Stardate

A chronometer, 2266

A stardate is a type of date expressed as a decimal number, e.g. 7412.6. They 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 in many contexts instead of Gregorian calendar dates, such as May 4, 2267. At the time of Richard Robau's murder, the digits to the left of the decimal separator were equal to the Gregorian calendar year; Robau died in 2233 on stardate 2233.04. This method was used in the alternate reality at least through 2258. By 2265 in the prime reality, a complex relationship had been established between stardates and the Gregorian calendar.

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. The following table outlines the progress of stardates over time:

Year	Stardate	Source
2233 (minutes after Nero's arrival)	2233.04	Star Trek
2258 (alternate reality)	2258.42	Star Trek
2264	1024.7	DS9: "Equilibrium"
2265	1312.4	TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before"
mid-2270s	7412.6	Star Trek: The Motion Picture
2284	7130.4	Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2285	8130.3	Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2285	8210.3	Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
2286	8390	Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
2287	8454.1	Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
2293	9521.6	Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
2293	9715.5	Star Trek Generations
2328	30620.1	TNG: "Dark Page"
2346	23859.7	TNG: "Sins of the Father"
2355	40217.3	TNG: "The Battle"
2363	40759.5	Dedication plaque of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D)
2364	41153.7	TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint"
2378, April 5.	54868.6	VOY: "Homestead"
2379	56844.9	Star Trek Nemesis

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")

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.

The Next Generation era

The teleplay of TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint" dated April 13, 1987 contains recognizable stardates ranging from 42353.7 to 42372.5. (Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion CD) This was changed to 41153.7-41174.2 on the air, consistent with the following description in Star Trek: The Next Generation Writer's/Director's Guide of March 23, 1987 (page 13):

A stardate is a five-digit number followed by a decimal point and one more digit. Example: "41254.7." The first two digits of the stardate are always "41." The 4 stands for 24th century, the 1 indicates first season. The additional three leading digits will progress unevenly during the course of the season from 000 to 999. The digit following the decimal point is generally regarded as a day counter.

Under this system, 1,000 stardate units were equal to approximately one year, since that is the normal timespan between two TV seasons. The value of the century digit nine seasons later was clarified as early as TNG: "Future Imperfect", where the imaginary Jean-Luc Riker asks the computer to display his birthday party of stardate 58416, less than sixteen years in the future according to the episode. The relation to the 24th century could only be symbolic. The writers of the Star Trek Chronology further developed 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.

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. However, stardates of events prior to TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint", but not so far back as the time of TOS, do not always conform to this method of counting. For example, in TNG: "Dark Page", the stardate for an event which took place 42 years before 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.

In addition to the overall rate of approximately 1,000 units per year, many episodes confirm the 24-hour stardate unit which was first mentioned in the TOS bible, with midnight at .0 and noon at .5. It is especially noticeable when the time of day is shown next to a stardate fraction, as demonstrated in the table below:

Stardate and time	Fraction converted to h:m:s	Source
42605.57 13:40:23	13:40:48	Donald Varley's log (TNG: "Contagion")
42592.72 17:16	17:16:48	Log from the future Enterprise (TNG: "Time Squared")
44673.9 22:30:59	21:36 to midnight	Captain Chantal Zaheva's log (TNG: "Night Terrors")
40164.7 17:29:46 (19:29, 22:15)	16:48 to 19:12	Logs of the USS Victory (TNG: "Identity Crisis")
44623.9 22:26:09	21:36 to midnight	A video showing Pardek (TNG: "Unification I")
46154.4 10:37:41	09:36 to noon	Riker's clock (TNG: "Schisms")
2823.6 16:23:00	14:24 to 16:48	TOS: "The Galileo Seven" (remastered)

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...")

Star Trek (2009)

Stardates from the latest film were developed by 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] A similar reply was posted on his Twitter account: "star date=standard year, with decimal representing day of year from 1-365." [7]

Orci never said whether leap years end at .366, which would be expected if the digits before the decimal point correspond to Gregorian calendar years, and he didn't explain why stardates 2230.06 and 2233.04 were scripted if .1 is supposed to be the starting decimal. The table below shows stardates from the film.

Stardate	Year	Event	Note
2230.06	2230	Spock's birth.	Deleted scene. The year is from the Star Trek Chronology.
2233.04	2233	Captain Robau's death.	Robau says "2233-zero-four," which according to the script is 2233.04. The year is from the Star Trek Chronology.
2258.42	2258	Shortly after the destruction of Vulcan.
2387	2387	The Jellyfish is commissioned.	The ship's computer gave the new-style stardate. Stardates in the 643xx range are used in the (non-canon) Countdown comic.

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 and Elizabeth Dehner are given as 1087.7 (onscreen dossier age: 23) and 1089.5 (onscreen dossier age: 21), respectively. Stardate 1277.1 on Kirk's gravestone is only 35.3 units before his first captain's log, but it almost certainly wasn't intended to be Kirk's date of birth. Sam Peeples' teleplay of July 8, 1965 describes the gravestone as follows: On it are etched the words "JAMES R. KIRK" and beneath it: "C-1277.1 to 1313.7." Since it is unlikely that Peeples would've used inconsistent stardate units in the same script, he probably intended the "C" to stand for the rank of Captain or command of the Enterprise, both of which would've been fairly recent achievements in Kirk's career.

• 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.

Apocrypha

Franz Joseph stardates

Most of the stardates in Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual are actually calendar dates formatted YYMM.DD. This can be inferred by comparing the dates of first printing (November 1975) and of the 20th anniversary edition (September 1986) with the stated stardates: 7511.01 and 8609.01, respectively. The format became one of the most popular ways of expressing current dates as stardates.

Other references

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.

External links

• Template:NCwiki
• The Stardate FAQ - primarily develops one particular theory of stardates that has gained some currency
• Determining Calendar Dates from Stardates - has calculations and calculators based upon information from the television series' and movies
• Star Trek logs - database of stardates and logs from the Star Trek films and television series