Stardates - ANOTHER attempt at a system

[Aahz]

Aahz, that’s a very interesting thread. Although I do editorialise here and there, I have tried to avoid too much “between the lines” speculation and just stick to established data points in my own timeline. Naturally, trying to accommodate something as arbitrary as stardates as well as all the other contradictory references makes for some decisions that might seem a little odd.

I try to stay away from speculation wherever possible. But sometimes speculation is necessary to fill in gaps. However, whenever I do speculate, I try to back up my speculations with relevant facts, even if those facts don't directly include the information in question.

Take for instance Spock's age.

I’d suggest that Spock is considerably older than 17 when he enters the Academy.

Although there's no specific data that establishes this, simple logic works to speculate that he's 17 or thereabouts. I just elaborated on this in the "Earth years/Vulcan years" thread. Suffice it to say that the older you make Spock, the younger Amanda had to have been when she married Sarek. See, she's approximately 57 in 2267 in "Journey to Babel" (Jane Wyatt's age in 1967), making Spock approximately 35 (Nimoy's age was 36). I use 35 because it is a multiple of 7, which comes into play in a slightly earlier episode, "Amok Time." That would make Amanda 21 when she wed Sarek. For every year older you make Spock, you have to make Amanda a year younger on her wedding day... Logically, there's a limit... (see the other thread for the full diatribe)

2270: The original 5-year mission ends.

I wouldn't have a problem with that. My timeline given in the P2 forum thread gives 2271 as the end of the 5-year mission, based on the starting year of that mission being 2266 after a year-long refit following the events in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" in 2265. But if you want to include WNMHGB as the start of the "5-year mission" then 2270 works as well.

July 2273: Star Trek: The Motion Picture. All the references in the film are to around three years. Kirk hasn’t logged a single star hour in two-and-a-half years. Gene Roddenberry’s novel has Spock on Vulcan for 2.8 years, so I think it’s 2273.

Here is one that I think I may have to revise on my timeline. After studying the stardate references earlier in this thread, I'm thinking that TMP could have occurred a little less than 10 years before Carol Marcus recorded her "Genesis" tape. She recorded her tape on 7130.4, while TMP's stardate is given as starting on 7410.2 when Kirk arrives at Starfleet HQ. Assuming a rollover occurred, then there's slightly less than 10 years between the events (perhaps 9 years and about 8 months), not the 6 years I placed on my timeline.

April 2285: Star Trek II. I feel uncomfortable with the idea that 2283 is some sort of gag. Kirk reads it off the bottle (although I can’t see how), so it must be what’s printed on the label. There’s no simple answer to this, but I’m assuming that Kirk approximates to 15 years, since it’s 15 years since the end of the 5-year mission. Khan says it’s 15 years because, for him on Ceti Alpha V, it has been. The years there are longer. It’s James Kirk’s birthday, and I’m assuming that 2233.04 is a reference to April 2233, rather than 4th January.

No disrespect intended, but feeling "uncomfortable" with a particular year is rather subjective, and not very data-driven or logical. The joke I referred to was not one supposed to be delivered by the Kirk and McCoy characters, but included by the writers out of fun. There's a lot of that in Star Trek. I mean, the USS Stargazer being build in Bedford Falls? Looking past that, why would an Earth year be printed on a bottle of Romulan ale, unless it was specifically meant to be imported into the Federation illegally in the first place? And would it be the actual bottling year, or would it be the year it was sent to be picked up by the border patrol vessel? Who knows? The point is, that is the year given in the film.

Now, going from that, the Genesis tape would have been recorded in 2282 ("made about a year ago"). Supposing that's late fall of 2282, then backing up 9 years and about 8 months would put the date of TMP at early 2273. So it seems we're not too far off with that date, at least. And the stardates would still fit as well.

June 2285: Star Trek III: Date fixed by stardate. I don’t think that there is a huge gap between the shows, despite Lt. Saavik’s radical makeover. Even if there isn’t a lot of information, space travellers would have to be warned not to go near the Genesis Planet, so I don’t think it has to be more than a couple of months later.

I think more time passed between ST2 and ST3 than most people give credit for. There is a lot that had to happen.

- Starfleet had to get all of the data on Genesis, then decide what to do about it. As several characters have been wont to point out, Starfleet's bureaucracy is not particularly fast. Then, once a decision had been made, a number of actions had to take place.

- Of course the Mutara sector had to be quarantined, and all of the various bits and pieces of the Genesis data and event had to be classified.

- The USS Grissom had to be assigned to the Genesis planet, and before that, David and Saavik had to be de-briefed prior to reassignment on the Grissom.

- Even before that, the crew of the USS Reliant had to have been rescued from Ceti Alpha V, which is where the Enterprise was headed at the end of ST2. The Reliant's crew isn't on the Enterprise. Neither are many of the trainees for that matter, according to Kirk's log entry. All of this by itself would have taken quite some time.

- Valkris had to have been able to intercept and decode Kirk's report on Genesis.

- The word of the Genesis planet's creation and the Mutara sector quarantine had to have gotten out. Even lowlife space pilots knew of Genesis and the Mutara quarantine. I really doubt that the events of ST2 made the 11:00 news...

- There are some minor differences to the Enterprise, suggesting that a minor repair/upgrade stopover took place. For example, the turbolifts in ST3 are different from those in ST2. And the battle damage repairs themselves had to take some time -- there are a number of REALLY LARGE plates welded (or otherwise fastened) to the hull.

- And then there's the damage to the Enterprise. I'm sure this has been hashed out a kazillion times since ST3 first came out. But on-screen, there is damage to the Enterprise at the beginning of ST3 that wasn't present in ST2, especially on the starboard side of the secondary hull. What happened between the two films?

Admittedly, much of this could occur simultaneously, but I strongly suggest that ST3 didn't immediately follow ST2. But if you back ST2's date to 2283, then ST3 could remain at 2285 or even back it up to 2284. I lean toward 2284, since I think 2 years is a bit much. But if ST2 occurred near the end of 2283, then early or mid-2285 wouldn't be out-of-line, and would still be less than two full years.

Admiral Morrow mis-spoke, since 20 years is approximately how long James Kirk has been associated with the Enterprise. The ship is obviously at least ten years older than that and was almost completely rebuilt 12 to 15 years before the film.

As you may have seen in my timeline, I give Morrow the benefit of the doubt by saying that 20 years is the length of time between refit #1 (2265, after WNMHGB) and ST3 (2285), with Morrow implying that after refit #1 it was a completely new ship. Actually, by the time of ST3, the Enterprise is 40 years old, having been launched in 2245 under the command of Capt. Robert April.

August 2285: Star Trek IV.

I'm like you -- I think ST4 came shortly on the heels of ST3. After all, they've just resurrected Spock, they're still on Vulcan, and they're still flying the "HMS Bounty" (the re-christened Bird of Prey). But they've significantly modified the ship, and Spock has nearly completed his re-training, so some amount of time had to have passed.

I've not done much work on the movies past ST4, or on TNG or later series, apart from the first season of TNG. I'll have to accept your work in this area at face value, since mine isn't worth much...

Incidentally, I sort of assumed that the stardate 2794.7 is only very approximately related to events in “Conscience of the King”, since we never find out what precisely it refers to. My stardate system says it is 2nd May 2245, and it could be the date Kodos was assigned to Tarsus IV.

True that. But the computer is responding to Kirk's request on Kodos "the Executioner" and Karidian. The reply regarding Kodos starts with a brief summary of the slaughter, then the computer says "Detailed information follows. On stardate 2794.7..." before Kirk stops it and asks for the summary on Karidian. It can be presumed that the information that was about to follow dealt with the portion of the story recounted by Spock later in the episode. After all, he had consulted the computer as well. It is possible that 2794.7 was when Kodos declared martial law on Tarsus IV, and that the executions came at a slightly later date, but only slightly. It was an emergency situation, and I'm sure his "solution" had to be done quickly before someone tried to stop it.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Spock referring to a 24th Century event with a four digit stardate would tend to bolster the argument that the whole thing is an alternate timeline from start to finish, Nimoy included, and therefore has absolutely no relation, or relevance, to the established timeline.

 

[jimcat]

Hello Aahz,

That was a quick and detailed reply, not to mention very good-humoured. I realised that I hadn’t had time to look at the Vulcan calendar thread, and still haven’t, but I thought I’d make some replies just now. Rather than going through the lot, especially since you’re very kind about some of the choices I’ve made, I’ll try to keep things shorter, and have failed.

Captain Kirk’s service history is hardly an open book, and capable of quite a few different interpretations, all equally valid (or invalid). I don’t think it’s impossible that Kirk might go from First Officer on a starship to captain of another, although a smaller command first is a much better argument. I’d assumed that Gary Mitchell’s age on his file is accurate, but I’m having severe second thoughts about that. There’s meteoric rises and meteoric rises, after all.

Incidentally, although I tried not to speculate too much in the timeline (see the link in the sig below, although I think Aahz is more interested in pusuing this independently. Good luck, I'm interested to see where you go with it), it didn’t stop me from trying to fill in gaps outside it. Spock’s service record seems to involve serving very nearly continuously on the Enterprise, rising from lieutenant to captain of the ship. Not terribly likely, but there it is. I was intrigued that Spock spent over a decade on the ship and yet never had an independent command before the “Galileo Seven”. It might be a mistake, but Spock doesn’t correct it, and he certainly doesn’t seem to be comfortable with commanding the others. My assumption is that Spock undergoes the “staff officer” training that McCoy gets (he and Scotty have a long talk about staff officers and line officers in an episode, I can’t remember the one) and leaves Starfleet Academy with a lieutenant’s commission as a scientist/computer specialist. It’s not until much later that Spock returns to the Academy to undertake command training on Captain Pike’s recommendation. He’s promoted to lieutenant commander on graduation, and by a fluke chance is assigned as First Officer back to the Enterprise. That’s why he’s wearing a gold shirt in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, and gets called lieutenant commander through a chunk of the first season, since Kirk’s field promotion to commander isn’t formally confirmed for several months. I’m guessing that he meets Uhura during the course, and recommends her to Kirk, since she arrives for the start of the series, and has a gold uniform too, at first. Hard evidence for any of which, there is none.

I can tell you’re not convinced that there’s only a short gap between STII and STIII, and I think you have some very sensible arguments to back that up. However, since my unhealthy attachment to stardates severely limits the time I can have, I’ll do the best I can to argue a contrary case: The ship is very heavily damaged in STII, and rescuing the Reliant’s crew from Ceti Alpha V is going to be an absolute priority, given the extreme surface conditions. Allowing that I’m squeezing events to fit an artificially short time, I see a rapid trip to Ceti Alpha, followed by best speed to the nearest starbase. Once there, Admiral Kirk pulls rank to get the ship fixed with whatever’s available in the minimum time, explaining the changes in the sets. The additional damage to the ship’s exterior seems likely to be from catastrophic failure of emergency repairs, rather than another space battle, at least as far as my concertinaed timescale allows.

A skeleton crew takes the ship back to Earth, where Admiral Kirk expects a priority refit. Starfleet Command has other ideas.

Although we’re back out into shaky chains of conjecture, I’m not sure that it would take a huge amount of time for Genesis to become a hot news topic. The Federation isn’t meant to be a closed society, so I’m going to be contrary again and say that the death of a whole load of cadets on a training cruise, the loss of a starship and the rumours about secret projects getting horribly out of hand would be the top story on the 11:00 news. Particularly when James Kirk’s involved, because he saved the Earth in TMP.

As I can see you’ve already spotted, interpreting anything in Star Trek is a matter of preference, and you can argue one way or another on the same contradictory evidence. Although they’re relatively minor points, the longer there is between STII and STIII, the more difficult it is to see that McCoy’s mind meld problems wouldn’t have been more obvious, and the less credible it becomes that the Klingons only find out about the Genesis Project about the same time as dodgy space-pilots for hire.

Having flogged that to death, and I think we’ll be continuing to differ there, on to Romulan Ale. It’s illegal, and the implication is it’s illegal like crack cocaine, marijuana or heroin. Whilst I can just about see Kirk and McCoy enjoying a friendly spliff, I’m less convinced that they’d be snorting a few lines together off duty. And then there’s the whole big reception for Chancellor Gorkon in STVI. Illegal substances? They’d all be cashiered, especially after what happens next. Again, I don’t think there’s a real answer, but I see Romulan Ale being illegal in the same sort of way as Cuban cigars are in the United States. The date of production becomes a big deal, and is treated with scepticism by the consumers. Supplies are always short, and it’s surrounded with a whole mystique it doesn’t really deserve. On the other hand, I think you’re right, the people making the film did intend it to be 2283 and all my arguments are just hand-waving because I can’t get that to fit.

But (and I admit I’m producing this with a bit of cheap dramatics) the really big problem with 2283 for STII appears in Star Trek: Generations. 11 years earlier, James Kirk has resigned from Starfleet, and has a wonderful but doomed relationship with a woman called Antonia, that ends 9 years before the film. If the film’s in 2293, then the relationship’s between 2282 and 2284. If the film moves, then the 23rd century bit of the film will have to move too, to be 78 years in the future (and preferably 78.2 years). As you say, you’ve still the fun of trying to work out that particular bit of continuity hell, but none of the available solutions I was able to come up with is obviously the right one.

Your point about Amanda’s age is a quite brilliant one, and it is very difficult to argue convincingly against. I’m afraid I’ll just have to argue unconvincingly again… I’ll be very interested to see what the Vulcan calendar thread says, but my own go at this was an attempt to reconcile stardates, the absolute mess that are Tuvok’s and T’Pol’s ages and pon farr cycles, and (last but not least) the actual physical parameters of the star 40 Eridani A and what limits they place on the length of the Vulcan year (or the period Vulcans use to count their ages by). If I can find the time, I’ll try and contribute something explaining all that in the more relevant thread. Suffice to say, I assume Amanda is deceptively young-looking and that Spock was born in June 2225. This is five years ahead of the “commonly accepted” date, and all I can say is that I tied myself in all kinds of knots trying to get something closer to the accepted value of a fairly close correspondence between Earth years and Vulcan years. If you throw 40 Eridani out of the window (and you’re not breaking any big rules if you do, because it’s never formally identified as the Vulcan system anywhere) then you can go for something else. I wanted it in, and keeping it eventually gave me a life history for Tuvok that didn’t make me wince too much. In defence of Old Amanda, Doctor McCoy is still pretty chipper at 137 in “Encounter at Farpoint”, so the human aging process is considerably slower in Star Trek. Amanda will have to be around 70 in “Journey to Babel” and 90 in STIV, but you win some, and you lose some. It would make her about the same age as the Aprils in “The Counter-clock Incident”, according to my guesses. I don’t think it’s out and out impossible, but I accept I’m arguing from a pretty weak position. I just hope that Vulcan medical care for old age is better than what’s provided for childbirth. (That cave in STV. What were they all thinking?)

None of this can ever be absolute, so I look forward to reading your take on it, Aahz.

Nice to hear from you, Captain Robert April. I’ve ended up assuming that the “stardates” in that film are a sort of “convention”. They aren’t the actual dates, they’re “something that the audience can identify with”. In practice, I see huge problems in effectively distinguishing between 2258.1, 2258.10 and 2258.100, say; not to mention 2258.01. I could have missed the whole thing out, along with anything else I decided I didn’t like, but the challenge was to try and include as much as possible. My biggest concern turned out to be the extra Pavel Chekhov. Does he have a brother called Piotr?

Timon

 

[Aahz]

Hi, Timon! I don't have much time, but I wanna get a couple of things in. Oh, and I always try to treat this stuff with a good humor. Where's the logic in having heated arguments over a science-fiction TV and movie series?

Whitfield's book "The Making of Star Trek" is the source I used to indicate that James T. Kirk's first command was a destroyer. And although it doesn't say for sure, I think Whitfield's source for that statement was the original Star Trek Writers' Guide itself.

I think I shot myself in the foot by giving a longer time between ST2 and ST3. I've been arguing other points based on stardate, but I neglected to take the stardate for ST3 into account until your post. ST2 ended on 8141, while ST3 began on 8210, approximately a month later. I guess a LOT had to happen in a VERY SHORT amount of time...

And I like your explanation of the starboard damage being caused by failed emergency repairs. I hadn't heard or thought of that before. Although the exterior didn't show it in ST2, the damage control station showed that there was some internal damage on the starboard side of the secondary hull after Khan's attack. Maybe sometime after 8141 they had a large-scale version of an Apollo 13-style blowout as a result of the internal damage.

Anyway, that's all for now. Gotta go...

 

[jimcat]

Hello Aahz,

I'm glad a few of my suggestions are proving helpful. I'm certainly revisiting some of the assumptions I made.

My comments about James Kirk turned out to be a bit cryptic, since I forgot a vital bit. It must have made sense to me at the time, I suppose. The point about Kirk being a First Officer was an idle thought that came out of watching “Mirror, Mirror”, when Kirk definitely is Chris Pike's Number One, and kills him to get the ship. I suppose it depends how closely the mirror universe reflects events in the “real” universe. Not very much, once you start going into details, I think.

I dug out my old copy of “The Making of Star Trek”, and there is quite a bit of extra information there. I'm not sure how much of it was in the Writer's Guide, but all of it must have come out of the notes in the production office.

Timon

 

[TrekGuide.com]

Moving off the movies a bit, I’d suggest that Spock is considerably older than 17 when he enters the Academy. I think he holds off on a decision until he’s sure that he’s not going to have trouble with pon farr.

I think all debates about characters' and actors' ages are kind of pointless, unless an age was established in an episode, but I will just add that actress Winona Ryder was about 35 when she gave birth to Spock in the deleted scene of "Star Trek XI," and later had age makeup in scenes when Spock was grown. So the question is not how old Spock (Nimoy) was in the series, but how old Amanda (Jane Wyatt/Winona Ryder) was when Spock was born.

TrekGuide.com you might not believe it, but I have looked at, and got inspiration from your site. Rather than trying to pick holes in your arguments, I’d like to say I wish I was able to make nifty little calculators like that.

Well, my calculators are just basic JavaScript arithmetic date calculators, to which I've applied my computed start date (Stardate 00000.0 started on Friday, July 5, 2318, 12:00 hours), and my computed Stardate ratio (1.0 Stardate is 34,367.0564 seconds) for the TNG system.

For TOS Stardates, I concluded that Stardate 0000.0 began on Tuesday, April 25, 2265, at 00:00 hours, and that one Stardate is less than 0.138606142 day.

My own ideas start from a similar set of arguments, but then drift off a little. I wanted to make sure that the overall system was as consistent as possible, particularly as far as the basic length of the stardate units was concerned. That was to make it as simple as possible for me, and for everyone else, too. I don’t think that you can get away with having a stardate unit of less than 24 hours if you’re going to use the dates given on screen.

Yes, we seem to be approaching the problem from opposite ends. I even state at the top of my Stardate Calculator page that it is intended to compute average years and dates across entire series, rather than hours and minutes within a single episode.

I have tried to fit the events of each story to a system very similar to yours, but the truth is that it breaks down over and over again, to the point that I’d just about given up on applying stardates to the chronology of events in Star Trek. When stardates can be made to work, I want them to work completely, right down to correctly matching the passage of time in the plotline of a story.

I think if you try to extrapolate a time span from Stardates givin within any single episode, it will not make any sense if you multiply that span of time to calculate entire years or decades (especially since different episodes seem to use different spans of time between Stardates).

While I can use my calculators to state that, on average, 1.0 Stardate = N milliseconds, and that can be extrapolated such that the Hindu festival of light in TNG's "Data's Day" and First Contact Day in Voyager's "Homestead" match up to the correct calendar dates of those known holidays, that same millisecond count certainly can't be used to tell the exact time between two Stardates within any single episode.

So, paradoxically, I can tell you exactly how many seconds are between any two episodes, but I can't begin to speculate on how many minutes or hours pass between two Stardates in any single episode.

My own date system is based on stardate 49334 being the 24th (of April 2372 in my timeline) as established in “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost”, whilst 49364 is 14th (May 2372). The problem is that no matter how carefully you go at it, there’s no real definitive answer, since the dates themselves weren’t calculated, just made up as they went along.

I started my Stardate theory while watching "Voyager," so I will have to go back and watch DS9 again and pay more attention to any date references.

In the end, I was left with the question of why Stardates would only use the last four or five digits, when they could all be fixed accurately against each other by one or two extra ones? Recalibrations of the start-date at irregular intervals might not be pretty, but it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to reconcile the TOS and TMP stardates with each other. I have managed to whittle things down so that from the earliest start date I needed in 2231 there are only three recalibrations and one massive time distortion of the system, with another seven “rollovers” where the stardate clock hits 99d9 and rolls over to 00a0.

Timon

My theory is based on a Stardate being a basic and constant unit of time (e.g., 34,367.0564 seconds in TNG system), and Stardate 00000.0 Starting on Friday, July 5, 2318, 12:00.

Given a starting point and an exact time value of 1 Stardate unit, any Stardate given in any episode can be converted to a specific date. (I'm not saying my theory is comprehensive or accurate, but at least it is consistent.)

Timon, given your timeline and Stardate calculations, have you also estimated a time value for one Stardate unit (i.e., how many seconds are in 1.0 Stardate)? And on what calendar date Stardate 0000.0 started?

Or are you saying that Stardates are not a linear value of time, and a person sitting in a room watching a Stardate clock for long enough will see the Stardate values speed up and slow down from time to time?

 

[jimcat]

Hello, TrekGuide.com,

Thanks for your comments. I think we’re coming at this from different starting points: I want stardates to work pretty much all the time, from the internal dates in an episode, to the overall timeline for the whole of Star Trek. That inevitably means that I lose out on what you’re going after, which seems to be a consistent way of calculating specific dates that generates a plausible range of dates across a longer time period.

The base unit of my stardates is completely fixed as one twenty-four hour day, as given in the writer’s guides for the various Star Trek series, and the observed passage of time in the stories. Where I come unstuck is that “1,000” units cannot be anything like 1,000 days. My assumption is that it’s only 400 days long, and that the stardating system measures something else along with the straight passage of time, again in keeping with the official explanations. In practical terms, there are 100 possible stardates between S.D. 41000 and S.D. 41099, but anything (a ship, person or whatever) experiencing those dates will only actually be in the right locations in space and time for 40 of them to apply. Motionless objects will progress in a relatively predictable way, since their space location will be less changeable (explaining why starships in orbit around planets experience the passage of stardates quite regularly, although I suspect I’ll need to insist that Deep Space Nine’s proximity to a wormhole somehow makes it an exception). Moving objects will be all over the place, especially if they’re travelling at warp speed.

I hope that any confusion has been caused by my use of the word “recalibration”. I got into the habit of using it to describe a resetting of the zero date for stardates, not for any change to the length of the base unit. As I explained in my post, I was unable to get stardates to come even close to working without changing the zero date irregularly. One I’m passing off as the effects of the Guardian of Forever’s time distortions. I still need another two to get the TOS films to work properly, and a final one at the start of the TNG cycle. That zero date is 00:00:00 on 14th April 2318. I have a complete list here, and am relying on the rather weak explanation that stardates are advanced an arbitrary number of units on from zero to avoid any confusion between “old” and “new” stardates at a recalibration (or maybe I should call it a resetting).

My stardates underpin and help to justify the timeline that appears on the site, rather than standing completely alone to easily generate a plausible stardate for any given conventional date in a range. With a huge health warning that my decisions are based on getting some reasonable correlation between established dates, my stardates and hints about other calendars, I have a list of very basic calendar information here, including a suggested Vulcan calendar. Since none of this is finalised just yet, I’m afraid the detailed arguments in support of my calendar decisions are missing, but I’d be happy to expand on the choices I’ve made if you’d like.

My ambition (which may not be achievable) is to end up with a complete timeline of events in Star Trek, dated by as many of the original stardates as I possibly can. I’d like to provide a useful resource for people wanting to know when things happened. I don’t think I’m necessarily the best person to try it, but I don’t know of anyone else who’s having a go, so once I’d begun, I thought I might as well try to get it finished. I’m not trying to discourage anyone else from tackling things their own way, and I’m aware that the best I’m likely to achieve is something that sort of works some of the time, so by that description it can’t be any better and could easily be worse than your system. Please don’t think that I’m trying to suggest that there’s only one way to calculate stardates, and it’s my way.

Someone sitting and looking at one of my stardate clocks wouldn’t see it speeding up and slowing down, but someone living on a starship travelling at warp speed might easily get up on S.D. 45238.2, and go to bed on S.D. 45218.9. If they were looking at the clock at just the right time, they might even see the “tens” digit shift about, although all the other numbers would stay properly behaved. If I sound a bit vague and confused about all this, it’s because I am. The stardating system grew out of my analysis of the stardates. If I was working something out from scratch, I’d have made it a lot less complicated.

Timon