Fascinating, I’ll need to see if I can find where they got their system from.
The best and most detailed stardate system I’ve found online is here. It makes a valiant attempt to integrate the TNG and TOS stardates into a coherent whole. It’s a little overwrought in my book and makes some calls I can’t agree with, but you can’t fault the dedication!
Wow, they’ve definitely spent a lot of time on it! I don’t agree with it all either, and (to me) the biggest difference is that I always accepted that the 23rd Century had to have at least two rates of stardate progression (TOS, then the TOS movies) before the TNG/DS9/VOY 5-digit system came into effect in the early 24th.
I’m also not beyond ignoring a handful of stardates to get the majority to make sense, since, as the author of that site says, there wasn’t actually a canon system and so the writers were just loosely progressing the dates. Getting everything to align perfectly just isn’t going to happen.
What does bother me is that Discovery didn’t even make an attempt to fit any kind of system - the stardates given in its first two seasons are clearly just trying to match the “vibe” of TOS without thinking about it any further than that. Unlike TOS, where you can somewhat reshuffle episodes around to make some sort of nearly-sensible progression of stardates, DSC’s serialised nature completely undermines that.
As the author finally concludes, though, DSC has to force a stardate reset – something that does not surprise me in the slightest, since it’s obvious from the rate of stardate progression in TOS that the most recent zero had to occur less than year prior to the start of the series. Of course, there’s no in-universe explanation for how Starfleet would have kept track of the various stardate cycles (since the 23rd Century would necessarily have seen multiple resets to limit stardates to 4 digits), but I don’t see any other option.
Fascinating, I’ll need to see if I can find where they got their system from.
The best and most detailed stardate system I’ve found online is here. It makes a valiant attempt to integrate the TNG and TOS stardates into a coherent whole. It’s a little overwrought in my book and makes some calls I can’t agree with, but you can’t fault the dedication!
Wow, they’ve definitely spent a lot of time on it! I don’t agree with it all either, and (to me) the biggest difference is that I always accepted that the 23rd Century had to have at least two rates of stardate progression (TOS, then the TOS movies) before the TNG/DS9/VOY 5-digit system came into effect in the early 24th.
I’m also not beyond ignoring a handful of stardates to get the majority to make sense, since, as the author of that site says, there wasn’t actually a canon system and so the writers were just loosely progressing the dates. Getting everything to align perfectly just isn’t going to happen.
What does bother me is that Discovery didn’t even make an attempt to fit any kind of system - the stardates given in its first two seasons are clearly just trying to match the “vibe” of TOS without thinking about it any further than that. Unlike TOS, where you can somewhat reshuffle episodes around to make some sort of nearly-sensible progression of stardates, DSC’s serialised nature completely undermines that.
As the author finally concludes, though, DSC has to force a stardate reset – something that does not surprise me in the slightest, since it’s obvious from the rate of stardate progression in TOS that the most recent zero had to occur less than year prior to the start of the series. Of course, there’s no in-universe explanation for how Starfleet would have kept track of the various stardate cycles (since the 23rd Century would necessarily have seen multiple resets to limit stardates to 4 digits), but I don’t see any other option.