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Post by macawol on Sept 23, 2009 8:41:03 GMT -6
This is perfect for your xmas cards this year:
The Stardate is a fictitious value that was supposedly used to keep track of mission time while starships were away from known federation planets. Because of the time distortions encountered by moving at the speed of warp, the Julian calendar would no longer work, so subspace beacons were needed to give 'stardates" that account for subspace time fluxes.
NOTE: the formula gives a "BEFORE STARDATE" stardate because stardates, as we know them from TNG wasn't put into use before the year 2323.
It use the following formula:
Take a date such as December 20, 2370 13:12 hrs
YY = 2370 - 2323 = 47 DDD = (334+20)/365*1000 =~ 969 T = (13*60+12)/144 =~ .6
Stardate = 47969.6
The procedure is:
1. subtract 2323 from the current year. 2. use a special table to get the total # of days that have passed. Divide this number by 365 or 366, then multiply by 1000. Round to the nearest whole digit. 3. Multiply the hours by 60 and add the minutes. Divide this number by 144. Round this number. 4. Stardate is the concatenation of the steps 1,2,3 above.
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Post by andrewlee on Sept 23, 2009 8:51:01 GMT -6
This is interesting as I have wondered how they came up with star dates! It looks sort of comlicated....Im not the best at math. I'm wondering if a Federation star ship gets thrown into the distant past, will the star date be a negative number? ;D
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Post by macawol on Sept 23, 2009 9:31:44 GMT -6
Yes, it will be a negative number, of course they might just write 314728.7 BS (which incidental is today)
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Post by andrewlee on Sept 23, 2009 9:35:41 GMT -6
Yes, it will be a negative number, of course they might just write 314728.7 BS (which incidental is today) Understood, but anyway! It's like BC dates.
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Dax123
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Post by Dax123 on Sept 23, 2009 11:59:22 GMT -6
Wow! I always wonderd about that too
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Oct 2, 2009 8:17:06 GMT -6
I've been playing around with this formula a bit. Let me see if I've got this right. Dividing by 365 and multiplying by 1000 simply tells us that a 24-hour day is equivalent to 2.7397 "stardate days" [there are only ten hours in a "Stardate hour" (the decimal place), which is about eight minutes shorter than our hour], so a simple shortcut would be to just multiply by 2.7397 (or 2.74 if you want to round off).
First you have to find the Julian date. You could either look it up in a table or figure it out yourself, which isn't all that hard. Remember that all months basically have 30 days. The exceptions are February, which of course has 28; and Jan, Mar, May, July, Aug, Oct, and Dec which all have 31. Notice that they alternate until you get to August (this is because August is named after Caesar Augustus, and he couldn't stand the fact that July, named after Julius Caesar, had more days than his month), then they start alternating again.
Let's walk through it. Today is October 2nd. Jan through Sept is nine months. Nine times 30 is 270. We have to add five days (for Jan, Mar, May, July, Aug), BUT we have to subtract two days for February, so September 30th would be the 273rd day of the year. October 2nd is two days past that, or 275. But before you multiply, you have to SUBTRACT one from the Julian date. Why? Because Jan. 1st begins on 000.0, not 002.7! 274 times 2.7397 is 750.7 (rounding off).
The year? If TNG premiered in 1987 (22 years! Gosh, has it been that long?), and the stardate then was 41150.7, the year then was 2364 (2323 plus 41, according to Mac's formula). Assuming that Real Time has been moving on, the current Star Trek year must be 2386 (or stardate 63xxx).
So unless I've made a really big boo-boo somewhere, the stardate for midnight October 2, 2009 is 63750.7. By three o'clock in the morning it would already be 63751.0; at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon it would click over to 63752.0; and by midnight of October 3rd would be 63753.4!
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Post by macawol on Oct 2, 2009 8:44:29 GMT -6
What have you eaten?!? (Disbelief)
The stardate for the date October 2, 2386 at midnight is 63750.1 in the show, which happens to be 377 years in the future.
Our current date is October 2, 2009, And it is therefore 314750.7 before stardate, and not as you wrongfully postulated, otherwise they would have used stardates in ENT and they would be higher than TNG, DS9, or VOY.
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Dax123
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Post by Dax123 on Oct 2, 2009 11:35:18 GMT -6
Let me just say that I dont get the maths in the slightest but no fear! Im only 12. I'll learn!!!!
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Post by macawol on Oct 2, 2009 12:04:19 GMT -6
Let me just say that I dont get the maths in the slightest but no fear! Im only 12. I'll learn!!!! Well, that is fair enough, just hopes this gives you a reason to want to understand math
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Dax123
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Post by Dax123 on Oct 2, 2009 12:41:28 GMT -6
Yeah, well I will get back to you in six years(when ive done my A-LEVEL maths
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Oct 3, 2009 9:12:39 GMT -6
The stardate for the date October 2, 2386 at midnight is 63750.1 in the show, which happens to be 377 years in the future. Our current date is October 2, 2009, And it is therefore 314750.7 before stardate, and not as you wrongfully postulated, otherwise they would have used stardates in ENT and they would be higher than TNG, DS9, or VOY. I stand corrected. How do stardates in TOS work? Did I miss you explanation of where that "314" prefix comes from?
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Post by macawol on Oct 3, 2009 9:28:09 GMT -6
I stand corrected. How do stardates in TOS work? The stardates in TOS works out from an entirely different formula. Did I miss you explanation of where that "314" prefix comes from? It is 314 before stardate, which means it is 314 years before stardates is taken into use. Remember the BS notification after the stardate, it is exactly like BC (Before [Insert curse of choice, beginning with C]
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Post by andrewlee on Oct 3, 2009 10:40:22 GMT -6
I'm glad you guys are figuring this star date thing out!!!...I'm out of my leauge here as I have enough trouble keeping track of time as it is in the real world!
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kijuro
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Post by kijuro on Oct 3, 2009 22:05:04 GMT -6
To top it all off, today my chronometer ran backward!
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Post by andrewlee on Oct 4, 2009 16:22:06 GMT -6
To top it all off, today my chronometer ran backward! Did you go back in time or was your day not so good??? ;D
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