VoI Timeline - 2377 or 2378?

[Christopher]

I would suggest that it's a mistake to pay attention to any part of the stardate after the second digit. All you really ought to pay attention to is the idea that "41xxx=2364." Everything else is just filler.

Well, but the point in the thread is that, more or less, the TV show disagrees with that.

No, that actually is the way the shows dealt with it. They kept the first two digits constant throughout the year and had the remaining digits usually increase from one episode to the next, but with no real attention paid to how much. For instance, the stardate given in "Pen Pals" is at least six weeks into the episode, but it's only 9 units larger than the stardate in the previous episode; while conversely, "Descent Part II" comes only a few days after Part I, but the stardates of the two parts differ by over 43 units.

This is because stardates are meant to be filler, pure and simple. They were invented in the first place specifically to avoid providing any meaningful chronological information to the viewer, because the makers of TOS wanted to be ambiguous about how far in the future it was. They had the stardates generally tend to increase as the series went on, but with no real consistency. In TNG, they started the pattern of keeping the first two digits the same throughout a season, but never developed it further than that.

Some of us novelists and editors have tried to keep the stardates roughly consistent according to the logic of the "1000 units per year" scheme, but the makers of the shows never went to such trouble. All they did was make the stardate in one episode larger than the one in the previous episode, and increase the second digit by one each year, and that was enough for them. It wasn't meant to convey any detailed meaning, just to give the illusion of doing so. Which is the definition of "filler."

 

[Sci]

I would suggest that it's a mistake to pay attention to any part of the stardate after the second digit. All you really ought to pay attention to is the idea that "41xxx=2364." Everything else is just filler.

Well, but the point in the thread is that, more or less, the TV show disagrees with that.

No, that actually is the way the shows dealt with it. They kept the first two digits constant throughout the year and had the remaining digits usually increase from one episode to the next, but with no real attention paid to how much. For instance, the stardate given in "Pen Pals" is at least six weeks into the episode, but it's only 9 units larger than the stardate in the previous episode; while conversely, "Descent Part II" comes only a few days after Part I, but the stardates of the two parts differ by over 43 units.

This is because stardates are meant to be filler, pure and simple. They were invented in the first place specifically to avoid providing any meaningful chronological information to the viewer, because the makers of TOS wanted to be ambiguous about how far in the future it was. They had the stardates generally tend to increase as the series went on, but with no real consistency. In TNG, they started the pattern of keeping the first two digits the same throughout a season, but never developed it further than that.

Some of us novelists and editors have tried to keep the stardates roughly consistent according to the logic of the "1000 units per year" scheme, but the makers of the shows never went to such trouble. All they did was make the stardate in one episode larger than the one in the previous episode, and increase the second digit by one each year, and that was enough for them. It wasn't meant to convey any detailed meaning, just to give the illusion of doing so. Which is the definition of "filler."

Exactly. Trying to take the TV show's stardates and turn them into something coherent is akin to taking the in-jokes that declare Michael Okuda and Gene Roddenberry to be the Enterprise's designers on the dedication plaques to be actual canonical information, or taking every single piece of filler info displayed for 1.2 seconds on the TV screen that you need a DVD player on pause to read to be accurate and definitive. It's bloody stupid. (Memory Alpha, I'm looking at you.)

 

[foravalon]

That's certainly one interpretation.

 

[Timo]

Then again, if an entire thread is dedicated to the timeline question, it does make sense to bring in all evidence initially, admissible or not.

And generally, the stardates do work, even if no thanks go to the writers... Which makes it all the more fun to try and fix the few problem spots.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[captcalhoun]

Well, but the point in the thread is that, more or less, the TV show disagrees with that.

No, that actually is the way the shows dealt with it. They kept the first two digits constant throughout the year and had the remaining digits usually increase from one episode to the next, but with no real attention paid to how much. For instance, the stardate given in "Pen Pals" is at least six weeks into the episode, but it's only 9 units larger than the stardate in the previous episode; while conversely, "Descent Part II" comes only a few days after Part I, but the stardates of the two parts differ by over 43 units.

This is because stardates are meant to be filler, pure and simple. They were invented in the first place specifically to avoid providing any meaningful chronological information to the viewer, because the makers of TOS wanted to be ambiguous about how far in the future it was. They had the stardates generally tend to increase as the series went on, but with no real consistency. In TNG, they started the pattern of keeping the first two digits the same throughout a season, but never developed it further than that.

Some of us novelists and editors have tried to keep the stardates roughly consistent according to the logic of the "1000 units per year" scheme, but the makers of the shows never went to such trouble. All they did was make the stardate in one episode larger than the one in the previous episode, and increase the second digit by one each year, and that was enough for them. It wasn't meant to convey any detailed meaning, just to give the illusion of doing so. Which is the definition of "filler."

Exactly. Trying to take the TV show's stardates and turn them into something coherent is akin to taking the in-jokes that declare Michael Okuda and Gene Roddenberry to be the Enterprise's designers on the dedication plaques to be actual canonical information, or taking every single piece of filler info displayed for 1.2 seconds on the TV screen that you need a DVD player on pause to read to be accurate and definitive. It's bloody stupid. (Memory Alpha, I'm looking at you.)

why just look at MA? there's other sites out there as well that take the 'it's on-screen so it's canon' 'rule' WAY too far...

 

[Turbo]

Then again, if an entire thread is dedicated to the timeline question, it does make sense to bring in all evidence initially, admissible or not.

And generally, the stardates do work, even if no thanks go to the writers... Which makes it all the more fun to try and fix the few problem spots.

Timo Saloniemi

Waitasec - are you saying the writers are the ones who came up with the 41xxx = 2364 convention? Because it was the Star Trek Chronology which did that first, I believe.

 

[Timo]

Uh, somebody came up with the system at some point - and the system was already in place when the first episode of TNG aired. This somebody had figured out that a 41000-range stardate coincided with McCoy being 137 years old, after all. The connection was spelled out even more carefully in the final episode of the first season (again long before the Chronology was written), where a stardate as well as the year 2364 were explicated.

At the very least, the system was in place at the beginning of the second season, where stardates of 42000 range were used to denote the new season and the new year.

So the episode writers, rather than (paid) fan research, would have established the practice originally.

It wasn't just that general practice that I was speaking about, though. It would only be in "Data's Day" that we would get our first clear evidence that the stardate year rolled with the Paramount season, not the calendar year, as the Hindu festival Dinali was established to fall on a specific stardate there. That practice would be something the episode writers apparently followed in general, with no known exceptions, even though obviously with a massive number of episodes where neither practice showed up explicitly. Novel writers and timeliners seem to have gone with the rolls-with-calendar-year practice in general, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Trek]

In filmed Startrek, stardates are fairly consistent in running from mid year to mid year (around may, or when the tv show season ends), dated by dialogue such as First Contact Day in Homestead, the Hindu Festival of Lights in Data's Day (which happens in Oct/Nov), the date in 11.59.

Then why do the novels have it otherwise?

Because the novels, like many other non-cannon sources, make the assumption that stardates run from January to December, which isn't backed up bay any on screen evidence at all.

I would suggest that it's a mistake to pay attention to any part of the stardate after the second digit. All you really ought to pay attention to is the idea that "41xxx=2364." Everything else is just filler.

Well, but the point in the thread is that, more or less, the TV show disagrees with that.

No, that actually is the way the shows dealt with it. They kept the first two digits constant throughout the year and had the remaining digits usually increase from one episode to the next, but with no real attention paid to how much. For instance, the stardate given in "Pen Pals" is at least six weeks into the episode, but it's only 9 units larger than the stardate in the previous episode; while conversely, "Descent Part II" comes only a few days after Part I, but the stardates of the two parts differ by over 43 units.

This is because stardates are meant to be filler, pure and simple. They were invented in the first place specifically to avoid providing any meaningful chronological information to the viewer, because the makers of TOS wanted to be ambiguous about how far in the future it was. They had the stardates generally tend to increase as the series went on, but with no real consistency. In TNG, they started the pattern of keeping the first two digits the same throughout a season, but never developed it further than that.

Some of us novelists and editors have tried to keep the stardates roughly consistent according to the logic of the "1000 units per year" scheme, but the makers of the shows never went to such trouble. All they did was make the stardate in one episode larger than the one in the previous episode, and increase the second digit by one each year, and that was enough for them. It wasn't meant to convey any detailed meaning, just to give the illusion of doing so. Which is the definition of "filler."

While I agree that the time between stardates can vary in length on the show (and the article I posted the link to also says this), the TV shows only supports the idea that 1000 stardate = (approx) 1 year, not 41xxx = 2364, by the real world/datable events it places in episodes. In fact most the dating evidence support Stardates crossing parts of 2 consecutive years.

The real world information that Data gives in "Data's day" has to place the episodes stardates in/around October/November each year. Similarly with the information given in "11:59" and "Homstead", the stardates given in those epsiodes must be around those dates as well. You can't just take one piece of evidence like Picard saying it's 2364 in "The Neutral Zone" and ignore ignore another like Data saying it's the Hindu Festival of Lights in "Data's Day".

 

[Timo]

You can't just take one piece of evidence like Picard saying it's 2364 in "The Neutral Zone" and ignore ignore another like Data saying it's the Hindu Festival of Lights in "Data's Day".

...And those two put together (by using the "rolls with Paramount season" model) work just fine. The only onscreen problem then is that "The Neutral Zone" clashes with the two years mentioned in VOY, since the episode writers would have been receiving advice from a supportive tech specialist who unfortunately happened to work by the "rolls with calendar year" model...

I'd still argue that the four or so cases of "Paramount season" trump the zero cases of "calendar year", even though neither model fully explains the half a dozen instances of a dubious year being mentioned.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sci]

You can't just take one piece of evidence like Picard saying it's 2364 in "The Neutral Zone" and ignore ignore another like Data saying it's the Hindu Festival of Lights in "Data's Day".

...And those two put together (by using the "rolls with Paramount season" model) work just fine. The only onscreen problem then is that "The Neutral Zone" clashes with the two years mentioned in VOY, since the episode writers would have been receiving advice from a supportive tech specialist who unfortunately happened to work by the "rolls with calendar year" model...

I'd still argue that the four or so cases of "Paramount season" trump the zero cases of "calendar year", even though neither model fully explains the half a dozen instances of a dubious year being mentioned.

Timo Saloniemi

You're both forgetting that stardates can be wildly inconsistent in terms of simple chronology, too. More than a few TOS episodes have stardates that are earlier than episodes that aired before them. (The Millennium novel justifies this by saying that because stardates are measured relative to the center of galaxy, they sometimes go backwards depending on where you are, in the same way that the hour of the day can go backwards depending on where you travel on the Earth's surface due to timezones.)

In short: They're filler. Ignore them. They're nonsense. Only pay attention to the first two digits, if that.

 

[Trek]

You can't just take one piece of evidence like Picard saying it's 2364 in "The Neutral Zone" and ignore ignore another like Data saying it's the Hindu Festival of Lights in "Data's Day".

...And those two put together (by using the "rolls with Paramount season" model) work just fine. The only onscreen problem then is that "The Neutral Zone" clashes with the two years mentioned in VOY, since the episode writers would have been receiving advice from a supportive tech specialist who unfortunately happened to work by the "rolls with calendar year" model...

I'd still argue that the four or so cases of "Paramount season" trump the zero cases of "calendar year", even though neither model fully explains the half a dozen instances of a dubious year being mentioned.

Timo Saloniemi

Yeah. That's pretty much my point too. People shouldn't just assume that stardates run from Jan to Dec. There's no evidence of this.

You're both forgetting that stardates can be wildly inconsistent in terms of simple chronology, too. More than a few TOS episodes have stardates that are earlier than episodes that aired before them. (The Millennium novel justifies this by saying that because stardates are measured relative to the center of galaxy, they sometimes go backwards depending on where you are, in the same way that the hour of the day can go backwards depending on where you travel on the Earth's surface due to timezones.)

In short: They're filler. Ignore them. They're nonsense. Only pay attention to the first two digits, if that.

Yes, stardates are wildly in consistant, but that doesn't mean you can assume that 41xxx = 2364, especially when the aspects of stardates that are consistant show otherwise.

 

[Timo]

More than a few TOS episodes have stardates that are earlier than episodes that aired before them.

But that

1) is TOS, not the TNG/VOY/DS9 system discussed here
2) poses no problems, because swapping those episodes into stardate order is perfectly workable.

There are problems with stardate order in early TNG (as aired; the penultimate scripts didn't have those problems), and all of TAS, but that's it - TOS isn't inconvenienced by this. There are problems with using the 1000-SD year on TOS movies and on TAS, but nowhere else. And there are two cases where stardates from separate episodes overlap, both in early TOS, but that's the extent of that sort of trouble.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Waitasec - are you saying the writers are the ones who came up with the 41xxx = 2364 convention? Because it was the Star Trek Chronology which did that first, I believe.

TNG's producers defined the first season as "stardate year" 41xxx, so to speak, and "The Neutral Zone" established it as Gregorian year 2364. So it was the makers of the show (or rather, the writers of "The Neutral Zone") who established that convention. The Chronology simply followed that lead and extrapolated from it.

Because the novels, like many other non-cannon sources, make the assumption that stardates run from January to December, which isn't backed up bay any on screen evidence at all.

It isn't, but it's following the lead of the Chronology, something that the novels are expected by Paramount/CBS licensing to do in the absence of canonical evidence to the contrary.

Besides, by now, there is a fair amount of documentation in the novels that stardate years run from January to December, as seen with the stardates in the Titan novels, The Buried Age, and the like. Although stardate evidence in the novels themsleves is as inconsistent as stardate evidence in the shows, so maybe that isn't rigidly binding.

While I agree that the time between stardates can vary in length on the show (and the article I posted the link to also says this), the TV shows only supports the idea that 1000 stardate = (approx) 1 year, not 41xxx = 2364, by the real world/datable events it places in episodes. In fact most the dating evidence support Stardates crossing parts of 2 consecutive years.

The real world information that Data gives in "Data's day" has to place the episodes stardates in/around October/November each year. Similarly with the information given in "11:59" and "Homstead", the stardates given in those epsiodes must be around those dates as well. You can't just take one piece of evidence like Picard saying it's 2364 in "The Neutral Zone" and ignore ignore another like Data saying it's the Hindu Festival of Lights in "Data's Day".

I am aware of those points and do not dispute them. But again, the precedent comes from the Chronology, and the books are expected to follow that lead even when its conjectures are inconsistent.

In my personal chronology, for a long time I assumed that the first season of TNG began in mid-2363 and ended in mid-'64. But I've now brought my chronology in line with the Okudachron and novel assumptions because as a novelist I need to be consistent with the assumptions used by the book line. (Well, more or less; I tend to have the seasons only approximately run Jan-to-Dec rather than ending exactly on December 31st. And in my chrono, the fourth season of DS9 runs extra-long because it's the only way to fit The 34th Rule in there -- requiring the next couple of seasons to be extra-short to catch up with the DS9-R's assumption that "What You Leave Behind" was in December 2375.) It does create inconsistencies, yes, but what in Trek doesn't have inconsistencies?

 

[Sci]

Yes, stardates are wildly in consistant, but that doesn't mean you can assume that 41xxx = 2364, especially when the aspects of stardates that are consistant show otherwise.

Alright. Let me put it this way:

It was established in "The Neutral Zone" that the year was 2364. It was established in "The Neutral Zone" that the stardate was 41986.0 -- in other words, very late into the "41xxx" cycle. And, wouldn't you know it, "The Neutral Zone" was the first season finale.

In "Q Who?," the stardate is now 42761.3, meaning that it took place around 7/10ths of the way through the stardate year 42xxx. "Q Who?" was the 16th of 22 episodes produced -- in other words, around 70% of the way through the season. And, sure enough, the Borg attacks on the colonies along the Neutral Zone established in "The Neutral Zone" are established as having happened "last year." (Notice how the second digit in a stardate corresponds to the TNG season number?)

So it's pretty firmly established at this point by the relationship between the second and third stardate digits and the placement of an episode in the season's chronology that a season equals one year of story time.

"The 37's," written and produced as part of VOY's first season, takes place on stardate 48975.1 and is established as taking place in 2371.

If you do the math, you'll notice that if 41xxx = 2364, and 42xxx=2365, etc, that 48xxx = 2371. This is rather obviously not a coincidence -- the creators' intent, especially as evidenced in the Chronology, was that a season equalled a year's worth of storytelling and that each season took place in a different year. That's about as far as things should ever be taken, and if they screwed up their own intent with a throwaway reference to an inconsistent date, then we should ignore that just like we ignore references to the Klingon Empire having joined the Federation in TNG Season Two.

 

[foravalon]

You can choose to look at the discrepancies and discount the pattern, or you can choose to look at the pattern and discount the discrepancies.

 

[Timo]

If you do the math, you'll notice that if 41xxx = 2364, and 42xxx=2365, etc, that 48xxx = 2371. This is rather obviously not a coincidence -- the creators' intent, especially as evidenced in the Chronology, was that a season equalled a year's worth of storytelling and that each season took place in a different year.

Actually, you got that wrong. The bold part, I mean.

All this establishes is that episodes taking place towards the end of the 1000-SD cycle on consecutive first-two-digits-cycles are set at different years. It tells squat about "each season taking place in a different year".

With the evidence you give, it could easily be that the year changes in the middle of the 1000-SD cycle, and thus any latter-half-of-cycle stardate would be set at a different year from a latter-half-plus/minus-thousand-SDs stardate - but any first-half-of-cycle date would be in a different year from the corresponding second-half-of-cycle, too. 41800 and 42800: different years. 41300 and 41800: different years. 41800 and 42300: same year.

So what you really need here is an episode that has something like SD 48123 and still claims to be set in 2371. Or an episode that has SD 41123 and claims to be set in 2364. Are there any episodes like that? Unfortunately enough, all the references to Gregorian years in VOY and TNG seem to fall on the tail end of the season...

(But let's emphasize that this only applies on the onscreen Trek universe. If the novels have decided to go the other way, they have obviously accumulated so much proof for that way that the onscreen evidence must yield in this "extended universe".)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Therin of Andor]

Uh, somebody came up with the system at some point - and the system was already in place when the first episode of TNG aired. This somebody had figured out that a 41000-range stardate coincided with McCoy being 137 years old, after all.

But we never knew, from TOS, how old McCoy was then, so there was plenty of leeway.

Early publicity boasted that TNG was "78 years since the time of Kirk and Spock" but, even then, we didn't know if they meant 78 years since TOS began, since TOS ended, or the TOS movie era.

"The Neutral Zone" used a Gregorian calendar year and most dating was possible from then. Then "Sarek" mentioned Sarek's age compared to "Journey to Babel" but even then, was it being expressed in Vulcan years?

 

[P0sitr0nic]

An Early interview I read stated that the 4 was for 24th century, the 1 was season 1, then the next 3 just got bigger as the season went on. The 4 never changed because we were in the 60s and 70s on the 24th century, but the years went on... For a time in Voyager, they never gave a stardate, because 49999 had passed, and they didnt know what to do. They finally did 50504 or something. 50 being the important bit. 10 years from TNG season 1. Didnt mean 25th century, but really, what COULD they do after 49999?

 

[Christopher]

An Early interview I read stated that the 4 was for 24th century, the 1 was season 1, then the next 3 just got bigger as the season went on. The 4 never changed because we were in the 60s and 70s on the 24th century, but the years went on... For a time in Voyager, they never gave a stardate, because 49999 had passed, and they didnt know what to do. They finally did 50504 or something. 50 being the important bit. 10 years from TNG season 1. Didnt mean 25th century, but really, what COULD they do after 49999?

It's a myth that the "4" was meant to mean "24th century" in-universe. Rather, Roddenberry wanted to pick a random couple of numbers to begin the stardate with, and he chose 4 because it reminded him of the 24th-century setting. It's just about where the creator got the idea, not what it's meant to signify in the story. I mean, the creators of DS9 named Quark after the subatomic particle, but that doesn't mean that Quark's mother named him for the English name of a subatomic particle.

And you're wrong about when the first 50xxx stardate came. Such a stardate was given in the very first VGR episode that could possibly have such a stardate, "Basics Part II," the premiere of the third season. Its stardate was 50032.7. Indeed, the following dozen episodes also had stardates, as did all but four of that season's 26 episodes. As for DS9, they used stardates a lot less often, but we nonetheless got a 50xxx stardate in the second episode that could possibly have one, "The Ship," which had a stardate of 50049.3. So there was no period in which they "didn't know what to do" about the stardate.

 

[Timo]

...Of course, there were often situations where they didn't know what to do with a stardate that referred to such an early timepoint that it either a) looked like a TOS stardate, with just four digits or the first digit at zero, or b) went negative. After all, the zero point of the TNG system would have been in 2323 or so already, and many of the characters were either born before that, or had things happen to their parents before that.

So the stardates referring to such early events tend to fall outside all systems: they aren't as low as the TNG system would call for, but they don't naturally flow from the less systematic TOS numbers, either.

Which is too bad for my preferred theory in which stardates have more than five digits, and the heroes just drop some of the first digits for brevity. So the digit before 4 in SD 41367 isn't zero, and thus the zero year of the TNG system isn't 2323. And the digit before the first 1 in SD 1315 isn't zero, either, so the zero year of the TOS system isn't just before Kirk's mission, either. In fact, the two systems could have the same zero year and be nicely in synch! That is, if the writers hadn't copped out on the "in-between" dates of episodes like "Dark Page" and on the later TOS movies.

Timo Saloniemi