Time

[Drone]

It is also sort of implied that other species in the Federation also come from planets with an approximate 24 hour cycle, which is unrealistic. It would have been nice if there was perhaps a mention of some crewman from 'whatever world' who has an unusual shift pattern because his homeworld's day is shorter and he needs to sleep shorter but more often, or another species who can work a couple of days straight, but is then out cold for a whole day.

Unless Federation medical science can align all crewmembers day-night cycles to an earth standard 24 hours

Would part of the Academy regimen be to habituate plebes of other races from the get go, to adjust to the rhythms and cadences of biology as lived by the agreed upon "gatekeeper' culture? I'm not suggesting medical interventions to overcome physiological conflicts, but haven't medical residents had to deal with such assaults on their cycles for a very, very long time?

 

[T'Girl]

Which is fun in itself, as Vulcan supposedly has no moon.

My take of the Kolinahr scene in TMP is that Vulcan is a moon in orbit of a gas giant.

 

[Ithekro]

Or a double planet ("Delta Vega" in the newer film)

 

[Timo]

"Delta Vega" is probably a code name like "Fox Sierra", as it obviously has as much to do with the place called Vega in either of its known usages as Fox Sierra would have with canines and landscape.

It's just that the outpost founded under that code name in one timeline happened to be somewhere near Vulcan, while in another it happened to be near the energy barrier at the "rim" of the galaxy. No doubt Charlie Vega and Echo Vega were also differently attributed in the two timelines. Doesn't mean the TOS timeline would have lacked an installation near Vulcan, or the new timeline would lack an installation near the barrier.

But I don't really buy the icy place being right next to Vulcan; if the loss of that planet really were visible to old Spock, the news would also have reached Scotty, no matter how loud he listened to Nazareth at the time. Plus, Spock was already proceeding full throttle towards Laurentius; even though the ship was hurt, it would have left the immediate vicinity of Vulcan long before the marooning scene.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

That must have been a huge projector Nero left in orbit to showcase Vulcan's destruction.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Time in Trek is pretty much a joke. They pretend relativity doesn't exist and that one hour passing on Earth is the same as one hour on the Enterprise as one hour on Kronos. The reality would be very different. Things like Chekov being 17 in 2258 and 22 in 2267 would be the norm for space travellers.

 

[vulcan redshirt]

Since we know that starships travel as the speed of plot and that speed = distance / time, therefore time time must also exist in a plot-dependant manner.

 

[TheCegorach]

Bearing in mind what King Daniel said above, I'd presume that this was one of the topics tackled in the formation of the Federation, hashed out rather like the metric system was. A standard for time would doubtless derive from the second, which as Timo points out, is already a standardized unit on Earth--currently defined, if I recall correctly, in terms of the oscillations within a cesium atom.

Even if Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites, et al., had a completely different system--in fact, especially if they did--defining a standard unit of time via atomic oscillations like that (whether cesium or some other element) would be a logical place to start. After that, I personally presume that other cultures may still maintain their own divisions of time, and simply mentally translate a Terran hour; their ships may have even had dual clocks for a while, like having highway signs in both miles and kilometers.

But I also kinda suspect that what we currently call globalization would explain the Terran-centric measurements of the Federation. One can assume that, in the same way that American pop culture is present globally, Terran culture proved to be popular within the Federation, and other cultures have been molded by it. If everyone's favorite soap operas talk about days and months and hours, people may simply become accustomed to their usage.

 

[T'Girl]

Or a double planet ("Delta Vega" in the newer film)

From what we've heard of Vulcan naming practices, it seems unlikely that a planet or moon in their home system would be named "delta vega." At least not by the Vulcan's themselves.

That must have been a huge projector Nero left in orbit to showcase Vulcan's destruction.

Assuming I'm correct about Vulcan being a moon around a gas giant, and further that "Delta Vega" is a moon too.

Nero timed the implosion of Vulcan to correspond to the moon Vulcan and moon Delta Vega being in conjunction in their orbits. Nero also would have timed Vulcan's implosion so that the side of Delta Vega that he placed Spock on was rotated towards Vulcan. With his superior Vulcan eye sight Spock could see Vulcan clearly in the sky from millions kilometers away.

If Vulcan and Delta Vega were three million kilometers apart, and Vulcan were about the same diameter as Earth, then from the surface of Delta Vega, Vulcan would have been half the width of the moon as seen from Earth.

 

[Timo]

...Which sort of makes one wonder why we never saw the gas giant involved.

I mean, we see the sky over Vulcan, and it's not there. And we see the opposite direction when we look at the planet collapsing, from "above" - both in the realtime death scene and the reenactment in the mind meld. No gas giants in either direction. Or in the direction of sunrise (to the left of the collapse scenes), as we see that direction covered when the Narada and the Enterprise face off. Or in the direction of sunset, as we see that when the Enterprise arrives at the debris field.

As they say, t-t-t-t-hat's all, folks. It would have to be a gas dwarf in order to evade our attention behind one of the "moons" involved.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nebusj]

Do you think it's weird that the Federation keeps standard time aboard vessels and stations

I assume Stardates are the universal Federation calendar. On any one member world, ship or station they may well have a clock that runs on their local time, with the cycles of day and night appropriate to that species.

Arthur C Clarke's novel The Songs Of Distant Earth (not the novella on which it was based) has a chapter which constitutes a memo from one of the people aboard the spaceship from Earth, which is still keeping Earth-inspired time, explaining what their days, hours, and minutes mean compared to local time on the planet, whose colonists long ago adapted their time notes to the rotation and year of their planet.

It's a very funny chapter, but it's also dizzying reading. The memo-writer grants that, mercifully, the planet has only the one major land mass and so only one time zone. It also adequately shows why we don't deal with this stuff on TV: the comparisons involve dense reasoning, and it's very hard to come up with a dramatic point served by getting into that detail.