How does stardate work

Fact: An average Earth year comprises about Therefore, each th of a year would be 3. Conclusion: The new STAR TREK film appears to use a ratio of one Stardate per year; more specifically, the Stardates in the film are consistent with the actual Earth calendar years expressed with two decimal places presumably representing hundredths of the calendar year.

Also, the given Stardate of Kirk's birth on Stardate McCoy gives him a bottle of Romulan Ale vintage While the episodes and assumptions cited above present a fairly accurate and consistent theory for calculating Stardates, there are many other date references -- mostly vague references to years -- that conflict with that theory, though these exceptions do not clearly establish a more-consistent alternative theory, so they may be regarded as errors.

Given the above calculations that there must be at least If This is inconsistent with the slow progression of four-digit Stardates throughout The Original Series , demonstrating that Stardate spans shown within single episodes cannot be extrapolated to measure Stardates across multiple episodes.

Shortly before Stardate So there is a span of These ratios would extrapolate to about 1 Stardate per day, or between and Stardates per year.

Three years later, on Stardate So there is a span of about It is unclear whether Sisko is describing Earth years or Bajoran years, since he is on a Bajoran station with 26 hours per day. This is a span of 1, to 1, days 3. The following morning, around hours, she records a log entry on Stardate Between Day and Day , Janeway mentions her birthday was "five months ago;" she later records a captain's log on Stardate On Day 1 after the timeline is restored, a captain's log is recorded on Stardate Therefore, there is a span of The captain's log recorded between Day and Day would be These date spans give a possible ratio of around to 1, Stardates per year.

The captain's log recorded on Stardate Given the wild inconsistencies of Stardate ratios in different episodes, some varying by a factor of ten, there can be no conclusive determination of an actual Stardate-to-year ratio for all episodes. Therefore, the ratio of This last reference is clearly an error, since Stardate in The Next Generation system would be just three years before "The Neutral Zone" It is likely that the decimal was left out of Tuvok's given birth date, and he was really born on Stardate Given a birth date of October 14, , Tuvok would be about years old on Stardate However, in the episode "FURY," Captain Janeway celebrates Tuvok's birthday, stating it is not long before he reaches "the big three digits.

If the statement "the big three digits" is taken to mean " Earth years," then this would mean that Tuvok would be born after , making him 11 years younger than assumed above.

But if "the big three digits" is taken to mean " Earth years" three identical digits , that would be consistent with the above assumptions, since Tuvok would be born on October 14, TOS Stardate This could mean that "FURY," which had no Stardate might be shown out of order, and actually took place on Tuvok's th birthday, October 14, Of course, it is unclear whether Janeway's statement even refers to Earth years rather than Vulcan years, so the statement may not be inconsistent after all, since the duration of a Vulcan year has not been established.

The episode takes place in the middle of the year , and apparently refers to first contact between Earth and Vulcans on April 5, , a span of more than 91 Earth years. Since Vulcans are known to quote numbers with great precision, and the statement about years was made between two Vulcans on the planet Vulcan with no humans present, it would be reasonable to assume they were describing the time span in Vulcan years. If so, then Vulcan years is about 91 Earth years, so one Vulcan year would be about 0.

Therefore, Tuvok's age of Earth years would be equivalent to about Vulcan years, making Janeway's statement in "FURY" about him soon reaching "the big three digits" inaccurate in both Earth and Vulcan years. The following calculators are based on the above explanation. Discuss Stardate calculations on the Message Board. Stardates and Calendar Dates. These calculations are not meant to be accurate for small time scales, such as hours or minutes within a single episode.

Note: The calculators on this page are designed to work only with JavaScript-enabled Web browsers. The calculators may not function in other Web browsers. Therefore, Looking at the stardates used so far in Star Trek: Discovery , it appears that the franchise will come full circle, returning to the stardate system used in Star Trek: The Original Series.

However, with Star Trek: Discovery season 2 ending in the far future, the entire stardate system could become redundant when the show returns. Craig first began contributing to Screen Rant in , several years after graduating college, and has been ranting ever since, mostly to himself in a darkened room. Having previously written for various sports and music outlets, Craig's interest soon turned to TV and film, where a steady upbringing of science fiction and comic books finally came into its own.

Craig has previously been published on sites such as Den of Geek, and after many coffee-drenched hours hunched over a laptop, part-time evening work eventually turned into a full-time career covering everything from the zombie apocalypse to the Starship Enterprise via the TARDIS.

Since joining the Screen Rant fold, Craig has been involved in breaking news stories and mildly controversial ranking lists, but now works predominantly as a features writer. By Craig Elvy Published Aug 29, Share Share Tweet Email 0. The first two digits of the Stardate are " The following three digits will progress consecutively during the course of the season from to The digit following the decimal point counts tenths of a day.

Stardate Because Stardates in the 24th Century are based on a complex mathematical formula, a precise correlation to Earth-based dating systems is not possible.

Despite explicitly stating that correlation to Earth-based dates is not possible, that hasn't stopped people from trying. Just when things were basically making sense, they changed again. From an exhaustive and brilliant article on Memory Alpha , here's an explanation of the reboot J. Abrams-directed movies' treatment of stardates emphasis added :.

The stardate format from the latest film series is credited to screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. According to Orci, they "used the system where, for example, The new stardates are similar to the ordinal dates of ISO , which express the first day of as , and the last as Orci hasn't clarified whether leap days increase the count to. When asked about There is no one answer to how stardates work, aside from saying that they don't.

They're inconsistent series-to-series, and even within a given series, the writers often mixed things up. With Roddenberry trying to retcon the system's continuity even in TOS , perhaps it's appropriate that the system continues to be more than a little mixed up.

Time-tracking throughout the galaxy is a hard problem; give 'em some slack. If you're curious about examples of various Stardates and even more discussion of this issue , check out Memory Alpha 's stardate page.