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STAR DATES : Page 2
this page by Michael & Denise Okuda in 'ST Chronology' for book details see SOURCES & STANDARD ABBREVIATIONS |
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| Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, said he invented stardates primarily as a means to remind us that the show was set in the future. We thought about trying to derive a formula to convert stardates to our present Gregorian calendar, but we quickly discovered that several different methods have been used to determine stardates over the history of the Star Trek show. It became clear that stardates were never intended to be examined too loosely, and that many errors have crept into the system over the years. Naturally, we did examine them too closely, but at least now you have been warned. |  |
Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek
Much of the first Star Trek series seemed to advance the stardate an average of about 57 units each episode, from 1512 in [TOS: Season 1: The Corbomite Maneuver] to 5928 in [TOS: Season 3: Turnabout Intruder]. Within a given episode, an increase of one unit (i.e. 1312 to 1313) seemed to correspond to about 24 hours. Additionally, there were a few episodes in which stardates apparently went backward from the previous week's show. The real reason for this is that the Star Trek production staff did not always know in which order the television network would air the episodes. Dorothy Fontana also notes that some episodes were filmed out of intended order when writers were late in completing their scripts. She was diplomatic enough to avoid naming any names.
Nevertheless, enough people asked about these apparent "errors", so that Gene Roddenberry came up with an explanation in the book he co-wrote with Stephen E. Whitfield (a pen name of Stephen Poe, whose book on [Star Trek Voyager] is abbreviated on this site to "Poe") 'The Making of Star Trek', which explains that stardates "adjust for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel's speed and space warp capability." Roddenberry added that "the stardate 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 get a meaningful reading." Gene Roddenberry also admitted that he was not quite sure what that explanation meant, and that he was glad that a lot of people seemed to think it made sense.
The Star Trek feature films showed a gradual increase in stardates in each succeeding film. The numbers seem to have been arbitrarily determined, since the apparent value of stardate units seemed to vary widely in the gaps between movies. [Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country] was an even stranger case. That film is of interest to [Star Trek Voyager] fans because many events in [Season 3: #44 Flashback] are set chronologically during events in that film. The film was set about four years after [Star Trek V: The Final Frontier] (stardate 8454). We have seen from [TOS] that a span of three years can correspond to an increase of 4416 units, which could easily have put [Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country] into the five-digit range. A five-digit stardate seemed inappropriate for a Star Trek movie with the original Enterprise crew, since the longer stardates have been the province of [TNG]. For this illogical but a sound enough reason solely for dramatic purposes, the stardate for [Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country] was arbitrarily set at 9523, since this was near the upper limit of four-digit numbers. We have a bit of insight into this selection process as [Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country] co-writer Denny Martin Flinn consulted with ST Chronology co-author Mike Okuda on this matter.
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Yet another method for stardate computation was employed for episodes of [TNG], the [TOS] spin-off shows. Gene Roddenberry made [TNG] stardates five-digit numbers, apparently to underscore the years that theoretically elapsed since [TOS]. He arbitrarily chose 4 as the first digit - supposedly because this show is set in the 24th century, although we expect stardates to cross the 50000 mark at the beginning of the 1996-997 [TNG] season - and he designated the second digit as the number of the show's current season. The last three digits increase unevenly from 000 at the beginning of a season, to 999 at the end. This means that a stardate of 43999 would be the last day of the third season of [TNG]. (Of course, given this setup, the last four digits of a stardate do not contain enough information to account for an entire century.) As with the original series, an increase of a single unit within an episode corresponds to about 24 hours, even though this is inconsistent with a 365-day year. (We rationalise that relativistic time dilation makes up the difference.) [TNG] script co-ordinator Eric Stiliwell served as the show's keeper of stardates during the first five seasons. Every year, Eric issued a memo listing suggested stardate ranges for each upcoming episode. This memo served as a guide to help our writers keep their stardates in order. Television viewers were unintentionally offered a tantalising nugget whenever a full stardate was given close to a poker night because the Enterprise-D crew always played poker on Tuesday nights. In the PERSONAL LOG entry for [Season 2: #40 Tuvix] it is noted that stardate 49655.2 is a Wednesday, as Janeway records her captain's log the same day that Neelix and Tuvok spend time on the planet (which they do in the morning), and in the evening Tuvix cooks dinner for Kes after mentioning that Neelix always cooks Trellan (or Trellian - discussed later in the PERSONAL LOG entry) crepes for her on Wednesdays. In [DS9: Trials And Tribble-lations] stardate 4523.7 is stated to be a Friday, although the [TOS] events referred to, in [TOS: The Trouble With Tribbles], occurred before the rationalisation process. Still, as we noted earlier, stardates were never intended to stand up under close scrutiny.
Several methods of deriving stardates from calendar dates have been developed by Star Trek fans. One of the most popular systems arranges the year, month, and date so that a Gregorian calendar date of July 20, 1969, corresponds to a "stardate" of 6907.20. Although this does not correspond to the stardates used on the show, many fans enjoy using them anyway. A JavaScript available on a number of free copy-and-paste script libraries on the Web offered a means to convert to something similar and, again, was inaccurate.
Another conjectural theory espoused by some fans theorises that stardates relate only to the length of the ship's current voyage. For example, a stardate of 1312, as in [TOS: Season 1: Where No Man Has Gone Before], would indicate that the log entry was made thirteen months, twelve days since the ship left port. By coincidence or design, stardate 5928, given in [TOS: Season 3: Turnabout Intruder], the last episode of [TOS], would correspond under this system to the sixtieth month or the end of the fifth year of the Enterprise's mission.
As indicated on the next page, there is a stardate with a known equivalent, namely stardate (or SD) 51000 = AD 2374.
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