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Stardateedit

From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference

A chronometer, 2266

A stardate is a number which references a specific point in time. In the alternate reality, the digits before the decimal point correspond to the Gregorian calendar year (e.g. stardate 2258.42 was in 2258). Stardates were used in certain cultures as far back as the 2150s, although Earth had not yet adopted the system. In 2154, Degra, a Xindi-Primate, sent a coded message to Enterprise containing a stardate for when Enterprise should rendezvous with Degra's ship. T'Pol was able to calculate that the given stardate was three days away, indicating that Vulcans also had an understanding of stardates at that time. (ENT: "Damage")

When adopted by humans during the next hundred years, stardates began to be used instead of explicit Gregorian dates such as May 4, 2267 in many contexts, although Gregorian dates did not disappear altogether. Stardates did not replace clock time or everyday units for expressing larger timespans, such as days, weeks, months, years, centuries or millennia, and they do not apply retroactively instead of Gregorian or Julian calendars either: for example, the first contact with Vulcans still took place on April 5, 2063, not on a stardate.

In an alternate timeline, the combat date replaced the stardate as the dating system used by Starfleet during their war with the Klingon Empire. This was indicative of the militaristic nature of Starfleet in this timeline. (TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise")

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[edit] Background

Stardates were first portrayed in TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second pilot for the series. Dave Eversole notes that the first draft of the teleplay (dated May 27, 1965) contains no stardates, although there is a reference to "Captain's Log, Report 197." [1] According to an unused teaser reproduced on the website, Kirk mentions "star date 1312.4" in the final revised draft ("July 9, 1965, with further revised pages inserted, dated July 14 & 15, 1965"). [2]

The pilot was written by Samuel A. Peeples, who was interviewed by journalist Joel Engel for Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek. [3] Replying to a newsgroup question on stardates, Engel quoted information from his book:

"For the starship captain's log entry narrations, Roddenberry wanted to devise a futuristic measurement of time reference. He called (Sam) Peeples (whom Roddenberry had contacted early on for help in learning about science fiction, a subject he knew nothing about; it was Peeples who wrote "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the pilot that sold ST). The two men had a few drinks while brainstorming, and soon began chuckling over their imaginative 'stardate' computations. 'We tried to set up a system that would be unidentified unless you knew how we did it,' Peeples says.
"They marked off sections on a pictorial depiction of the known universe and extrapolated how much earth time would elapse when traveling between given points, taking into account that the Enterprise's warp engines would be violating Einstein's theory that nothing could exceed the speed of light. They concluded that the 'time continuum' would therefore vary from place to place, and that earth time may actually be lost in travel. 'So the stardate on Earth would be one thing, but the stardate on Alpha Centauri would be different,' Peeples says. 'We thought this was hilarious, because everyone would say, "How come this date is before that date when this show is after that show?" The answer was because you were in a different sector of the universe.' [4]

Gene Roddenberry provided a very similar explanation to Stephen Edward Poe for his 1968 book The Making of Star Trek:

In the beginning, I invented the term "star date" simply to keep from tying ourselves down to 2265 A.D., or should it be 2312 A.D.? I wanted us well into the future but without arguing approximately which century this or that would have been invented or superseded. When we began making episodes, we would use a star date such as 2317 one week, and then a week later when we made the next episode we would move the star date up to 2942, and so on. Unfortunately, however, the episodes are not aired in the same order in which we filmed them. So we began to get complaints from the viewers, asking, "How come one week the star date is 2891, the next week it's 2337, and then the week after it's 3414?"
In answering these questions, I came up with the statement that "this time system adjusts for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel's speed and space warp capability. It has little relationship to Earth's time as we know it. One hour aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise at different times may equal as little as three Earth hours. The star dates specified in the log entry must be computed against the speed of the vessel, the space warp, and its position within our galaxy, in order to give a meaningful reading." Therefore star date would be one thing at one point in the galaxy and something else again at another point in the galaxy.
I'm not quite sure what I meant by that explanation, but a lot of people have indicated it makes sense. If so, I've been lucky again, and I'd just as soon forget the whole thing before I'm asked any further questions about it.

The TOS series bible likewise did not require writers to keep their stardates consistent with those in other scripts. Any four-digit number with a single decimal place was fine, but the bible did specify that within a particular script, the selected number should increase by one every day, with .5 corresponding to noon. The actual stardates on the show range from 1312.4 ("Where No Man Has Gone Before") to 5943.7 ("All Our Yesterdays"). "Turnabout Intruder", the last filmed episode, has a stardate of 5928.5.

[edit] The Next Generation era

The producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation decided to use stardates with five digits before the decimal point. They chose to begin the stardate with the number 4 because the series was set during the 24th century. The next digit identified the season of TNG (so TNG Season 1 had stardates 41xxx.x, Season 2 had stardates 42xxx.x, and so forth). The remaining digits increased gradually over the course of the season, from xx000.0 to xx999.9. (Star Trek Chronology)

Under this system, 1,000 stardate "units" were equal to approximately one year, since that is the normal timespan between two TV seasons. The first digit therefore couldn't literally stand for the 24th century, since it would change every ten seasons; this was later confirmed onscreen. The writers of the Star Trek Chronology further simplified the system by having a calendar year start at 000 and end at 999, although this does not fit all references in the show, such as a Diwali celebration around stardate 44390, too early in the year according to the simplified system. (TNG: "Data's Day") Stardate 41986.0 was in 2364 according to TNG: "The Neutral Zone", hence the simplified system assumes that stardates 41xxx.x covered the entire year 2364, stardates 42xxx.x the entire year 2365 and so forth.

However, stardates for periods prior to TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint", but not so far back as the time of the Original Series, do not always conform to this method of counting. For example, in TNG: "Dark Page" the stardate for a period 37 years before Stardate 47254.1 is given as 30620.1, which, according to the standard method of counting used after "Encounter at Farpoint", should only be 17 years earlier.

The second digit continued to increase every TV season in other spin-offs as well, even after TNG had ended. Since DS9 premiered during the sixth season of TNG and was set in exactly the same timeframe, stardates on DS9 ranged from 46379.1 to 52861.3. Likewise, the first season of Voyager would've been the eighth season of TNG had it continued, so Voyager stardates ranged from 48315.6 to 54973.4. Star Trek Nemesis, the latest Star Trek story in the 24th century, had a stardate of 56844.9, showing that it took place approximately fifteen years after the first season of TNG.

In addition, the TNG series bible claims that "the digit following the decimal point may be regarded as a day counter", which corresponds to a rate of one stardate unit per day. It is not clear how this can be reconciled with the notion that 1,000 stardate units are equal to one season of the show. If 1,000 stardates equal one season, then one stardate unit should represent approximately 8 hours and 46 minutes. Many episodes confirm the 24-hour stardate unit, however: in TNG: "Time Squared", for example, stardate 42679.5 was six hours in front of stardate 42679.2, indicating that 0.1 stardate unit was equal to two hours.

Although the vast majority of stardates are given with only one digit following the decimal point, the captain's log in TNG: "Code of Honor" is recorded with two digits (41235.25 and 41235.32) and other references have two, three or even four digits, as in TNG: "The Child", where a stardate of 42073.1435 is seen on a viewscreen in the Observation Lounge or in VOY: "Relativity", when Seven of Nine travels back in time from 52861.274 to 49123.5621. Occasionally there are no digits, such as when "today's date" is given as stardate 47988. (TNG: "All Good Things...")

[edit] Alternate reality

Stardates in the alternate reality were developed by Star Trek screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. According to Orci, they "used the system where, for example, 2233.45 or whatever means 23rd century, 33rd year of that century, and the .45 indicates the day of the year out of 365 days." [5] During a Q&A session, Orci restated that a stardate is "the year, as in 2233, with the month and day expressed as a decimal point from .1 to .365 (as in the 365 days of the year)." [6] Orci didn't say whether leap years end at .366, but that would be expected if the digits before the decimal point always correspond to calendar years.

Timespans from the movie confirm the yearly increase: 25 years between stardates 2233 and 2258, another 129 years to stardate 2387 (the date given as the manufacturing origin of the Jellyfish). Furthermore, 2233 is James T. Kirk's birth year as established by the Star Trek Chronology. However, one can only speculate how the decimal part of Captain Robau's "2233-zero-four" fits into the system, since Orci only mentioned .1 as the starting decimal. The deleted scene of Spock's birth shows a similar stardate: 2230.06, where 2230 is Spock's birth year from the Chronology. Even if the zero is a placeholder in both stardates (.04 = .4?, .06 = .6?), it is unclear why only one placeholder would be used for a count that can reach three digits.

[edit] Deviations from production norms

Stardates would occassionally deviate from the prevailing production norm throughout all of the Star Trek incarnations. Examples include:

  • In TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the stardates within the episode progress by 1.4, from 1312.4 to 1313.8, in what could not be more than a few days, yet the birth stardates of Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner and James T. Kirk are given as 1087.7 (onscreen dossier age: 23), 1089.5 (onscreen dossier age: 21) and 1277.1, respectively. Kirk's birth is only 35.3 units before his first captain's log, about one for every year of his life, while the other two dates apparently use this rate as well, even if their values are much lower than Kirk's stardate of birth.
  • In TNG: "Datalore", Riker dropped one of the numbers in his log, stating "Stardate 4124.5".
  • In VOY: "Unimatrix Zero, Part II", set during stardate 54014.4, Tuvok mentions that his date of birth is stardate 38774, but he was born in 2264.
  • VOY: "Homestead" gives a stardate of 54868.6, which would suggest a date sometime in late 2377, but in fact the episode is set on the 315th anniversary of the first contact with Vulcans, which works out to April 5, 2378.

[edit] Apocrypha

In the novel Where Sea Meets Sky, Captain Christopher Pike has to use conversion formulas to convert stardates to the Gregorian Calendar for his friend "Nowan" from the bar "The Captain's Table".

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Millennium novel The War of the Prophets, the stardate system is based on hyperdimensional distance averaging.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Stardate"
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