brown@utflis.UUCP (Susan Brown) (09/03/85)
The Star Trek Writers' Guide, which was handed out to prospective scriptwriters when the show was under production and is presumably written by Roddenberry says, on page 25: STARDATE We invented "Stardate" to avoid continually mentioning Star Trek's century (actually about two hundred years from now), and getting into arguments about whether this or that would have developed by then. Pick any combination of four numbers plus a percentage point, use it as your story's stardate. For example, 1313.5 is twelve o'clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon the next day. Each percentage point is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of a day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don't worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode. [sic] Now since they do tend to progress from the first program to the last, as others have observed in recent net conversations, we could guess that the script editors may have altered the actual numbers chosen sometimes, while preserving the author's internal time scheme in the stories. I have yet to read a good (i.e. both imaginative and scientifically plausible) explanation of how this kind of stardate would operate - what this time is *relative to* etc. - and how it would relate to "ship time" (an artificial construct to keep beings on a biological schedule), or "planetary standard time" upon arrival somewhere. Comments? sb
tom@utcsri.UUCP (Tom Nadas) (09/04/85)
In THE MAKING OF STAR TREK, Roddenberry notes that originally the Star Dates were supposed to be sequential from first episode to last, but it got screwed up very early on because the network chose to air episodes in a different order than that in which they were filmed. He came up with the double-talk answer in the STAR TREK WRITERS GUIDE to explain this seeming inconsistency.