giffingthingsss
So I always assumed that a stardate referred to measuring time by something galaxy-wide. What exactly that would be, I don’t know. But I thought it was some kind of uniform way of communicating time across worlds that would all obviously have different revolutions and rotations, etc…
But it’s just them saying Earth dates in a way that sounds fancy.
frontier001
The Kelvin films just say their year and a point something. 2259.8 or something. And they’ve done this once in Strange New Worlds just to establish it’s year.
The rest of them? Pretty random. Don’t mean anything.
TNG through Voyager, the second digit is the season. So 43859.4 is TNG season 3. After TNG, it’s wonky but 52849.3 is technically TNG season 12 even though it ended at season 7. They just kept it going with DS9 and Voyager.
Yeah stardates are weird nonsense. They have a lot of calculators out there, but honestly they’re just… Meh.
Traditionally the 24th century Trek, Berman era stuff, each season was a year. Season premiere was January or February of a given year, finale was November or December. It wasn’t strictly kept track of. And I don’t think new trek is keeping with it. I think I read in an interview recently “a season doesn’t have to be a year” about new trek, especially true with 10 episodes.
Yeah stardates were nonsense, they didn’t correspond with anything in TOS and the movie era (except they went progressively higher from 1300s in Where No Man Has Gone Before to the 9500s in Star Trek VI. Also avoided discussing what year we were actually in.
Somewhere between VI and TNG the stardate convention changed. and the TNG one made sense. (even tho, initially, the producers/writers said the 4 was to represent the 24th century lol, that dropped when we hit 10 years).
The TNG as discussed above was also useful to know what season you were in if you caught a random rerun. I always got the impression that Data’s line of “ By your calendar two thousand three hundred sixty four.)” in The Neutral Zone made it seem as stardates were the Official Timekeeping Measure when talking to the revived trio from the 1990s (and not him saying, humans).
DC Comics even had a list of episodes, their corresponding stardates,
and where their own issues, with stardates, fell in the episode order.
Enterprise just eschewed that with Star logs and actual western calendar dates.
It does make me curious in universe when it was adopted (after the formation of the Federation no doubt) and how many iterations it has gone through.
