each month there's a new class of recruits. Which isn't that far of a stretch...

This is making such a straight forward system more complicated than it should be....

Actually, there are plenty of cadets who graduate in February (completing classes at the end of semester in January). It's a minority, sure, but there's no reason even if you assume a similar academy-style calendar that Kirk, et al., weren't winter graduates.

 

[Merky]

Did it dawn on anyone that maybe Starfleet Academy doesn't follow the same structure as a traditional college and that maybe these cadets could possibly be graduating in the Winter, which then would make sense if you look at the plausibility that each month there's a new class of recruits. Which isn't that far of a stretch...

This is making such a straight forward system more complicated than it should be....

Actually, there are plenty of cadets who graduate in February (completing classes at the end of semester in January). It's a minority, sure, but there's no reason even if you assume a similar academy-style calendar that Kirk, et al., weren't winter graduates.

Exactly.

 

[Avon]

they clearly should have used the vulcan stardate system based around metric time that i've just made up/stolen from the simpsons.

 

[BillJ]

 

[Boris Skrbic]

If Orci/Kurtzman had used random numbers, we wouldn't have learned anything of real significance. However, now we have a tiny clue: if stardates can be as regular as YYYY.DOY, why couldn't January 2, 2258 be a stardate as well? Rather than being the "politically correct" system, which would be irrelevant in an era of the universal translator, stardates are likely more about references used to calculate them, as opposed to any particular set of units.

When Archer was recording his logs, those calendar dates may have been de facto stardates. YYYY.DOY is probably a mere formatting convention of the day, no more important than my personal use of YYYY-MM-DD (the international date format) in certain types of text. Maybe there are dozens or hundreds of ways to express a stardate, with the universal translator taking care of conversions. This would go a long way towards explaining why we cannot make sense of the details.

 

[KirkPicard]

I can understand why Robau refers to the stardate as an Earthdate, following the Captain's Starlog dating convention established during the Enterprise timeframe in the Prime timeline. However, why does Spock's vessel, constructed in the 24th Century (prime timeline), post Nemesis, state that the date on which it was constructed in the same manner rather than as Stardate 63***.*?

SPOCK: Computer, what is your manufacturing origin?
COMPUTER VOICE: Stardate 2387. Commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy.

 

[BlobVanDam]

I can understand why Robau refers to the stardate as an Earthdate, following the Captain's Starlog dating convention established during the Enterprise timeframe in the Prime timeline. However, why does Spock's vessel, constructed in the 24th Century (prime timeline), post Nemesis, state that the date on which it was constructed in the same manner rather than as Stardate 63***.*?

SPOCK: Computer, what is your manufacturing origin?
COMPUTER VOICE: Stardate 2387. Commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy.

Because they didn't care about continuity. They cared about the audience understanding the time relation, which would have taken more explanation had they done it properly with established stardates.

 

[Timo]

That's obvious: Vulcans built the ship during the second year of TOS, right between "Squire of Gothos" (SD 2124) and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (SD 2712).

They just sat on the design for a century and a half, seeing no logical use for such an extremely fast vessel...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

I can understand why Robau refers to the stardate as an Earthdate, following the Captain's Starlog dating convention established during the Enterprise timeframe in the Prime timeline. However, why does Spock's vessel, constructed in the 24th Century (prime timeline), post Nemesis, state that the date on which it was constructed in the same manner rather than as Stardate 63***.*?

SPOCK: Computer, what is your manufacturing origin?
COMPUTER VOICE: Stardate 2387. Commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy.

Because they didn't care about continuity. They cared about the audience understanding the time relation, which would have taken more explanation had they done it properly with established stardates.

They broke continuity by using a number that actually meant something and could be understood by all

 

[BlobVanDam]

I can understand why Robau refers to the stardate as an Earthdate, following the Captain's Starlog dating convention established during the Enterprise timeframe in the Prime timeline. However, why does Spock's vessel, constructed in the 24th Century (prime timeline), post Nemesis, state that the date on which it was constructed in the same manner rather than as Stardate 63***.*?

SPOCK: Computer, what is your manufacturing origin?
COMPUTER VOICE: Stardate 2387. Commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy.

Because they didn't care about continuity. They cared about the audience understanding the time relation, which would have taken more explanation had they done it properly with established stardates.

They broke continuity by using a number that actually meant something and could be understood by all

They broke continuity because they decided to define stardate as the plain ol' Earth year, instead of anything consistent with what Trek has used over the past 40+ years. No magical "alternate timeline" explanation accounts for Spock using the wrong stardate system. If they meant year, they should have said year, instead of pretending it's some creative new system.

Was their target audience really too stupid to recognize a basic relative value? Would it have slowed down their plot too much to throw in a line saying how many years into the past/future it is? It was never a problem for the audience in the past to follow along.

 

[Timo]

They could have had Nero ask "What is the current date?" and Robau ponder for a bit, then decide to answer "The current Earth date is April 1st, 2233. Does that tell you anything?".

But then they'd have to play a similar trick with the dates of the latter half of the adventure, so the audience would understand that Kirk is now 25 years old. It's after all something of a plot point that he's 25, rather than, say, 18 or 36. That is, he has missed his "predestined" window for joining Starfleet, but is still a young loose cannon with the future ahead of him.

Not that this would have been particularly difficult to do, either. Just plain say that he's 25 in some scene, preferably during his first chat with Pike already.

The stardates in the movie could then remain the incomprehensible strings of random numbers that they are elsewhere in Trek. Whether they would match the established TOS stardates is another question entirely - because the four-digit TOS dates could only cover a decade of action before rolling over, while the story spanned 25 years. Something new would have to have been introduced there in any case, then.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

It is unlikely that Orci/Kurtzman expected everyone to understand that 2233 is the year, which is probably why they did use timespans as well. If I hadn't been familiar with the official timeline, at most I might have noticed that the 25-year timespan stated in dialogue corresponds to 2258 - 2233, and the same when adding the stated 129 years to 2258.

Also, why is it so improbable that Jellyfish changed its stardate system once it had arrived? GetLocalStardateSystem(), SetDefaultStardateSystem(), then convert TNG stardates before replying to anyone. No need for the AR timebase to use cryptic time/date protocols.

 

[BillJ]

Was their target audience really too stupid to recognize a basic relative value? Would it have slowed down their plot too much to throw in a line saying how many years into the past/future it is? It was never a problem for the audience in the past to follow along.

Especially since Spock said in the mind meld scene that he was 129 years from the future and we see him flying the Jellyfish through the time vortex. Guess they were afraid the ADHD crowd wouldn't remember what happened thirty minutes earlier in the film.

 

[Ryan8bit]

And honestly, no regular audience member is going to pay attention to what the future dates are anyways. They're not going to be doing any math or figuring out anything because all they need to know is that it's the future and that Spock is from even further in the future. Since the regular audience doesn't give a damn, you might as well appease the nerds who do care.