STARDATE

[dizzyg]

dunno if this has been done before, but does anyone know how the stardates work? and has anyone ever checked on them to make sure they use the right star dates in episodes :P

[Antipodean]

I believe they're just made up... especially with TOS.

 

check out the wikipedia entry, its got a good overview

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate

[TetsuoShima]

There a re a lot of theories about stardates, most have some exceptions in which they do not work according to know Star Trek 'cannon'.

 

He's a quote from another site:

 

Originally, stardates were used so that Star Trek could be established as taking place a long way into the future without actually being pinned down to a particular time. The stardates were arbitrary, chosen without regard to consistency. The only thing that was consistent was that the stardates generally increased. However, because episodes got out of order in the production sequence, and were shown in a different order again, even this could not be relied upon from week to week.

 

Furthermore, even ignoring obvious verbal slips, the stardate ranges of episodes occasionally overlapped, and stardates sometimes even decreased within the confines of a single episode. When pressed for an explanation, Gene Roddenberry said:

This time system adjusts for shifts in relative time which occur due to the vessel's speed and space warp capability. It has little relationship to Earth's time as we know it. One hour aboard the U.S.S.Enterprise at different times may equal as little as three Earth hours. The stardates specified in the log entry must be computed against the speed of the vessel, the space warp, and its position within our galaxy, in order to give a meaningful reading.

Roddenberry went on to explain that stardates would be different in different parts of the galaxy at any one time. He admitted that he didn't really understand this, and would rather forget about the whole thing. And that was when there was only ST:TOS to consider.

 

Roddenberry's explanation does make some sense. It seems to suggest that stardates are completely subjective. This will be dealt with in the next section. Contradicting this, however, is the suggestion that position is relevant to the calculation. This part of his explanation, at least, must be discounted on the grounds of absurdity. His explanation is not canonical, so it may be treated like any other theory.

 

Also there is a theory that says something like: 1 Earth year is about 1000 stardate units, but:

 

The constraint of universality makes matters a little complicated, because it means that the rate of increase of stardates is not totally constant. For example, the duration of the ST:TNG series is confirmed within itself to have lasted about seven years, during which time the stardate has increased almost 7000 units. This is irreconcilable with the fact that SD 5943.7 to SD 7411.4 was more than two years (ST:TMP).

 

 

So basically there is not a single theory that matches all known 'facts' from all series and all movies... Though within a series, they are usually fairly consistent, though even then sometimes there are inexplainable things...

 

 

There are also some stardate calculators on the web, most of which are utter crap and none of which can be said to do some actual plausible conversion for dates under about 2300.

 

Some links:

 

Here is a nice page about stardates

This is the wikipedia page about Star Trek stardates

 

 

[TFMF]

Not sure of the accurace but there is an artical about how he does it: http://www.route56.com/startrek/stardate.html

[Tenebrae]

They do vaguely correlate, seemingly to a 1000 a year but there are exceptions.

 

Given that warp is supposed to be like Alcuiberre though, they shouldn't be subject to relative time dilation. Hmm... but does that mean the rest of the galaxy would be moving faster and hence would? Best not to think about it until I've had my daily helping of teaching beer.

[slug]

The stardates in TOS and the films were just nonsense but in the first season of TNG all stardates started with 41, 4 denoting century and 1 the season, of course, by the time the franchise had run for ten years continually the 4 had to change to 5, showing it didn't really mean anything, but you can still work out the relative year from all stardates from TNG onwards.

 

Only the 1st 3 digits actually have any real importance, the first 2 tell the year and the third will tell you how far through that year, or season you are, hence the Stardate for the final episode of TNG was 47988.1, the decimal point of course, denotes absolutley nothing.

 

 

[Tenebrae]

Day of the week?

[dizzyg]

further then on "how things work in star trek" does anyone know - in theory - how everyone didnt get splat against the back wall everytime they jump to warp

[Tenebrae]

Inertial dampners, duh.

 

That and the fact they accelerating when going to warp, they're remaining stationary while the rest of the universe moves around them.

[MrDad]

inertial dampening

[Tenebrae]

Just like how transporters get over the heisenberg uncertainty principle - the heisenberg compensator.

 

Amusing that they said they were doing "research" for Trek. Oh, how we laughed. Wig research for Shatner - maybe... male corset research, of course. Passable physics research? I don't think so... and if they did, it wasn't much beyond pop science.

[Tigerplayer]

the first two didits are marking the year, when a year has passed, the stardate goes up with 1000, the third digit are much like what we today know as a month, the last two are weeks or (a number of) days (only a little theory of mine, but it dosn't seem to fit).

 

after the decimal mark, this could be something like the time of the day, or if it is a number of days, then it is used to count a number of hours.

 

the Inertial dampener is a kind of shield in front of the ship, not only does it deflect at least some of the particles that float around in space, but it also acts to protect the crew from the massive acceleration that comes into effect when the ship goes to warp speed.

 

If the damener system dosn't work or is offline, they would all be crushed against the wall (assumin everyone is standing front towards the front part of the ship) right behind them. Only thing left is a lot of blood and some organs that are just about as thick as a piece of paper, also it portcects against the effect of deceleration, for example when the ship goes out of warp

[Antipodean]

Just like how transporters get over the heisenberg uncertainty principle - the heisenberg compensator.

 

Amusing that they said they were doing "research" for Trek. Oh, how we laughed. Wig research for Shatner - maybe... male corset research, of course. Passable physics research? I don't think so... and if they did, it wasn't much beyond pop science.

 

 

I think some Physicist actually went and wrote a book on the Science of trek... I sorta remember seeing something on TV about it.

[Symok]

That and the fact they accelerating when going to warp' date=' they're remaining stationary while the rest of the universe moves around them.[/quote']

 

That's Futurama ;)

[Wazer]

Antipodean the book you may be thinking of is "The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence Krauss

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060977108/sr=8-1/qid=1149084262/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-1097907-7020813?%5Fencoding=UTF8

with a foreward by Stephen Hawking. Lawrence Krauss, like Stephen Hawking, is a theorectical physicist of renown who is also a big Star Trek fan. I bought the book for my brother when it first came out. I don't know how much he read but I read it and it explains possible ways that most important ST techs work but he said he struggled with the transporter most because it wasn't based on reality it was aplot device. But Warp is explained.

 

 

As to Stardates they didn't relate to much as gene rodenbery said in TOS but they reinvented them in TNG and they make much more sense after that. They relate directly to production times of the show. Starting with production September eg Farpoint ~41100 and finishing in June with production eg Neutral Zone 41986 aproximately 1000 per production year with a suitable gap in line with production except two parters. eg "The Child" 42073 start of season 2 isat least several weeks after the Neutral Zone

This makes it easier to work out when they mean as a day adds around 2.7 to a stardate and each season from TNG you increase around 1000 to the next year. So 41000 was probabaly about June 2363 - Neutral Zone was June 2364 and ST: Nemesis Stardate 56844 was in 2380 ie more than 15 years after the start of TNG.

 

Sorry for Rambling :D

[Tenebrae]

The main issue with the transporter is that it functions in a manner contrary to how we can imagine it happening with our current understanding of quantum physics... where you're essentially faxing something, so what comes out at the end isn't the original but rather (if one could get around the uncertainty principle) an exact duplicate, with the original being destroyed.

 

TNG clearly demonstrates that a person is conscious throughout the entire process... presumably to get around the fact that it's unlikely anyone would use a device that killed you and produced a copy of you at the other end.

 

Explaining warp was - no doubt - a doddle by comparison.