I'm not sure why 1 said 100 years since the original NX-01 launch while depicting the specific 2401 celebration, even though I do believe Frontier Day was a recurring event. :/
You are one of the few people that have actually been able to explain Rod's crazy system, thank you. I have to think that Stardate was ship mission dating system only. Since the Vulcans and all the other space faring races prior to mankind joining them had to have their own and I can imagine they would have setup an agreed upon system so they could anticipate cargo and passenger ship arrivals at ports for commerce. Yeah, I think we can also imagine they came up with a galactic calendar system prior to Stardate system. Based on quantum time keeping and the atomic decay. Like our atomic clocks. Since the twenty-four hour limit itself is not "logical". On Earth there had been several ancient civilizations different math systems: Maya - used a base 20, Babylon - used a base 60, Egyptians - base 10. So, I can imagine that commerce might not use the Stardate systems.
If anyone has too much time on their hands, here's a project for you. Assume that ALL star dates on All the star trek shows and movies are on One Scale. Collate a list of shows in order by star date and then watch that list in that order. Happy Viewing.
This was all covered years ago in the Star Trek Encyclopedia, I guess people forgot about it. I made a table converting TOS and TNG stardates to the Gregorian calendar about thirty years ago and haven’t had a problem with stardates since.
@@edmundthespiffing2920In most cases they are. Until recently they were made up half the time, had differing numbers of digits depending on the source. Nothing in this video can explain it all. It's all jumbled up between the TV shows and books.
I have an alternate suggestion for why the stardates still seem Earth-centric: they're based on the half-life cycles of an element that is 8.76 hours long. Think of it this way: all those disparate dating systems, lengths of days and years for different worlds means that to have a universal constant as a common reference point would be easiest. Perhaps some element vital for matter/anti-matter reactors or warp travel in general.
I was actually thinking this too! A meter was redefined at some point to be however many millions of orbital-cloud-widths of hydrogen(?) in length, choosing an element that is quite literally universal and decoupling it from any Earth-specific parameter. The "rebooting" of stardates may have been an intent to do the same, the Federation knew enough about the universe and encountered enough alien races by that point to have a pretty good idea of "universal timekeeping elemental candidates", and _just happened_ (for the convenience of both humanity and the writers) to pick something that could easily be converted to a scale of one thousand units "coinciding" with an Earth year. Also, the first Men In Black movie had a throwaway line that a "galactic standard week" is one hour long... and for those that have played Outer Wilds, a day (axial rotation) and a year (orbit of the star) on Timber Hearth (the player's species' home) are measured in _minutes_ by Earth reckoning. So maybe to many of the member species of the Federation that gave input on Stardates 2.0, there was a unit of time of significance that happened to multiply nicely to one thousand units to an Earth year, and so they agreed on the "subdivisions part" being 1,000 units in length, having one decimal place of precision when needed to divide up a "day" further.
A free neutron mean lifetime is 879.6 seconds, or 14 minutes 37 seconds. As this is close to one quarter of a traditional hour, let's call this a quad. 100 quads is 24 hours and 26 minutes. A milliquad is .88 seconds. 36 Kiloquads is 366.5 days. 1 au is .56 Lightquads. Seems like a reasonable basis for a universal decimal time that is trying to approximate Earth units.
3:05 a book i had back in the 90s answered the question, “how fast us warp 10?” With, “just fast enough to get the ship where the plot needs it, when it needs it.”. Or words to that effect.
@@oldylad From what I understand, Warp 9.9 is the maximum possible speed using Warp Engines. However, in The Original Series the actual speed were cubes of the Warp Factor, so Warp Factor 2 is 8 times the Speed of Light, Warp Factor 3 is 27 times the Speed of Light, and so on. In TNG the Warp Factors were to the Fifth Power, so Warp Factor 2 would be 32 times the Speed of Light.
people have long passed the need to smoke pot, its not even mentioned once, they don't even drink real alcohol. Most the time its synthahol....I mean how many people have you seen smoke in star trek? .5? anything special about that part? and they are extremely sexual, but it seems like they have grown passed the need to make jokes about sex and pot..... but the man children of today haven't. Its like you guys are the characters from Idiocracy, laughing at the movie about a bum. Even some of the cool people
I like my headcanon explanation better: dates in Excel kept getting formatted as a number, and they found it easier to use numbers instead of fighting it back to a date.
@reddblackjack It's still a planet. Wannabe academics who never created or did anything in their field renaming things to pump their egos up isn't legitimate and zero new scientific knowledge led to them reclassifying everything. It was completely arbitrary.
*FYI: A "quad" is a quantum actuated dynamo, which is a realworld concept for storing data. Its basically a quantum computers transistor and represents a physical size for the amount of data being stored. "50 giga-quads of data"? Thats 50 billion quantum transistors of data or 500 isolinear chips.*
@d.b.4671 If you've ever looked into quantum computing in the realworld, a "quad" would be a series of Q-bits and the physical space they take up. Modern computers use transistors which represent 1s and 0s, quantum computers use Q-bits which represent 1s, 0s, and 1/0 simultaneously. You can google this you know.
@@JurgenvanGestel-k1b YES, exactly! Quantum bits have the ability to retain information from their previous states, reducing the amount of active memory needed to perform calculations. It's one of the reasons quantum computing would be so dangerous to modern cryptography.
@@blankspace178 - one, I do know what a qubit is; two, I did run a search for "quantum actuated dynamo" before asking for sources and I didn't find anything; three, burden of proof is on the claimant and "google it" is just a rude way of saying "I can't be bothered".
My take on it was that in TOS, the star dates were in “ship’s time” starting at launch for a given mission. At some point 40 years before TNG they settled on a global time system of some sort so that there was consistency everywhere
I've read that theory before and it does indeed check out, albeit most likely unintenionally. The stardate would then be months, days in the month and time of day of the duration of the mission. The stardate for the last TOS episode is 5928.5. That would be the 59th month and the 28th day. Coincidentally, a five year mission (TOS) would have 60 months.
I always assumed the Universal Translator converted Unit of measurement (time, length, etc). This would be an absolute trivial task compared to the translation languages.
After I went into computer science I always presumed it was something very similar to Unix time, just without the context for what the reference start time is. I bet a lot of people here know, but if you don't, Unix time is the basis for all computer clocks so they can stay in sync with each other, and something we always have to deal with in coding if you want to display the time or have, like, date based calculations. It's the number of milliseconds that have passed since Midnight, January 1st, 1970 UTC. The current date and time, according to your computer and mine as I copy paste this, is/was 1725047265.7462 (August 30th, 2024, about 1pm my local time). If you apply that same logic to the number of days, perhaps, rather than seconds then you could just about get something that actually seems weirdly reasonable - if you have a stardate like 47457.1 (Memory Alpha has this as the stardate for TNG: The Pegasus, as good a random thing as anything else I suppose, takes place in 2370), then 47,457.1 (Earth) days equates to 130.02 (Earth) years. If you go back 130 years from that, it equates to a 00000.0 stardate in 2240. Interestingly, and I _KNOW_ this is pure coincidence, Memory Alpha lists 2243 as the year when Richard Daystrom created the first Duotronic Computer, an event really similar to 1970-01-01:00:00:00 as a somewhat arbitrary start date that is VERY important to our world as the 'beginning of time' for modern computing - that would make a good Epoch time if 2240 was when he started development, or just thought 2240 was a rounder epoch time than 2243 or something. It's also around the time when Earthdate Calendars seemed to give way to a Stardate based calendar. If you step away from Earth hours/days/years and go towards some Federation standard hours/days/years, then a stardate might just be something like .
About a decade ago I scanned the NFC data on a train ticket and felt really smart when I almost immediately realized the random humongous number was when the ticket was activated in Unix Time. I don't know why, but I just felt like sharing that.
One explanation for the 24hr day could simply be it's the average day length (or a rounded average) of the home worlds of the charter members of the Federation at the point of the Calendar being established. And this, again, could be argued as a function of the "Goldilocks" zone of a star system that would be conducive to humanoid life.
Also, there doesn't really have to be any consistency across the decimal point; the numbers before the point could be 'average-ish days in a year' with the post-point numbers being 'fraction of an average-ish day.'
Time is relative to both velocity and gravity. Calculating a standardized time is no joke for space travel, and becomes nonsense for star trek. Stardates just need to be thought of as space magic that let's the stories unfold.
Time is constant for all ships normally in Star Trek. The writers got around the whole Time Dilation issues with traveling fast by saying that the Ships Subspace bubble isolates it and prevents time dilation. It works like this: Time dilation due to traveling faster isn't a product of the speed but of the increasing mass as you approach the speed of light. The ships subspace bubble reduces the ships mass in relation to normal space-time, thus no time dilation despite full impulse being 25% light speed. On screen this exact explanation is used in the the opening episodes of DS9 when they move the station. To move it they create a subspace bubble around the station to lower its mass so that the orbital maneuvering thrusters could move it to the worm whole. When the field was unstable the station started to tear itself apart because different parts of the station basically had different masses. The moment it stabilized the station took off like a rocket across the solar system.
@@jacara1981technically it would be ‘star system’, as ‘solar’ is a specific reference to Earth’s star/sun 😉 BTW - thank you for pointing out the giant inconsistency with traveling at impulse! I knew it was supposed to be a fraction of LS, but my dumb brain never put together the time dilation issue.
I'm a massive Star Trek fan, but I've already forgotten this time format after watching the video. I go by the Earth year for whatever the series starts in, and use that to get a rough idea of where it is in the timeline.
Stardate 42069, CMO Crushers’s log; I got totally wasted and tried it on with Mott, the barber. I thought he was Picard. The worst part is, Picard was there. I still don’t know why. I’m gonna have to leave the ship for a season or two.
You have no idea how many times I've wondered about Stardates! Crazy video man!! I love how you keep us grounded in the real, but fill us in on the "in universe" explanations! Thanks again, Rick!!
The Imperial dating system is quite detailed, even having a "check" number that's essentially a margin of error to account for the unreliability of precise dates due to the warp (for example if the check is 8, that means the event could have actually occurred 20 years before or after the recorded date)
@@CollinBuckman did not know that particular factoid, but it feels like it's negated by the nature of imperium bureaucracy and warp buggery. Even with a robust system taking as many variables as possible into account, if your distress call disappears into that void, what's the point?
@@NamelessTitan bro you clicked the same video I did. I have a masters in international political economy, I know more about the world we are in than most do. I just also know more about other ones too. If anything it helps, but it sounds like you have never learned enough about anything to ever see the beauty of the connections between them all.
What I've noticed in "Star Trek: Lower Decks" is that they still use the conventional years in addition to Star Dates. Command Ransom mentions the 2260s as the era of Those Old Scientists (meaning Spock, McCoy, and Scotty on the NCC-1701). One reason for using Star Dates is to provide consistency among all of the planets in the Galaxy, but they can still use local calendars on each planet. Related in Green Lantern was the amount of time a Power Ring would maintain its charge. It was established the the Ring's charge would last 24 earth hours/1 day, and at 24 hours and 1 minute the Ring's charge would die. Later they revised it to indicate how much time the Ring's charge will last in normal use.
9:11 Imagine all the humans having a massive New Year party on that stardate, and the non-human crewmates being very confused as to the significance of that particular year over all others. Then one of them explains that “it’s the confluence of two numbers that represent very crude jokes in ancient human culture; I guess the tradition has lasted much longer than anyone realized…” “Oh, is that why ensign James always says ‘nice’ whenever I say certain numbers?”
Kinda time-related but remember that episode of Enterprise where Archer and Trip are on the prison ship and Trip tells the alien they’ve never had contact with to turn the valve clockwise…how would the alien know how our clocks used to work?
To trip that makes perfect sense , ( I hadn’t even considered that the universal translation would = to what the Alien would know clockwise is turn to your right ~ righty tighty.
It’s a translator, it’s technology. What would the reference be. Neither person knows what the other’s clock looks like or how it functions. If in the Enterprise era UTs could just search the minds of the people talking and know what a clock is, how it works and what the equivalent is then there would never be misunderstandings. It would be more like a telepathic exchange. Like when Troi shows Picard a cup and says a word in her language and Picard guesses a dozen things but they’re all wrong. Troi explains that without a similar cultural reference pointing at a cup of tea and saying one word can lead to a lot of confusion. Hell, I can tell my neighbor to turn something clockwise and he will ask ‘is that left or right.’
Your channel is a must watch companion to the lore of Star Trek, no matter how well versed you consider yourself to be. Thank you for creating this content!
I see it thus: all Earth societies now know that the solar year is 365.2499 days, often rounded to 365.25 days. But there are still societies that maintain alternate versions of the solar calendar (Ethiopia, East Asian, Thai), lunisolar (Hebrew, Hindu), and lunar (Muslim) that are found in the Gregorian calendar that has become the standard, and even that calendar wasn't fully adopted by some societies until decades/centuries after its introduction (Russia didn't switch until 1917). With some exceptions, almost all connected Earth societies use some form of the Gregorian for everyday interaction, and other calendars for parallel or cultural significance. The same can be said for ST's non-Earth Federation members who still maintain local timekeeping for practical parallel use.
Thanks for sharing this. Been a Trekkie for many years. I always liked how in certain episodes of movies they would sometimes (although rare) when a character would actually mention the current earth year like in the ST:Voyager episode in which the crew beam over a Romulan on board through a collapsing, centuries old worm hole that lead to the Alpha Quadrant, only to find out there was a time difference between both ends, The Romulan officer was asked year it was and he stated that it was the earth year 2351 A.D. when Commander Chikotay stated it was actually 2371 A.D. just an example. Thanks again for helping make stardates a bit more sense.
Lower Decks also uses a slightly different calculation. Star Trek's current Science advisor, Erin Macdonald created a new formula for Stardates, but what it is hasn't been made public yet. According to Executive producer Brad Winters, Season 1 Episode 1 is set on January 1 2380, with the stardate given in the episode being 57436.2. The first episode set in 2381 he said was 3.06, which gives a stardate of 58456.2
@@casparhughey5651 Yes it is :) It has star trek in the name, and it's made by the people who own the IP, so it's star trek. The creator of this video even includes it in the timeline at the end.
@@casparhughey5651 Lower Decks is not Star Trek? Man, me and the guys must have been high as a kite because we really thought that the USS Cerritos, Starfleet Registration Number NCC 75567, was a ship under the flag of the United Federation of Planets. You know, like in Star Trek.
I came up with a calendar for my RPG I ran for my friends. I made the presumption that the Star Date system was established during the centennial of the founding of the Foundation. That is, midnight Jan 1, 2261, which would equal 0000. 0. Each whole number would equal 1 24-hour day. So noon on Jan 2, 2261, would be Stardate 0001.5. So by my reckoning, Stardate 1312.4 would be 5 August 2264 around 9 am. That’s my two credits.
If Earth is the Federation capital and Starfleet headquarters, then using its days and years to dictate the Star Date calendar makes some sense from an efficiency perspective. At least the government institutions there won't need to worry about converting all their local times - they're already in-sync with the official system. As for other powers using it, this could just be a convenience thing. There's no need to maintain a unique system and work about calendars for multiple other factions when this one group is maintaining a system that works.
Apparent internal redundancy: If the three digits to the left of the point represent a year divided into 1000 parts, the one digit to the right is one day divided into 10 parts, and a year has 365.25 days, then the two segments can't operate together. For example, xx000 is day 1 at 00:00 (midnight), xx001 is 08:45 (i.e., 0.36 of 24 hours), xx002 is 17:30, and xx003 is ~02:00 the next day. If the two segments operated together, the decimal would indicate 1/10,000 of an Earth-year, or ~52 minutes. Sometimes a crew cites unerringly precise dates ("remember that party on '057 point 8?"), but usually they just use a 24-hour clock. Or, on DS9, a 26-hour clock. Nobody wears a wristwatch, and there are no large clocks around (except for Star Trek VI, or that time Sisko went horologically obsessed), so how do crews know? Do they wear contact lenses (invisible to the audience) that display the time?
Thank you, I always wondered why I could never figure out how start dates work. The simple answer is, they were making it up as they went, then try to shoehorn in a system, while continuing to make it up while they went..
My take on how this is seen by other planets' cultures is by the Universal Translator; not only does it interpret languages but it also converts calendars.
The real problem was that the Eugenics Wars weren't given in Stardates, but in the Earth AD calendar, which were within a human lifetime of TOS first being broadcast. The 1990s were a turbulent time, but I still should have noticed the rise of the Augment dictatorships and WW3.
Ive been watching ST since 1983 and I never bothered to learn Stardates until now, thank you. Kinda like Americans and Metric (working in computers you have to know it)
Like lots of things they came up with in the sixties, we actually know more now. For instance there's no galactic barrier and no energy barrier in the center. So, a galactic year is 225 million years, which a little math Will show that a galactic second is about 7¼ years. If they could do it again, I'm sure a stardate or star time might be based on this ironically a Vulcan has Pon Farr every galactic second. That makes it sound much more frequent. Say for instance the Federation founding happens at a time we call galactic midnight. The NX-01 launched around 11:59 and Kirk's five year mission is around 12:12 and the D launches around 12:24. But it's not very accurate, so star dates might include galactic hundredths of seconds. Nice job getting me to do math for fun!😅
3:00 There is a datatype used mainly in older C programs called the WORD. It's number of bits was variable based on the architecture of the CPU (in those days, there were 5 bit bytes, 6 bit, 8 bit, 10 bit and even 12 bit bytes). A WORD was essentially "one unit of the number of bits in a byte on your architecture", so 8 bits on x86 architecture. There was also the DWORD (Double WORD) of 16 bits and the QWORD (Quad WORD) of 32 bits. From which the term unit of "quad" was derived.
1:25 you say Frontier Day marks the 100 year anniversary of the launch of the NX-01. Itd be the 250th though by Picard season 3. There’s no indication that it’s celebrated each year but no matter what the number 100 is completely out of nowhere, right?
Thanks, I have nothing to do with Star Trek, no idea how the video came to my feet, but I've been wondering since I was a little boy what this mysterious time unit was all about. I never thought I would ever find out. 👍
I've been watching Star Trek since original episodes of TOS were being released. I quickly gave up trying to understand stardates. I got along all these years okay without that understanding. Now I've watched this video and I don't feel like I know any better. I will continue on in happy oblivious ignorance. I wish they had finished Star Trek Enterprise.
I always figured it was some interstellar equivalent of what we use on earth called "universal coordinated time," which is whatever time it is at longitude 0°. Handy for coordination of events across multiple time zones.
Not sure if you mentioned this, but starting with tng, the second digit represents seasons of television from first episode. So in DS9 and voyager the second digit (and eventually the first after 10 years) represent seasons from season 1 of tng. Stardate 43224.1 is season 3 of tng. Stardate 49331.5 would be two years after tng went off the air (in season 7)
The only thing I noticed about stardates was that in TNG, the second digit corresponded to the season of the show. I can't verify this right now due to time constraints, but as I recall, all first-season episodes took place on 41xyz, second-season episodes on 42xyz, all the way to season-seven episodes that took place on 47xyz. As many will likely remember, "All Good Things..." began and ended on the "present" stardate of "47988."
Vulcan Starfleet Officer's personal log: I have not been able to ascertain the reason why so many of my Terran colleagues have been saying "Nice" in reference to the current Stardate 42069.
My head cannon for the in universe reason for star dates is largely psychological. Due to relativistic effects, and temporal distortions caused by the war drive itself, it's highly common for s significant variance to develop between the timeframe of a starship and that of the ground level society of their home world. The automatically calculated star date provided a reference to a constant external timeframe, hence it's use in logs, without constantly reminding a ships crew of the temporal drift in ways which might stress them out regarding lost time.
I was looking this up the other day, I kinda hate how inconsistent it was before DS9 but I get why. The problem is that different online stardate calculators give slightly different results. For example, one I used to test the original implementation gave .5 as being 3pm not 12pm.
I've definitely wondered about star dates and appreciate the recap. Maybe this time I'll remember it. In my own personal head canon, the fact that the second digit flipping over to a new number corresponds to an Earth year is a coincidence. It seems reasonable to me that at the time of the last calendar reform the worlds of the federation at the time might simply take the average of their local years which could very easily end up being pretty close to the value for Earth's year, perhaps only varying by a few minutes. Since we don't follow any particular crew every single day of their lives, and there are definitely some large gaps between episodes any existing discrepancies would be well hidden, especially since they don't ever mark the moment of rollover from one "year" to the next. In a real-world example, the Julian Calendar was off by 11 min and seconds from the actual length of the year and it took almost 1600 years for things to be wrong enough for anyone to get busy calculating anew. Later seasons of Discovery might have discrepancies of a week or more, but that's well within the "margin of error" for the series since each season in that era was only 10 to 13 episodes long and hardly ever happened on Earth.
Stardates get even muddier when we look into the Kelvin Timeline, which I swear uses a system more akin to that used in Wing Commander, with the year and the day of the year. In Star Trek 2009, the first stardate we hear is 2233.04. And we know that the Narada traveled back to 2233. And the reason I bring up Wing Commander is because the Terran Confederation's dating system is Year.Day, so for example first contact with the Kilrathi was on 2629.105, which translates to the 105th day of the year 2629. So yea... stardates are weird. lol
Cool, good job. Now then, I’m off to go work on my Lego Nexus-10 model. It kinda looks like some weird Star Trek shuttle, but with a removable pontoon sled containing the Hyperdrive. It also has a defense turret on top, kinda like something from Star Wars. It’s a cool ship, would you like to see a picture?
very cool, i was always wondering just how exactly this would work, atleast now i know theres no 100% surefire way to decifer it but the understanding still helps, atleast now i can roughly translate the years, which is already more than i was able to do before this ^^ thx "Rick with a thing" 😅
when I was a kid there were at the time 3 versions of stardate. so I decided to create my own using a European calendar. so todays date Sep 20th 2024 would be displayed as 2408.20 (19 and 20 are only used for the first 10 years to show decades) the time is similar 04:27 pm would be written 1627.23 so todays stardate would be 2408.20:1627.23
Any time scale is somewhat arbitrary, you just need a time to start at, and increments to count with. One is as good as another, what matters is that people need to use the same one when they want to talk about time. The Federation having started with Earth and then carrying the calendar with it makes sense.
I now clearly understand how a stardate is fitted, thanks Ric 🖖However and though that system still remains based on maths as you said, I think it is too much of an anthropocentrism as it's anyway taking Earth-related times into account
I've been deep-diving on TOS stardates lately, and here's my take. Putting the TOS episodes into stardate ['SD'] order, we have "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as the earliest, running from SD 1312.4 to 1313.8 (a total of 1.4 SDU ['star date units'], with the alleged 'birth'-date SD 1277.1 inscribed on the tombstone of "JAMES R. KIRK" by Gary Mitchell), and "All Our Yesterdays" as the last, at SD 5943.7 to 5943.9 (a total of 0.2 SDU). "Space Seed" had stardates ranging from SD 3141.9 to 3143.3 (a total of 1.4 SDU). Since it's Kirk's birthday on SD 8130.3 ("The Wrath of Khan"), then SD 1277.1 can't be his 'birth'-date and MUST refer to something else; as it is 35.3 SDU before the 1st stardate mentioned [SD 1312.4], and represents between 25 and 26 times the duration of that episode's events, then with 1,000 SDU equaling 365.2425 days (i.e. one Gregorian Calendar's average year) it amounts to 12 days + 21 hours + 26 minutes before SD 1312.4 . . . which I would suggests represents the time since Kirk became the Captain of the Enterprise, when the 5-Year Mission began. The duration of the 5-Year Mission -- if it, indeed, began on SD 1277.1 -- would have come to an end c. SD 6277.1, and the 1312.4-to-5943.9 stardates fit comfortably between those two bookends, there being about 4 months between the end of "All Our Yesterdays" and the return of the Enterprise to Spacedock. In "The Wrath of Khan" we learn that Carol Marcus recorded her PROJECT GENESIS proposal on SD 7130.4 and Kirk says that the recording was made "a year ago" -- which makes sense if 1,000 SDU = 1 Earth year, since Chekov makes a log entry on the Reliant on SD 8130.4 upon approach to Ceti Alpha V (which he thinks is VI), EXACTLY 1,000 SDU after Carol's recording. The STARDATE cycles upwards from 0000.0 to 9999.9, a total of 10,000 SDU = one stardate 'decade'. When the clock reaches SD 9999.9 it then clicks over like a car's odometer to 0000.0 to begin another stardate decade's worth of time. From the end of "Space Seed" [SD 3143.3] to SD 9999.9 there are 6,856.6 SDU (i.e. 6.8566 years), and adding 8130.4 SDU (i.e. Chekov's log's stardate) gives a total of 14,987 SDU = 14.987 years, which is almost exactly the "15 years" between the TOS episode with Khan and this movie, mentioned by both Khan and Kirk. Note that in "The Search for Spock" Kirk reviews the Engineering security camera footage with Sarek, and the STARDATE number seen is a fuller format than the 4+1 digits used familiarly up until then, being a number with 4+2+2+2 digits, i.e. STARDATE 0000.00.00.00 to 9999.99.99.99. If the 'year' is a Gregorian Calendar's average year of 365.2425 days, then each STARDATE number in each given decade represents 31,556,952 x 10 = 315,569,520 seconds' worth of Time, with the right-most digit being one-billionth of a year = 0.031556952 seconds, just over 31 and a half milliseconds. Stardates were never mentioned in "The Cage," which suggests that the 1st stardate 'decade' began after those events at Talos IV. I like to imagine that Starfleet began the 1st stardate decade soon after that adventure, and that TOS takes place in the 2nd stardate decade. But when do they begin? In STAR TREK CHRONOLOGY they state that the 5+1 TNG-era stardates (i.e. 00000.0 to 99999.9) have their Epoch in 2323 CE. Before that 'epoch' they must have had a series of seven stardate 'decades' beginning with SD 0000.0 sometime in the year 2253 CE ... the 2nd 'decade' starting in 2263 CE ... etc. But WHEN in the Earth year 2253 CE would the system have begun? At first I thought it ought to begin at Midnight (00:00:00 UT) when 1 January 2253 begins . . . but there's a problem. In the TOS episode "Charlie X" we learn that it's about to be -- or even IS -- Thanksgiving Day, and between the two stardates 1533.6 and 1535.8 (a span of 2.2 SDU, with there being 2.737907007 SDU per day, i.e. 1000/365.2425 SDU/day) Charlie magically replaced the meat loaf in the Galley with "real turkeys." Now, if Thanksgiving Day began sometime during that 2.2 SDU span of time, and if there are 1,000 SDU per year, then SD 1534.7 -- the midpoint of the two stated stardates -- must represent the Earth date 24 November 2264, just over a year and a half since that 2nd stardate 'decade' began. If we add the 10,000 SDU representing the 1st stardate 'decade' to SD 1534.7 we get a total of 11,534.7 SDU or 11.5347 years : x 365.2425 = 4,212.962665 days since the day in 2253 CE when the STARDATE system was begun. From 2253 May 14 through 2264 November 23 there are 4,212 days. This leaves a part of the 0.962665 days left over (i.e. 23 hours + 06 minutes + 14.256 seconds) to be part of 24 November 2264 (i.e. Thanksgiving Day, the 4th Thursday in that month), when Charlie magically changes meat loaf into turkeys, and part of the rest to indicate a time-of-day somewhen on the date 13 May 2253 CE. Thus, it was sometime on that date -- May 13, 2253 CE -- when the STARDATE system began to be used. [NOTE: Part 2 follows . . .]
Here's Part 2 . . . "The Menagerie" begins on SD 3013.1 and Spock mentions that the Talos IV incident happened "13 years ago" -- and that he had served with Captain Pike for "11 years, 4 months, and 5 days." Assuming he began to serve under Captain Kirk on SD 1277.1 -- when I deduce that their 5-Year Mission began -- then that would have been 1,736 SDU with Kirk (i.e. 3013.1 minus 1277.1) or 1.736 years with Kirk, preceded by 11 years + 4 months + 5 days with Pike. If SD 1534.7 (see above) represents Thanksgiving Day's approximate beginning -- i.e. 24 November 2264 CE -- then 1277.1 would be 257.6 SDU earlier = 0.2576 years = 94 days + 2 hours 4 minutes 30.8352 seconds, sometime on-or-about the Gregorian Date 21 August 2264 for the 5-Year Mission to have begun. Going back 11 years 4 months and 5 days from 21 August 2264 gets us back to 2253 April 16 for when Spock began to serve on the Enterprise under Captain Pike. By my math, the Talos IV incident had to have happened before 13 May 2253 (when the STARDATE system began), some 27 days after Spock began serving under Pike. "The Menagerie" takes place about 1,478.4 SDU = 1.4784 years = about 540 days after the start of Thanksgiving Day (24 November 2264), i.e. on 17 May 2266. The adventure at Talos IV had to have been sometime between 16 April and 14 May of 2253, so when Spock states that the Talos IV events the tribunal sees on the viewscreen happened "13 years ago" he's being just about as exact as can be. Aside from an occasional continuity error -- such as overlapping stardates ("The Corbomite Maneuver" spans SD 1512.2-to-1514.1, but "The Man Trap" spans SD 1513.1-to-1513.8 . . . oops ... and "Miri" spans SD 2713.5-to-2717.3, but "Dagger of the Mind" spans SD 2715.1-to-2715.2 . . . oops again) -- my system works just fine . . . except that the TAS episodes can't fit into the system, and the stardates for STTMP are much too early: Captain Decker tells Kirk sometime around SD 7410.2 that he hasn't logged a single 'star-hour' in over 2 and a half years, yet the 5-Year Mission had to have lasted at least until SD 5943.9 (the final stardate stated at the end of "All Our Yesterdays"), and 2.5 years would be equivalent to 2,500 SDU. STTMP should have a stardate around 5944 + 2500 = 8444 at the very least, or even 6277.1 + 2500 = 8777.1 if they returned exactly 5,000 SDU after the Mission began. The reason the stardate for STTMP doesn't fit in, of course, is that they didn't 'canonize' the 1,000 SDU = 1 year system until they made "The Wrath of Khan" (see above). Thus, if it were up to me, I'd re-date the 1st film to SD 8800 or so, that being in the 2nd stardate 'decade' since 2253 May 13, the TOS-era decade from 2263-to-2273. The films "The Wrath of Khan" through "The Final Frontier" would be in the 3rd stardate 'decade' (from 2273 to 2283), and "The Undiscovered Country" is near the end of the 4th stardate 'decade' (from 2283 to 2293). The beginning scenes of "Generations" take place early in the 5th stardate 'decade', on SD 0111.5 (i.e. 0.1115 years into that decade (i.e. 9.8885 years before that 5th stardate decade ended), and 29.8885 years before the start of the TNG-era stardate century of 2323 to 2423. The latter part of "Generations" -- said to be "78 years later" -- ends on SD 48605.1 (i.e. 48.6051 years since a mid-May 2323 starting date : 29.8885 + 48.6051 = 78.4936 years . . . i.e. almost exactly 78 and a half years since Kirk was caught up in the Nexus. Since it was Kirk's birthday on SD 8130.3 (i.e. 28.1303 years = 10,274.3811 days since the STARDATE epoch of 13 May 2253), then it had to have been his birthday on 2281 June 29. Since he was said to have been 34 years old in "The Deadly Years" (SD 3478.2 to 3479.4), having turned 34 circa SD 3130.3, then it had to have been his 49th birthday in the opening scenes of "The Wrath of Khan" -- his actual birthdate thus being June 29, 2232. The book STAR TREK CHRONOLOGY has Kirk's birthdate as March 22, 2233 . . . but their entry for the TOS episode "Charlie X" makes no mention of the fact that it took place partly on Thanksgiving Day (they have this episode taking place in 2266, whereas my system confidently places it on the Thanksgiving Day of 24 November 2264, just over a year and a half (circa SD 1534.7 = 1.5347 years) after that stardate decade began in mid-May of 2263. You'd think that a book attempting to specialize in CHRONOLOGY in the STAR TREK universe would've picked up on that Thanksgiving Day event in "Charlie X" . . . My STARDATE system makes sense of all the TOS-era information, fudging over those few overlapping stardates early on (mentioned above), and unfortunately discounting the stardate for the 1st film and the TAS episodes. If it were up to me, TAS and STTMP would be re-dated, so that TAS covers the 4-month period between the end of "All Our Yesterdays" and SD 6277.1 (my proposed end of the Mission), and STTMP to c. SD 8800 (i.e. "more than 2 and a half years" since the Mission ended c. SD 6277.1). The stardate information in the Kelvin Universe, of course, doesn't fit at ALL, and they've been all over the place in the more recent Post-VOYAGER series (i.e. DIS, SNW, etc.). It's too bad the Okudas (et al.) weren't as on-the-ball with the STARDATE system from the get-go, and that whoever's running the current Trek shows didn't seek to follow the precedents set from "Wrath of Khan" onwards.
@@patricktilton5377 Decent work. I generally try to keep dates as close to the official Chronology as possible, usually. TMP can still be in late 2273. TWOK still in early 2285, etc. But I actually do have some idea of the span from TWOK to TUC. If TWOK is in March 22nd 2285, for it's start date... then that is 2285.22. And The Undiscovered Country may begin in very early 2293 - with a possible two month gap, however. But if we assume it was seven years and ten months between those films... Then we get about 178.3 stardates per year, from 2285.22 to 2293.05. Roughly. That's a lot less than in TOS however (that averages 900-1000 stardates a year)
I've always remembered that the star dates were very similar to what we use right now called Julian date which is year day. ie 24243 is 24 Aug 2024. When they first went into space every one has there own Verizon of a star date according to the region that they were in and coincidentally they all must have agreed to adopt a standard stardate
🖖😎👍Very cool and very nicely greatly fabulously well done and very nicely well informatively explained and executed in every detail way shape and format provided on "How To Read A Stardate", A job very nicely wonderfully well done indeed Sir!👌.
We need a follow-up video linking Einstein’s theory of relativity with stardates. Those 3 digits could be explained by relativity, as the concept of simultaneity in time between two distant locations does not exist, it depends on the relative speed of observers at those locations. Something could occur before an event when observed from Earth, but could also occur after the same event when witnessed from a starship near Vulcan.
In my imagination I figured stardates were a way to adapt to time dilation from travels at impulse speed, so that the whole Federation had a consistent time measurement
Also there's the suggestion that warp drive doesn't entirely eliminate temporal effects of FTL travel. So a stardate system is to easily compensate for minor differences in experienced time.. between a ship at warp and the outside universe. Which thanks to warp technology are on the order of hours & days rather that years & century's..
Years ago I created my own stardate system. I designed it so that the first digit would match up with the 24th century stardates. I started in 1999. December 31, 1999 would be 9912.31. When the new century began I made the first number the century. Of course this means that my system won't match the TOS system in the 23rd century but I'm ok with that. January 1, 2000 = 10001.01 December 31, 2000 = 10012.31 October 21, 2015 = 11510.21 August 30, 2024 = 12408.30 May 11, 2256 = 35605.11
My Star Trek Encyclopedia explained the TNG stardates this way: 4 was to represent 24th Century, 2nd digit is the TNG season the episode takes place, and the last three digits is a rough measure of how far into the season the episode takes place.
I really enjoyed this video. I’ve seen other videos on Stardates including - I think on this one. But, this video was really good. I think can pretty much understand and translate a Stardate into a date on the Gregorian calendar after watching this video. I’ve really enjoyed your lore videos of the last two months especially the ones on the Jem’Hadar fighter and the Breen interceptor. I didn’t really care for the Romulan or Klingon ones although I did like the one on Diderex. I’m going to watch the Cardassian ones next, but I probably won’t like it because Cardassian technology is inferior compared to the other Alpha and Gamma powers. I think it would be interesting if you did some on the Delta Quadrant powers like the Voth’s City Ship and some of the others that Voyager had to encounter. I think you did one on the Krenim time ship and the Borg cubes and spheres. Maybe do one on Species 8472’s bioship or one on the ships in the Devore Imperium. Voyager had to deal with a lot of hostile powers so there’s plenty to cover.
I've recently developed a new head canon that the star date system is connected to the Sagitarius A Black Hole in the centre of our galaxy, using the rotation of a specific star around it as an official counter with the '3 random digits' as a breakdown down of the days throughout a year of that orbit. so stardate 48108.3 would be the 48th rotation of the star around Sagitarious A and the 108 being a 1/1000 breakdown of that orbit, with a decimal point to denote a more specific hour like period.
I think the concept of a stardate being a standard date/time system for any federation member species makes more sense than the actual implementation by the show, and i just view that as an artifact of an unestablished standard that never got concepted out far enough.
If I'm not misunderstanding your explanation, you are mixing 2 non compatible approaches here. If the decimal part of the Stardate is meant to be the part of the day (24h based, as you explained first) Then the following digits would be days, meaning the "year"-ones-digit would be 1000 days, making it 2.74 years, followed by the next digit, making that one 27.4 years (instead of 10 years). If the "year"-ones-digit is the one earth centric, then you'd have 8 hours 45 minutes and 36 seconds in a "day", making the decimal part of the date only 52 minutes and 33.6 seconds per 0.1 stardate. So in the unlikely event, that xxxxx.0 corresponds to 00:00 on earth, the .1 would be 00:52:33.6, .2 would be 01:45:07.2 and the next .0 would be 08:45:36
And this channel has stated many times it's about giving in universe answers while also discussing real world applications. Relax. It's all in good fun. (Fun is that thing we aren't legally allowed to have according to most fandoms)
That may be, but during the TNG era, those dates were clearly more structured. Heck, the DC comics had entire timelines consisting of TV episodes, books and indeed comic issues. Stardates aren't perfect, but they sure help give some sense of when something takes places in relation to other entries in the franchise.
Honestly, if they wanted an easy and convinient calendar they could just have adapted the UNIX Epoch. 172.528 being thereabouts a stardate for today and ~1356.949 being the stardate for January 2400. It's the easiest way to store time and near universal when dealing with computers.
I like that the Federation uses mathematics to chart time while non-fed worlds use their own homeworld cultures. It separates them and shows their differences. Especially Klingons and Romulans, as the worlds they "integrate" into their own, they would likely force those worlds to observe their calendar, regardless of planetary conditions.
Remember when a Stardate in TNG was 1000 days per year? That's why Alexander was 2 in season 3 of TNG. It wasn't until season 5 or 6 that they went back to regular years. They now have Stardate calculators online.
Not all cultures needed to use the Earth dating system. There just had to be a viable conversion system so that a computer could instantly redefine the time to fit each other's culture. The simplest way to do this is to define a second which I believe is currently defined using the cesium-133 atom.
My understanding is that in TNG was the stardate used consistent. TNG S1 the SD was 41*** for the year 2364. And this way 1000 SD unit was a year. ST VIII was in 50*** and in 2373. This was used to the end of VOY.
I'm not sure you're right on this. I think Stadates are akin to Julian dates: Number of days since January 1st, 1901. In an excel file, that is how its figured. So it would need a standard "day," but years become irrelevant. Stardate 47988 for the final episode of TNG ~2370 Current calendar, would put the date of the beginning of this calendar use around 2239, or Stardate 00001 as it were. You can apply this to your own existence as well. For example, I'm a little over 45 1/2 years old. But I'm 16667 days old. I always figured, (Post TOS anyway) that it was a Julian Date back to the founding of Starfleet, the Federation or some other significant event.
I'm not sure why 1 said 100 years since the original NX-01 launch while depicting the specific 2401 celebration, even though I do believe Frontier Day was a recurring event. :/
You are one of the few people that have actually been able to explain Rod's crazy system, thank you. I have to think that Stardate was ship mission dating system only. Since the Vulcans and all the other space faring races prior to mankind joining them had to have their own and I can imagine they would have setup an agreed upon system so they could anticipate cargo and passenger ship arrivals at ports for commerce. Yeah, I think we can also imagine they came up with a galactic calendar system prior to Stardate system. Based on quantum time keeping and the atomic decay. Like our atomic clocks. Since the twenty-four hour limit itself is not "logical". On Earth there had been several ancient civilizations different math systems: Maya - used a base 20, Babylon - used a base 60, Egyptians - base 10. So, I can imagine that commerce might not use the Stardate systems.
If anyone has too much time on their hands, here's a project for you. Assume that ALL star dates on All the star trek shows and movies are on One Scale. Collate a list of shows in order by star date and then watch that list in that order. Happy Viewing.
This was all covered years ago in the Star Trek Encyclopedia, I guess people forgot about it.
I made a table converting TOS and TNG stardates to the Gregorian calendar about thirty years ago and haven’t had a problem with stardates since.
I've been a Star Trek fan for literally decades, and did not know this. Thank you Sir!
I just assumed they were random numbers
I also have been watching for decades and now understand they made a new calendar to confuse me more.
Haha, me too!
And I still don't 😆
@@edmundthespiffing2920In most cases they are. Until recently they were made up half the time, had differing numbers of digits depending on the source. Nothing in this video can explain it all. It's all jumbled up between the TV shows and books.
I have an alternate suggestion for why the stardates still seem Earth-centric: they're based on the half-life cycles of an element that is 8.76 hours long.
Think of it this way: all those disparate dating systems, lengths of days and years for different worlds means that to have a universal constant as a common reference point would be easiest. Perhaps some element vital for matter/anti-matter reactors or warp travel in general.
Dilithium?
I was actually thinking this too! A meter was redefined at some point to be however many millions of orbital-cloud-widths of hydrogen(?) in length, choosing an element that is quite literally universal and decoupling it from any Earth-specific parameter. The "rebooting" of stardates may have been an intent to do the same, the Federation knew enough about the universe and encountered enough alien races by that point to have a pretty good idea of "universal timekeeping elemental candidates", and _just happened_ (for the convenience of both humanity and the writers) to pick something that could easily be converted to a scale of one thousand units "coinciding" with an Earth year.
Also, the first Men In Black movie had a throwaway line that a "galactic standard week" is one hour long... and for those that have played Outer Wilds, a day (axial rotation) and a year (orbit of the star) on Timber Hearth (the player's species' home) are measured in _minutes_ by Earth reckoning. So maybe to many of the member species of the Federation that gave input on Stardates 2.0, there was a unit of time of significance that happened to multiply nicely to one thousand units to an Earth year, and so they agreed on the "subdivisions part" being 1,000 units in length, having one decimal place of precision when needed to divide up a "day" further.
A free neutron mean lifetime is 879.6 seconds, or 14 minutes 37 seconds. As this is close to one quarter of a traditional hour, let's call this a quad. 100 quads is 24 hours and 26 minutes. A milliquad is .88 seconds. 36 Kiloquads is 366.5 days. 1 au is .56 Lightquads. Seems like a reasonable basis for a universal decimal time that is trying to approximate Earth units.
@@mojojoko Perhaps, but in Star Trek a quad is a measure of data, not time.
@@OmegaReaverparsecs
I never even bothered trying to understand Star dates. So thanks for helping me!
It's no help. Until only recently they were all essentially made up numbers, no rhyme or reason.
@bigguy7353 that's why I never bothered. I haven't even watch the full vid yet XD just assume and say thanks
The spoken Stardates and the closed captions often differ as well.
3:05 a book i had back in the 90s answered the question, “how fast us warp 10?” With, “just fast enough to get the ship where the plot needs it, when it needs it.”. Or words to that effect.
Tell that to Tom Paris. 😂
Warp 10 (though this is inconsistent) is like teleportation
@@oldylad From what I understand, Warp 9.9 is the maximum possible speed using Warp Engines. However, in The Original Series the actual speed were cubes of the Warp Factor, so Warp Factor 2 is 8 times the Speed of Light, Warp Factor 3 is 27 times the Speed of Light, and so on. In TNG the Warp Factors were to the Fifth Power, so Warp Factor 2 would be 32 times the Speed of Light.
Stardate 42069.5 feels like it should be a holiday on Risa.
Gonna pull out my horga’hn for that one
Half(.5) a 69 sounds lonely….
We need to perform a risky time travel manoeuvre for this joke to be funny again
people have long passed the need to smoke pot, its not even mentioned once, they don't even drink real alcohol. Most the time its synthahol....I mean how many people have you seen smoke in star trek? .5? anything special about that part?
and they are extremely sexual, but it seems like they have grown passed the need to make jokes about sex and pot..... but the man children of today haven't. Its like you guys are the characters from Idiocracy, laughing at the movie about a bum. Even some of the cool people
Everyday is a holiday on Risa.
I like my headcanon explanation better: dates in Excel kept getting formatted as a number, and they found it easier to use numbers instead of fighting it back to a date.
😂😂😂😂😂😂 Excel is undefeated into the 25th century.
Since they apparently still use SQL into the 23rd century, this actually tracks.
Surf Wisely.
Today’s the day folks august 30th 2024 let’s go party in the sanctuary district’s downtown
Oh yeah. I just saw "Past Tense" this morning too. On Pluto. Pluto TV, not the former planet.
@reddblackjack It's still a planet. Wannabe academics who never created or did anything in their field renaming things to pump their egos up isn't legitimate and zero new scientific knowledge led to them reclassifying everything. It was completely arbitrary.
What event in Star Trek exactly i don’t remember
@@acescionti711 - the Bell Riots.
Let’s ring the bell. ! Get here and show me your ID. 😅
*FYI: A "quad" is a quantum actuated dynamo, which is a realworld concept for storing data. Its basically a quantum computers transistor and represents a physical size for the amount of data being stored. "50 giga-quads of data"? Thats 50 billion quantum transistors of data or 500 isolinear chips.*
Sources?
@d.b.4671 If you've ever looked into quantum computing in the realworld, a "quad" would be a series of Q-bits and the physical space they take up. Modern computers use transistors which represent 1s and 0s, quantum computers use Q-bits which represent 1s, 0s, and 1/0 simultaneously. You can google this you know.
@@JurgenvanGestel-k1b YES, exactly! Quantum bits have the ability to retain information from their previous states, reducing the amount of active memory needed to perform calculations. It's one of the reasons quantum computing would be so dangerous to modern cryptography.
@@blankspace178 - one, I do know what a qubit is; two, I did run a search for "quantum actuated dynamo" before asking for sources and I didn't find anything; three, burden of proof is on the claimant and "google it" is just a rude way of saying "I can't be bothered".
Why does Google provide no results for "quantum actuated dynamo"?
My take on it was that in TOS, the star dates were in “ship’s time” starting at launch for a given mission. At some point 40 years before TNG they settled on a global time system of some sort so that there was consistency everywhere
I've read that theory before and it does indeed check out, albeit most likely unintenionally. The stardate would then be months, days in the month and time of day of the duration of the mission.
The stardate for the last TOS episode is 5928.5. That would be the 59th month and the 28th day. Coincidentally, a five year mission (TOS) would have 60 months.
I always assumed the Universal Translator converted Unit of measurement (time, length, etc). This would be an absolute trivial task compared to the translation languages.
After I went into computer science I always presumed it was something very similar to Unix time, just without the context for what the reference start time is. I bet a lot of people here know, but if you don't, Unix time is the basis for all computer clocks so they can stay in sync with each other, and something we always have to deal with in coding if you want to display the time or have, like, date based calculations. It's the number of milliseconds that have passed since Midnight, January 1st, 1970 UTC. The current date and time, according to your computer and mine as I copy paste this, is/was 1725047265.7462 (August 30th, 2024, about 1pm my local time). If you apply that same logic to the number of days, perhaps, rather than seconds then you could just about get something that actually seems weirdly reasonable - if you have a stardate like 47457.1 (Memory Alpha has this as the stardate for TNG: The Pegasus, as good a random thing as anything else I suppose, takes place in 2370), then 47,457.1 (Earth) days equates to 130.02 (Earth) years. If you go back 130 years from that, it equates to a 00000.0 stardate in 2240. Interestingly, and I _KNOW_ this is pure coincidence, Memory Alpha lists 2243 as the year when Richard Daystrom created the first Duotronic Computer, an event really similar to 1970-01-01:00:00:00 as a somewhat arbitrary start date that is VERY important to our world as the 'beginning of time' for modern computing - that would make a good Epoch time if 2240 was when he started development, or just thought 2240 was a rounder epoch time than 2243 or something. It's also around the time when Earthdate Calendars seemed to give way to a Stardate based calendar. If you step away from Earth hours/days/years and go towards some Federation standard hours/days/years, then a stardate might just be something like .
Brilliant!
About a decade ago I scanned the NFC data on a train ticket and felt really smart when I almost immediately realized the random humongous number was when the ticket was activated in Unix Time. I don't know why, but I just felt like sharing that.
Actually a super interesting thing I didn't know, explained well. Thanks man!
Finally, a video that gets to tell me how stardates work
One explanation for the 24hr day could simply be it's the average day length (or a rounded average) of the home worlds of the charter members of the Federation at the point of the Calendar being established. And this, again, could be argued as a function of the "Goldilocks" zone of a star system that would be conducive to humanoid life.
Also, there doesn't really have to be any consistency across the decimal point; the numbers before the point could be 'average-ish days in a year' with the post-point numbers being 'fraction of an average-ish day.'
Essentially you have decimalised time based on some standard day counting up from a relevant Federation event.
Time is relative to both velocity and gravity.
Calculating a standardized time is no joke for space travel, and becomes nonsense for star trek.
Stardates just need to be thought of as space magic that let's the stories unfold.
Time is constant for all ships normally in Star Trek. The writers got around the whole Time Dilation issues with traveling fast by saying that the Ships Subspace bubble isolates it and prevents time dilation.
It works like this:
Time dilation due to traveling faster isn't a product of the speed but of the increasing mass as you approach the speed of light.
The ships subspace bubble reduces the ships mass in relation to normal space-time, thus no time dilation despite full impulse being 25% light speed.
On screen this exact explanation is used in the the opening episodes of DS9 when they move the station. To move it they create a subspace bubble around the station to lower its mass so that the orbital maneuvering thrusters could move it to the worm whole. When the field was unstable the station started to tear itself apart because different parts of the station basically had different masses. The moment it stabilized the station took off like a rocket across the solar system.
@@jacara1981technically it would be ‘star system’, as ‘solar’ is a specific reference to Earth’s star/sun 😉
BTW - thank you for pointing out the giant inconsistency with traveling at impulse! I knew it was supposed to be a fraction of LS, but my dumb brain never put together the time dilation issue.
I'm a massive Star Trek fan, but I've already forgotten this time format after watching the video. I go by the Earth year for whatever the series starts in, and use that to get a rough idea of where it is in the timeline.
Stardate 42069, CMO Crushers’s log; I got totally wasted and tried it on with Mott, the barber. I thought he was Picard. The worst part is, Picard was there. I still don’t know why. I’m gonna have to leave the ship for a season or two.
I'd say it was a hairy situation, but that would be a bald-faced lie.
Nice 🤣🤣🤣
You have no idea how many times I've wondered about Stardates! Crazy video man!! I love how you keep us grounded in the real, but fill us in on the "in universe" explanations! Thanks again, Rick!!
It's insane that Warhammer 40k has more consistent chronology and timekeeping than Star Trek.
The Imperial dating system is quite detailed, even having a "check" number that's essentially a margin of error to account for the unreliability of precise dates due to the warp (for example if the check is 8, that means the event could have actually occurred 20 years before or after the recorded date)
@@CollinBuckman did not know that particular factoid, but it feels like it's negated by the nature of imperium bureaucracy and warp buggery.
Even with a robust system taking as many variables as possible into account, if your distress call disappears into that void, what's the point?
@@blackc1479 because 950/1000 didn’t
It’s insane that you care that much about fiction instead of putting your energy into the real world.
@@NamelessTitan bro you clicked the same video I did. I have a masters in international political economy, I know more about the world we are in than most do. I just also know more about other ones too. If anything it helps, but it sounds like you have never learned enough about anything to ever see the beauty of the connections between them all.
What I've noticed in "Star Trek: Lower Decks" is that they still use the conventional years in addition to Star Dates. Command Ransom mentions the 2260s as the era of Those Old Scientists (meaning Spock, McCoy, and Scotty on the NCC-1701). One reason for using Star Dates is to provide consistency among all of the planets in the Galaxy, but they can still use local calendars on each planet.
Related in Green Lantern was the amount of time a Power Ring would maintain its charge. It was established the the Ring's charge would last 24 earth hours/1 day, and at 24 hours and 1 minute the Ring's charge would die. Later they revised it to indicate how much time the Ring's charge will last in normal use.
9:11 Imagine all the humans having a massive New Year party on that stardate, and the non-human crewmates being very confused as to the significance of that particular year over all others. Then one of them explains that “it’s the confluence of two numbers that represent very crude jokes in ancient human culture; I guess the tradition has lasted much longer than anyone realized…” “Oh, is that why ensign James always says ‘nice’ whenever I say certain numbers?”
Starfleet HQ is on Earth, most important shipyards are in the Sol system, so you celebrate when we celebrate. Humanity fuck yeah.
Kinda time-related but remember that episode of Enterprise where Archer and Trip are on the prison ship and Trip tells the alien they’ve never had contact with to turn the valve clockwise…how would the alien know how our clocks used to work?
Universal translator. The alien heard whatever is equivalent in his language is to "Turn the valve clockwise"
Starfleet was originally an Earth based organization.
To trip that makes perfect sense , ( I hadn’t even considered that the universal translation would = to what the Alien would know clockwise is turn to your right ~ righty tighty.
It’s a translator, it’s technology. What would the reference be. Neither person knows what the other’s clock looks like or how it functions. If in the Enterprise era UTs could just search the minds of the people talking and know what a clock is, how it works and what the equivalent is then there would never be misunderstandings. It would be more like a telepathic exchange. Like when Troi shows Picard a cup and says a word in her language and Picard guesses a dozen things but they’re all wrong. Troi explains that without a similar cultural reference pointing at a cup of tea and saying one word can lead to a lot of confusion.
Hell, I can tell my neighbor to turn something clockwise and he will ask ‘is that left or right.’
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t ENT predate universal translator technology?
Your channel is a must watch companion to the lore of Star Trek, no matter how well versed you consider yourself to be. Thank you for creating this content!
I see it thus: all Earth societies now know that the solar year is 365.2499 days, often rounded to 365.25 days. But there are still societies that maintain alternate versions of the solar calendar (Ethiopia, East Asian, Thai), lunisolar (Hebrew, Hindu), and lunar (Muslim) that are found in the Gregorian calendar that has become the standard, and even that calendar wasn't fully adopted by some societies until decades/centuries after its introduction (Russia didn't switch until 1917). With some exceptions, almost all connected Earth societies use some form of the Gregorian for everyday interaction, and other calendars for parallel or cultural significance.
The same can be said for ST's non-Earth Federation members who still maintain local timekeeping for practical parallel use.
Thanks for sharing this. Been a Trekkie for many years. I always liked how in certain episodes of movies they would sometimes (although rare) when a character would actually mention the current earth year like in the ST:Voyager episode in which the crew beam over a Romulan on board through a collapsing, centuries old worm hole that lead to the Alpha Quadrant, only to find out there was a time difference between both ends, The Romulan officer was asked year it was and he stated that it was the earth year 2351 A.D. when Commander Chikotay stated it was actually 2371 A.D. just an example. Thanks again for helping make stardates a bit more sense.
Lower Decks also uses a slightly different calculation. Star Trek's current Science advisor, Erin Macdonald created a new formula for Stardates, but what it is hasn't been made public yet.
According to Executive producer Brad Winters, Season 1 Episode 1 is set on January 1 2380, with the stardate given in the episode being 57436.2.
The first episode set in 2381 he said was 3.06, which gives a stardate of 58456.2
Not Star trek
@@casparhughey5651 Yes it is :) It has star trek in the name, and it's made by the people who own the IP, so it's star trek.
The creator of this video even includes it in the timeline at the end.
@@casparhughey5651 Lower Decks is not Star Trek? Man, me and the guys must have been high as a kite because we really thought that the USS Cerritos, Starfleet Registration Number NCC 75567, was a ship under the flag of the United Federation of Planets. You know, like in Star Trek.
@@casparhughey5651You gatekeeper
@@ThePandoraGuy By that logic I guess my brother's coffee cup must also be a starship in starfleet, since it has an NCC registration.
I just saw this now and oh boy this is probably gonna be my new favorite video after the medical technology one.
The ending before credits were a chefs kiss. Thank you
The post sign-off was WONDERFUL!! Well done, Rick!!
I came up with a calendar for my RPG I ran for my friends.
I made the presumption that the Star Date system was established during the centennial of the founding of the Foundation. That is, midnight Jan 1, 2261, which would equal 0000. 0. Each whole number would equal 1 24-hour day. So noon on Jan 2, 2261, would be Stardate 0001.5. So by my reckoning, Stardate 1312.4 would be 5 August 2264 around 9 am. That’s my two credits.
YES! Its a Julian date. TNG Final episode is 47988 days post Calendar creation.
Thank you very much for this. Very much appreciated.
This is the video I never knew I needed.
*crosses fingers before clicking play*
Please be simple, please be simple, please be simple
If Earth is the Federation capital and Starfleet headquarters, then using its days and years to dictate the Star Date calendar makes some sense from an efficiency perspective. At least the government institutions there won't need to worry about converting all their local times - they're already in-sync with the official system. As for other powers using it, this could just be a convenience thing. There's no need to maintain a unique system and work about calendars for multiple other factions when this one group is maintaining a system that works.
Star dates have confused me since I first watched it
I’ve been a trek fan for 33 years and I just learned how stardates work 😅
Apparent internal redundancy: If the three digits to the left of the point represent a year divided into 1000 parts, the one digit to the right is one day divided into 10 parts, and a year has 365.25 days, then the two segments can't operate together. For example, xx000 is day 1 at 00:00 (midnight), xx001 is 08:45 (i.e., 0.36 of 24 hours), xx002 is 17:30, and xx003 is ~02:00 the next day. If the two segments operated together, the decimal would indicate 1/10,000 of an Earth-year, or ~52 minutes. Sometimes a crew cites unerringly precise dates ("remember that party on '057 point 8?"), but usually they just use a 24-hour clock. Or, on DS9, a 26-hour clock.
Nobody wears a wristwatch, and there are no large clocks around (except for Star Trek VI, or that time Sisko went horologically obsessed), so how do crews know? Do they wear contact lenses (invisible to the audience) that display the time?
Thank you, I always wondered why I could never figure out how start dates work. The simple answer is, they were making it up as they went, then try to shoehorn in a system, while continuing to make it up while they went..
My take on how this is seen by other planets' cultures is by the Universal Translator; not only does it interpret languages but it also converts calendars.
Love these kind of videos
The real problem was that the Eugenics Wars weren't given in Stardates, but in the Earth AD calendar, which were within a human lifetime of TOS first being broadcast.
The 1990s were a turbulent time, but I still should have noticed the rise of the Augment dictatorships and WW3.
Ive been watching ST since 1983 and I never bothered to learn Stardates until now, thank you. Kinda like Americans and Metric (working in computers you have to know it)
Thanks, Rick! You just erased decades of confusion 😂
Like lots of things they came up with in the sixties, we actually know more now. For instance there's no galactic barrier and no energy barrier in the center.
So, a galactic year is 225 million years, which a little math Will show that a galactic second is about 7¼ years. If they could do it again, I'm sure a stardate or star time might be based on this ironically a Vulcan has Pon Farr every galactic second. That makes it sound much more frequent.
Say for instance the Federation founding happens at a time we call galactic midnight. The NX-01 launched around 11:59 and Kirk's five year mission is around 12:12 and the D launches around 12:24. But it's not very accurate, so star dates might include galactic hundredths of seconds. Nice job getting me to do math for fun!😅
Best explanation I've seen of this, LLAP.
3:00 There is a datatype used mainly in older C programs called the WORD. It's number of bits was variable based on the architecture of the CPU (in those days, there were 5 bit bytes, 6 bit, 8 bit, 10 bit and even 12 bit bytes). A WORD was essentially "one unit of the number of bits in a byte on your architecture", so 8 bits on x86 architecture. There was also the DWORD (Double WORD) of 16 bits and the QWORD (Quad WORD) of 32 bits.
From which the term unit of "quad" was derived.
Dammit! I was drinking water as the video was wrapping up! lmao Well played, Rick.
1:25 you say Frontier Day marks the 100 year anniversary of the launch of the NX-01. Itd be the 250th though by Picard season 3. There’s no indication that it’s celebrated each year but no matter what the number 100 is completely out of nowhere, right?
probably just a mistake
Thanks, I have nothing to do with Star Trek, no idea how the video came to my feet, but I've been wondering since I was a little boy what this mysterious time unit was all about. I never thought I would ever find out. 👍
That timeline at 6:10 is great, I just wish it had Prodigy on it as well.
I've been watching Star Trek since original episodes of TOS were being released. I quickly gave up trying to understand stardates. I got along all these years okay without that understanding. Now I've watched this video and I don't feel like I know any better. I will continue on in happy oblivious ignorance.
I wish they had finished Star Trek Enterprise.
I always figured it was some interstellar equivalent of what we use on earth called "universal coordinated time," which is whatever time it is at longitude 0°. Handy for coordination of events across multiple time zones.
This is some top-level nerd stuff, very well done!
Not sure if you mentioned this, but starting with tng, the second digit represents seasons of television from first episode. So in DS9 and voyager the second digit (and eventually the first after 10 years) represent seasons from season 1 of tng.
Stardate 43224.1 is season 3 of tng.
Stardate 49331.5 would be two years after tng went off the air (in season 7)
The only thing I noticed about stardates was that in TNG, the second digit corresponded to the season of the show. I can't verify this right now due to time constraints, but as I recall, all first-season episodes took place on 41xyz, second-season episodes on 42xyz, all the way to season-seven episodes that took place on 47xyz. As many will likely remember, "All Good Things..." began and ended on the "present" stardate of "47988."
Well, the metric system finally got implemented ♥️♥️♥️
As for other cultures, using stardates - Simple. They don't - the Universal Translator could translate the date from the local culture and back.
Vulcan Starfleet Officer's personal log: I have not been able to ascertain the reason why so many of my Terran colleagues have been saying "Nice" in reference to the current Stardate 42069.
: sigh : finally!! Did not disappoint! 🖖 thank you good sir!!!
My head cannon for the in universe reason for star dates is largely psychological. Due to relativistic effects, and temporal distortions caused by the war drive itself, it's highly common for s significant variance to develop between the timeframe of a starship and that of the ground level society of their home world. The automatically calculated star date provided a reference to a constant external timeframe, hence it's use in logs, without constantly reminding a ships crew of the temporal drift in ways which might stress them out regarding lost time.
I was looking this up the other day, I kinda hate how inconsistent it was before DS9 but I get why.
The problem is that different online stardate calculators give slightly different results.
For example, one I used to test the original implementation gave .5 as being 3pm not 12pm.
To quote someone famous when coming to dealing with time and keeping track of things, "Oh no, I've now gone cross-eyed."
Thanks for answering everyone's burning question at the end
I've definitely wondered about star dates and appreciate the recap. Maybe this time I'll remember it.
In my own personal head canon, the fact that the second digit flipping over to a new number corresponds to an Earth year is a coincidence. It seems reasonable to me that at the time of the last calendar reform the worlds of the federation at the time might simply take the average of their local years which could very easily end up being pretty close to the value for Earth's year, perhaps only varying by a few minutes. Since we don't follow any particular crew every single day of their lives, and there are definitely some large gaps between episodes any existing discrepancies would be well hidden, especially since they don't ever mark the moment of rollover from one "year" to the next. In a real-world example, the Julian Calendar was off by 11 min and seconds from the actual length of the year and it took almost 1600 years for things to be wrong enough for anyone to get busy calculating anew. Later seasons of Discovery might have discrepancies of a week or more, but that's well within the "margin of error" for the series since each season in that era was only 10 to 13 episodes long and hardly ever happened on Earth.
Am I the only one that sees painted grey highlighter pens over and under the starship at 6:16???
Stardates get even muddier when we look into the Kelvin Timeline, which I swear uses a system more akin to that used in Wing Commander, with the year and the day of the year.
In Star Trek 2009, the first stardate we hear is 2233.04. And we know that the Narada traveled back to 2233. And the reason I bring up Wing Commander is because the Terran Confederation's dating system is Year.Day, so for example first contact with the Kilrathi was on 2629.105, which translates to the 105th day of the year 2629.
So yea... stardates are weird. lol
Cool, good job.
Now then, I’m off to go work on my Lego Nexus-10 model. It kinda looks like some weird Star Trek shuttle, but with a removable pontoon sled containing the Hyperdrive. It also has a defense turret on top, kinda like something from Star Wars.
It’s a cool ship, would you like to see a picture?
Fascinating
very cool, i was always wondering just how exactly this would work, atleast now i know theres no 100% surefire way to decifer it but the understanding still helps, atleast now i can roughly translate the years, which is already more than i was able to do before this ^^ thx "Rick with a thing" 😅
No problem, working on another thing soon!
when I was a kid there were at the time 3 versions of stardate. so I decided to create my own using a European calendar. so todays date Sep 20th 2024 would be displayed as 2408.20 (19 and 20 are only used for the first 10 years to show decades) the time is similar 04:27 pm would be written 1627.23 so todays stardate would be 2408.20:1627.23
I like the idea of never really knowing just how futuristic a science fiction story is.
😂😂 I was not thinking about it at all but the last line in the video made me laugh
Any time scale is somewhat arbitrary, you just need a time to start at, and increments to count with. One is as good as another, what matters is that people need to use the same one when they want to talk about time. The Federation having started with Earth and then carrying the calendar with it makes sense.
Its about time. And why was this not the first video
I had been lowkey wondering about stardates since forever.
I now clearly understand how a stardate is fitted, thanks Ric 🖖However and though that system still remains based on maths as you said, I think it is too much of an anthropocentrism as it's anyway taking Earth-related times into account
I've been deep-diving on TOS stardates lately, and here's my take.
Putting the TOS episodes into stardate ['SD'] order, we have "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as the earliest, running from SD 1312.4 to 1313.8 (a total of 1.4 SDU ['star date units'], with the alleged 'birth'-date SD 1277.1 inscribed on the tombstone of "JAMES R. KIRK" by Gary Mitchell), and "All Our Yesterdays" as the last, at SD 5943.7 to 5943.9 (a total of 0.2 SDU). "Space Seed" had stardates ranging from SD 3141.9 to 3143.3 (a total of 1.4 SDU). Since it's Kirk's birthday on SD 8130.3 ("The Wrath of Khan"), then SD 1277.1 can't be his 'birth'-date and MUST refer to something else; as it is 35.3 SDU before the 1st stardate mentioned [SD 1312.4], and represents between 25 and 26 times the duration of that episode's events, then with 1,000 SDU equaling 365.2425 days (i.e. one Gregorian Calendar's average year) it amounts to 12 days + 21 hours + 26 minutes before SD 1312.4 . . . which I would suggests represents the time since Kirk became the Captain of the Enterprise, when the 5-Year Mission began.
The duration of the 5-Year Mission -- if it, indeed, began on SD 1277.1 -- would have come to an end c. SD 6277.1, and the 1312.4-to-5943.9 stardates fit comfortably between those two bookends, there being about 4 months between the end of "All Our Yesterdays" and the return of the Enterprise to Spacedock.
In "The Wrath of Khan" we learn that Carol Marcus recorded her PROJECT GENESIS proposal on SD 7130.4 and Kirk says that the recording was made "a year ago" -- which makes sense if 1,000 SDU = 1 Earth year, since Chekov makes a log entry on the Reliant on SD 8130.4 upon approach to Ceti Alpha V (which he thinks is VI), EXACTLY 1,000 SDU after Carol's recording.
The STARDATE cycles upwards from 0000.0 to 9999.9, a total of 10,000 SDU = one stardate 'decade'. When the clock reaches SD 9999.9 it then clicks over like a car's odometer to 0000.0 to begin another stardate decade's worth of time. From the end of "Space Seed" [SD 3143.3] to SD 9999.9 there are 6,856.6 SDU (i.e. 6.8566 years), and adding 8130.4 SDU (i.e. Chekov's log's stardate) gives a total of 14,987 SDU = 14.987 years, which is almost exactly the "15 years" between the TOS episode with Khan and this movie, mentioned by both Khan and Kirk.
Note that in "The Search for Spock" Kirk reviews the Engineering security camera footage with Sarek, and the STARDATE number seen is a fuller format than the 4+1 digits used familiarly up until then, being a number with 4+2+2+2 digits, i.e. STARDATE 0000.00.00.00 to 9999.99.99.99. If the 'year' is a Gregorian Calendar's average year of 365.2425 days, then each STARDATE number in each given decade represents 31,556,952 x 10 = 315,569,520 seconds' worth of Time, with the right-most digit being one-billionth of a year = 0.031556952 seconds, just over 31 and a half milliseconds.
Stardates were never mentioned in "The Cage," which suggests that the 1st stardate 'decade' began after those events at Talos IV. I like to imagine that Starfleet began the 1st stardate decade soon after that adventure, and that TOS takes place in the 2nd stardate decade. But when do they begin?
In STAR TREK CHRONOLOGY they state that the 5+1 TNG-era stardates (i.e. 00000.0 to 99999.9) have their Epoch in 2323 CE. Before that 'epoch' they must have had a series of seven stardate 'decades' beginning with SD 0000.0 sometime in the year 2253 CE ... the 2nd 'decade' starting in 2263 CE ... etc.
But WHEN in the Earth year 2253 CE would the system have begun?
At first I thought it ought to begin at Midnight (00:00:00 UT) when 1 January 2253 begins . . . but there's a problem. In the TOS episode "Charlie X" we learn that it's about to be -- or even IS -- Thanksgiving Day, and between the two stardates 1533.6 and 1535.8 (a span of 2.2 SDU, with there being 2.737907007 SDU per day, i.e. 1000/365.2425 SDU/day) Charlie magically replaced the meat loaf in the Galley with "real turkeys." Now, if Thanksgiving Day began sometime during that 2.2 SDU span of time, and if there are 1,000 SDU per year, then SD 1534.7 -- the midpoint of the two stated stardates -- must represent the Earth date 24 November 2264, just over a year and a half since that 2nd stardate 'decade' began.
If we add the 10,000 SDU representing the 1st stardate 'decade' to SD 1534.7 we get a total of 11,534.7 SDU or 11.5347 years : x 365.2425 = 4,212.962665 days since the day in 2253 CE when the STARDATE system was begun. From 2253 May 14 through 2264 November 23 there are 4,212 days. This leaves a part of the 0.962665 days left over (i.e. 23 hours + 06 minutes + 14.256 seconds) to be part of 24 November 2264 (i.e. Thanksgiving Day, the 4th Thursday in that month), when Charlie magically changes meat loaf into turkeys, and part of the rest to indicate a time-of-day somewhen on the date 13 May 2253 CE. Thus, it was sometime on that date -- May 13, 2253 CE -- when the STARDATE system began to be used.
[NOTE: Part 2 follows . . .]
Here's Part 2 . . .
"The Menagerie" begins on SD 3013.1 and Spock mentions that the Talos IV incident happened "13 years ago" -- and that he had served with Captain Pike for "11 years, 4 months, and 5 days." Assuming he began to serve under Captain Kirk on SD 1277.1 -- when I deduce that their 5-Year Mission began -- then that would have been 1,736 SDU with Kirk (i.e. 3013.1 minus 1277.1) or 1.736 years with Kirk, preceded by 11 years + 4 months + 5 days with Pike. If SD 1534.7 (see above) represents Thanksgiving Day's approximate beginning -- i.e. 24 November 2264 CE -- then 1277.1 would be 257.6 SDU earlier = 0.2576 years = 94 days + 2 hours 4 minutes 30.8352 seconds, sometime on-or-about the Gregorian Date 21 August 2264 for the 5-Year Mission to have begun. Going back 11 years 4 months and 5 days from 21 August 2264 gets us back to 2253 April 16 for when Spock began to serve on the Enterprise under Captain Pike.
By my math, the Talos IV incident had to have happened before 13 May 2253 (when the STARDATE system began), some 27 days after Spock began serving under Pike. "The Menagerie" takes place about 1,478.4 SDU = 1.4784 years = about 540 days after the start of Thanksgiving Day (24 November 2264), i.e. on 17 May 2266. The adventure at Talos IV had to have been sometime between 16 April and 14 May of 2253, so when Spock states that the Talos IV events the tribunal sees on the viewscreen happened "13 years ago" he's being just about as exact as can be.
Aside from an occasional continuity error -- such as overlapping stardates ("The Corbomite Maneuver" spans SD 1512.2-to-1514.1, but "The Man Trap" spans SD 1513.1-to-1513.8 . . . oops ... and "Miri" spans SD 2713.5-to-2717.3, but "Dagger of the Mind" spans SD 2715.1-to-2715.2 . . . oops again) -- my system works just fine . . . except that the TAS episodes can't fit into the system, and the stardates for STTMP are much too early: Captain Decker tells Kirk sometime around SD 7410.2 that he hasn't logged a single 'star-hour' in over 2 and a half years, yet the 5-Year Mission had to have lasted at least until SD 5943.9 (the final stardate stated at the end of "All Our Yesterdays"), and 2.5 years would be equivalent to 2,500 SDU. STTMP should have a stardate around 5944 + 2500 = 8444 at the very least, or even 6277.1 + 2500 = 8777.1 if they returned exactly 5,000 SDU after the Mission began.
The reason the stardate for STTMP doesn't fit in, of course, is that they didn't 'canonize' the 1,000 SDU = 1 year system until they made "The Wrath of Khan" (see above). Thus, if it were up to me, I'd re-date the 1st film to SD 8800 or so, that being in the 2nd stardate 'decade' since 2253 May 13, the TOS-era decade from 2263-to-2273. The films "The Wrath of Khan" through "The Final Frontier" would be in the 3rd stardate 'decade' (from 2273 to 2283), and "The Undiscovered Country" is near the end of the 4th stardate 'decade' (from 2283 to 2293). The beginning scenes of "Generations" take place early in the 5th stardate 'decade', on SD 0111.5 (i.e. 0.1115 years into that decade (i.e. 9.8885 years before that 5th stardate decade ended), and 29.8885 years before the start of the TNG-era stardate century of 2323 to 2423. The latter part of "Generations" -- said to be "78 years later" -- ends on SD 48605.1 (i.e. 48.6051 years since a mid-May 2323 starting date : 29.8885 + 48.6051 = 78.4936 years . . . i.e. almost exactly 78 and a half years since Kirk was caught up in the Nexus.
Since it was Kirk's birthday on SD 8130.3 (i.e. 28.1303 years = 10,274.3811 days since the STARDATE epoch of 13 May 2253), then it had to have been his birthday on 2281 June 29. Since he was said to have been 34 years old in "The Deadly Years" (SD 3478.2 to 3479.4), having turned 34 circa SD 3130.3, then it had to have been his 49th birthday in the opening scenes of "The Wrath of Khan" -- his actual birthdate thus being June 29, 2232. The book STAR TREK CHRONOLOGY has Kirk's birthdate as March 22, 2233 . . . but their entry for the TOS episode "Charlie X" makes no mention of the fact that it took place partly on Thanksgiving Day (they have this episode taking place in 2266, whereas my system confidently places it on the Thanksgiving Day of 24 November 2264, just over a year and a half (circa SD 1534.7 = 1.5347 years) after that stardate decade began in mid-May of 2263.
You'd think that a book attempting to specialize in CHRONOLOGY in the STAR TREK universe would've picked up on that Thanksgiving Day event in "Charlie X" . . .
My STARDATE system makes sense of all the TOS-era information, fudging over those few overlapping stardates early on (mentioned above), and unfortunately discounting the stardate for the 1st film and the TAS episodes. If it were up to me, TAS and STTMP would be re-dated, so that TAS covers the 4-month period between the end of "All Our Yesterdays" and SD 6277.1 (my proposed end of the Mission), and STTMP to c. SD 8800 (i.e. "more than 2 and a half years" since the Mission ended c. SD 6277.1).
The stardate information in the Kelvin Universe, of course, doesn't fit at ALL, and they've been all over the place in the more recent Post-VOYAGER series (i.e. DIS, SNW, etc.). It's too bad the Okudas (et al.) weren't as on-the-ball with the STARDATE system from the get-go, and that whoever's running the current Trek shows didn't seek to follow the precedents set from "Wrath of Khan" onwards.
@@patricktilton5377 Decent work.
I generally try to keep dates as close to the official Chronology as possible, usually.
TMP can still be in late 2273. TWOK still in early 2285, etc.
But I actually do have some idea of the span from TWOK to TUC.
If TWOK is in March 22nd 2285, for it's start date... then that is 2285.22.
And The Undiscovered Country may begin in very early 2293 - with a possible two month gap, however.
But if we assume it was seven years and ten months between those films...
Then we get about 178.3 stardates per year, from 2285.22 to 2293.05. Roughly.
That's a lot less than in TOS however (that averages 900-1000 stardates a year)
I've always remembered that the star dates were very similar to what we use right now called Julian date which is year day. ie 24243 is 24 Aug 2024. When they first went into space every one has there own Verizon of a star date according to the region that they were in and coincidentally they all must have agreed to adopt a standard stardate
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We need a follow-up video linking Einstein’s theory of relativity with stardates. Those 3 digits could be explained by relativity, as the concept of simultaneity in time between two distant locations does not exist, it depends on the relative speed of observers at those locations. Something could occur before an event when observed from Earth, but could also occur after the same event when witnessed from a starship near Vulcan.
In my imagination I figured stardates were a way to adapt to time dilation from travels at impulse speed, so that the whole Federation had a consistent time measurement
outta my brain, I was literally thinking this yesterday 😅😅
On my first checking account, I would use our current Stardate.
Never had a complaint from the bank!
Also there's the suggestion that warp drive doesn't entirely eliminate temporal effects of FTL travel. So a stardate system is to easily compensate for minor differences in experienced time.. between a ship at warp and the outside universe. Which thanks to warp technology are on the order of hours & days rather that years & century's..
Years ago I created my own stardate system. I designed it so that the first digit would match up with the 24th century stardates. I started in 1999. December 31, 1999 would be 9912.31.
When the new century began I made the first number the century. Of course this means that my system won't match the TOS system in the 23rd century but I'm ok with that.
January 1, 2000 = 10001.01
December 31, 2000 = 10012.31
October 21, 2015 = 11510.21
August 30, 2024 = 12408.30
May 11, 2256 = 35605.11
yes
I needed this video
My Star Trek Encyclopedia explained the TNG stardates this way: 4 was to represent 24th Century, 2nd digit is the TNG season the episode takes place, and the last three digits is a rough measure of how far into the season the episode takes place.
I really enjoyed this video. I’ve seen other videos on Stardates including - I think on this one. But, this video was really good. I think can pretty much understand and translate a Stardate into a date on the Gregorian calendar after watching this video.
I’ve really enjoyed your lore videos of the last two months especially the ones on the Jem’Hadar fighter and the Breen interceptor. I didn’t really care for the Romulan or Klingon ones although I did like the one on Diderex. I’m going to watch the Cardassian ones next, but I probably won’t like it because Cardassian technology is inferior compared to the other Alpha and Gamma powers. I think it would be interesting if you did some on the Delta Quadrant powers like the Voth’s City Ship and some of the others that Voyager had to encounter. I think you did one on the Krenim time ship and the Borg cubes and spheres. Maybe do one on Species 8472’s bioship or one on the ships in the Devore Imperium. Voyager had to deal with a lot of hostile powers so there’s plenty to cover.
I've recently developed a new head canon that the star date system is connected to the Sagitarius A Black Hole in the centre of our galaxy, using the rotation of a specific star around it as an official counter with the '3 random digits' as a breakdown down of the days throughout a year of that orbit.
so stardate 48108.3 would be the 48th rotation of the star around Sagitarious A and the 108 being a 1/1000 breakdown of that orbit, with a decimal point to denote a more specific hour like period.
I think the concept of a stardate being a standard date/time system for any federation member species makes more sense than the actual implementation by the show, and i just view that as an artifact of an unestablished standard that never got concepted out far enough.
If I'm not misunderstanding your explanation, you are mixing 2 non compatible approaches here.
If the decimal part of the Stardate is meant to be the part of the day (24h based, as you explained first)
Then the following digits would be days, meaning the "year"-ones-digit would be 1000 days, making it 2.74 years, followed by the next digit, making that one 27.4 years (instead of 10 years).
If the "year"-ones-digit is the one earth centric, then you'd have 8 hours 45 minutes and 36 seconds in a "day", making the decimal part of the date only 52 minutes and 33.6 seconds per 0.1 stardate.
So in the unlikely event, that xxxxx.0 corresponds to 00:00 on earth, the .1 would be 00:52:33.6, .2 would be 01:45:07.2 and the next .0 would be 08:45:36
Star Trek's writers have clearly and repeatedly stated that stardates are made randomly and don't make sense!
And this channel has stated many times it's about giving in universe answers while also discussing real world applications. Relax. It's all in good fun. (Fun is that thing we aren't legally allowed to have according to most fandoms)
That may be, but during the TNG era, those dates were clearly more structured. Heck, the DC comics had entire timelines consisting of TV episodes, books and indeed comic issues. Stardates aren't perfect, but they sure help give some sense of when something takes places in relation to other entries in the franchise.
Honestly, if they wanted an easy and convinient calendar they could just have adapted the UNIX Epoch.
172.528 being thereabouts a stardate for today and ~1356.949 being the stardate for January 2400.
It's the easiest way to store time and near universal when dealing with computers.
I like that the Federation uses mathematics to chart time while non-fed worlds use their own homeworld cultures. It separates them and shows their differences.
Especially Klingons and Romulans, as the worlds they "integrate" into their own, they would likely force those worlds to observe their calendar, regardless of planetary conditions.
Non-Federation worlds also use Stardates, and Earth still uses the old calendar. But Stardates are the calendario franca of local space.
Remember when a Stardate in TNG was 1000 days per year? That's why Alexander was 2 in season 3 of TNG. It wasn't until season 5 or 6 that they went back to regular years. They now have Stardate calculators online.
Not all cultures needed to use the Earth dating system. There just had to be a viable conversion system so that a computer could instantly redefine the time to fit each other's culture. The simplest way to do this is to define a second which I believe is currently defined using the cesium-133 atom.
Excellent
First! I really enjoy your content! (:
My understanding is that in TNG was the stardate used consistent. TNG S1 the SD was 41*** for the year 2364. And this way 1000 SD unit was a year. ST VIII was in 50*** and in 2373. This was used to the end of VOY.
I'm not sure you're right on this. I think Stadates are akin to Julian dates: Number of days since January 1st, 1901. In an excel file, that is how its figured. So it would need a standard "day," but years become irrelevant. Stardate 47988 for the final episode of TNG ~2370 Current calendar, would put the date of the beginning of this calendar use around 2239, or Stardate 00001 as it were. You can apply this to your own existence as well. For example, I'm a little over 45 1/2 years old. But I'm 16667 days old. I always figured, (Post TOS anyway) that it was a Julian Date back to the founding of Starfleet, the Federation or some other significant event.