Stardates ???

[tharpdevenport]

They're meaningless numbers.

Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense character can thus remember them. "Oh yes, that was stardate _________." Or: "Can you tell us where you were stardate _____________?"

Yeah, right.

Hard to follow passage of time and place when nothing is logically laid out time wise.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense character can thus remember them. "Oh yes, that was stardate _________." Or: "Can you tell us where you were stardate _____________?"

Yeah, right.

Hard to follow passage of time and place when nothing is logically laid out time wise.

Makes sense to the characters and that’s all that matters.

 

[fireproof78]

Makes sense to the characters and that’s all that matters.

Yes, it's a story point not a history lesson.

 

[BillJ]

Stardates are gibberish to make the shows seem futuristic. Nothing more, nothing less. It is a fools' errand to try and make sense of them.

 

[Hawku]

The TNG stardate system doesn't start until the year 2323, a bit after DIS/SNW/TOS. My headcanon is someone tripped over the Ethernet cable at Starfleet Headquarters, causing it all to reset.

 

[fireproof78]

The TNG stardate system doesn't start until the year 2323, a bit after DIS/SNW/TOS. My headcanon is someone tripped over the Ethernet cable at Starfleet Headquarters and causing it all to reset.

Y24K was a rough new year .

 

[camdudetenger2018]

Voyager's Homestead states Stardate 54868.6 is April 5 2378.
Disco's premiere episode The Vulcan Hello states Stardate 1207.3 is May 11 2256.

lol would it be easyer to say like stardate 0405.2378 and stardate 0511.2256

 

[UssGlenn]

Does the stardate calculator move to the next date in January or at the start of the new TV season in September?

 

[Maurice]

Roddenberry even said they were actually meant to be inconsistent

I don't think he said that as much as his explanation hand waved away any need to be consistent.

That said, de Forest Research frequently commented on the issue when stardates went backwards.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Does the stardate calculator move to the next date in January or at the start of the new TV season in September?

Both. In-universe, each TNG through VOY stardate year seemed to start towards the beginning of an Earth year and in real life, at the start of each TV season. Naturally, there are occasional instances when this isn't true at all.

 

[Tosk]

The TNG stardate system doesn't start until the year 2323, a bit after DIS/SNW/TOS. My headcanon is someone tripped over the Ethernet cable at Starfleet Headquarters, causing it all to reset.

Or the stardates were recalibrated at the same time as the warp scale.

 

[fireproof78]

Or the stardates were recalibrated at the same time as the warp scale.

That will be covered in the upcoming anthology series, "All My Canon."

 

[The Salt Umpire]

That will be covered in the upcoming anthology series, "All My Canon."

Hold on: We have three separate paths on Canon Blvd? Televised order, production order...and by log stardate order? Let's put them in order of the Captain's Log Stardate for fun! Time's all relative anyway.

 

[B.J.]

lol would it be easyer to say like stardate 0405.2378 and stardate 0511.2256

If you're going to do that, just go with ISO8601: 2378-04-05 and 2256-05-11

But my head canon for TOS and SNW is that it's an abbreviated date, similar to how many people just write the last two digits of the year instead of all four. The full number could be going up as time moves on as we'd expect, but we only see part of it.

 

[CaptChris42]

The stardates were never meant to make sense in TOS. IIRC, Roddenberry even said they were actually meant to be inconsistent, to reflect the each region of space uses its own dating system which the Enterprise adopts while in that region. This way here the writers don't actually have to keep track of the dates to make sure everything makes sense. Disco and SNW are merely going back to this original Roddenberrian intent, which which the other shows from TNG onwards disregarded when they actually tried to make the stardates make sense.

And holy shit, my spellchecker recognized a word I thought I was making up while writing this post, "Roddenberrian" but doesn't recognize stardate.

At a stretch you can say the TOS stardates cover about sixty months, or maybe six years... but may be particular to the ship registering them, and for a particular mission.

TNG never treated it that way, or DS9 and Voyager though, including when citing TOS incidents.

Stardates seem to go up a little at a time in Discovery and SNW, but rather haphazardly.

Stardates in the movie era seem to go up by less than 180 units a year, on average, meantime (particularly in the span from TWOK to TUC)

Then we have Picard, and when the celebration date is supposed to be in season 3, relative to Enterprise's pilot episode.