Stardate
Stardate is one of the
dating conventions used in the fictional
Star Trek universe. Other fictional universes may use similar systems, though typically under another name. Stardate was invented by
Star Trek's creators partly as a way to establish the events in the series as taking place far into the future without tying the episodes down to a particular
date. Although the events of the Star Trek universe would soon be pinned down to future dates that are sufficiently specific for most practical purposes, efforts to establish a relationship between calendar dates and stardates have not yet succeeded because the relationship is not simple. The
prequel series,
Star Trek: Enterprise does not use stardates, instead using the
Gregorian calendar for log entries.
Few explanations have seriously tried to delve into the reasoning behind stardates or bothered to explain all the data points. For example, Franz Joseph, the author of
Star Fleet Technical Manual and
Star Trek Blueprints, adopted the convention of writing a Gregorian calendar date in the superficial form of a stardate, so that, for example, "stardate 9802.13" represents February 13, 1998. Aside from the name and appearance, this is clearly unrelated to the stardates used in Star Trek''. As such, most of those explanations are mere creative inventions that give little reason to be universally accepted.
Relationship with time
Stardates generally increase with time, although locally they have been observed to increase with time at different rates, both within particular episodes as well as between. There are several cases where future stardates have a lower number than past stardates even when lower stardates are clearly in the future, not just in an episode aired later. The occassional decrease with time was more prevalent during the TOS era than the TNG era where stardates increased more consistently.
There are different interpretations of these observations. Some believe these observations have a deeper meaning or should be explained by a complex theory, which canon sources do not offer. Others think that they are simply writer's errors in the real world that have no actual reason in the fictional world, just like many other errors observed in the shows.
Evidence of stardate decrease with time
* Lwaxana Troi's diary in "Dark Page" (TNG), recorded in the 2330's, had a stardate of 30620.1. The date of the Khitomer Massacre as observed onscreen in "Sins of the Father", however, was 23859.7. The Khitomer Massacre took place in 2346.
* In "Star Trek III" Spock's death occurred on stardate 8128, yet the previous movie began on stardate 8130.
Rounding
The vast majority of observed log entry stardates is rounded to a single decimal. The decimal is usually omitted in conversations. There are a couple of instances where stardates are given to more than a single decimal.
Usage
Stardates are used by Starfleet personnel and Federation civilians alike. The shows are mostly set within Starfleet, but only small parts of them play in civilian life, so it is not possible to infer from the shows whether stardates are used by civilians regularly or only occasionally.
Relationship to clock time
Stardates do not replace clock time. Clock time is still commonly used and often shown next to a stardate on displays.
Relationship to the Gregorian calendar
Stardates almost always replace explicit Gregorian dates such as July 6, 2367. The Gregorian calendar is still used, however, as evidenced in "Conundrum" (TNG) where crew biographies are given in Gregorian years and a number of VOY episodes. The Gregorian calendar is always used for references to time before the 23rd century. It is clear that in 2150's Gregorian dates still were used in the same context as stardates.
The Gregorian calendar is always used for timespans. References to days, months, and years are clearly Gregorian, as are references to hours, minutes or seconds.
A plausible
retcon, though not fully consistent with
Star Trek canon, is that Stardates are analogous to
Julian dates. In this hypothesis, each stardate corresponds to a length of day, probably not of Earth but of some Federation member planet selected by compromise, such that 1000 stardates is a period of about 2 Terrestrial years (making 1 stardate approximately 17.5 hours). The "2 year = 1000 stardate" hypothesis is consistent with the original intent that ST:TNG began 80 years after ST:TOS, but not with the internal intent that each season of ST:TNG should correspond to one Terrestrial year. Also by this hypothesis, the ST:TOS (which ran from Stardate 1312 to Stardate 5930) had a duration of about 4600 stardates or just over 9 years; however, in second season, there is only 1 episode between Stardate 3620 and Stardate 4040, which would conveniently correspond to a nearly year-long break and suggest that TOS covers both the first and the start of a second five-year mission. It also suggests that the Stardate system was introduced and standardized within the Federation (despite adoption of similar systems by other species) less than three years before the
Enterprise began her first mission in 2262. Like any other attempt to establish rationalized Stardates, there are inconsistencies with this suggestion, and this proposal in no way invalidates the suggestion that duration within a starship is variable compared to the external universe due to relativistic effects. Is does present a Federation-centric, rather than Earth-centric view of Stardates. The Stardate faq referenced below offers other suggestions, some compatible and some not, with this idea.
Any of these suggestions make 0.1 Stardate a period of approximately 1 - 3 hours, a very useful number for record keeping. A minute (based on 17.5 hours per stardate) is just under 0.001 (0.000952) Stardates, and a second would be 0.0000159 stardates.
The Original Series
Gene Roddenberry created stardates as an abstract idea without any thought to actual implementation, choosing to leave the idea up to the imaginations of the viewers.
There is a clear note in the Phase II writer's guide reproduced in the Making of Phase II book instructing the writers to pick any four digits for the stardate! Reports say it was copied from the original series writer's guide.
As a result, little thought was given to the numbers used in stardates for episodes, except that the numbers for the dates generally increased. But so little care was exercised with the dates that sometimes episode stardates actually overlapped. When pressed for an explanation, Roddenberry said:
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 stardates 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.
Roddenberry admitted that he did not really understand this, and would rather forget about the whole thing:
"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 Next Generation
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a slightly more systematic system of stardates was used. They were 5-digit numbers, initially starting with 4 (symbolically to represent the 24th century), and followed by the season number. Within these thousand-unit ranges, sub-ranges were allocated to writers of episodes to use. After the first season, these increased monotonically between episodes. In Deep Space Nine and Voyager the same system was kept, incrementing to 48xxx in what would have been TNG season 8, and wrapping round to 50xxx and beyond in season 10.
In this era each television season is deemed to occupy a year of time in the Star Trek universe. This keeps the fictional universe running at the same rate as the real world, so characters age at the same rate as their actors. Thus, in this system, 1000 stardate units is just about an Earth year. It is also generally assumed that the stardate system is aligned such that a stardate divisible by 1000 is close to the start of a year in the Gregorian calendar.
Within a single episode, TNG writers have most commonly increased stardates at the rate of one unit per Earth day, contradicting the 1000 units per year used on the larger scale. Although closer to a usable system than they were in the original series, stardates remain inconsistent and often arbitrary.For example,
Ron Moore flatly said that stardates do not make sense and shouldn't be examined closely.
*
*
The Stardate FAQ which primarily develops one particular theory of stardates which has gained some currency
*
Determining Calendar Dates From Stardates which has calculations and calculators based upon information from the television series and movies
*
Goofs for Star Trek III, an
IMDb page which lists several observed errors in
Star Trek III, including one error related to stardates, one to Gregorian dates and one to timespans (minutes).
