Star Trek episodes often refer to the “star date.” What exactly is a “star date”? How does it equate to our calendar? Or is it merely sitcom disinformation? –Evan Williams, Austin, Texas
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In Star Trek: The Next Generation things are more systematic. One production staffer is “keeper of the star dates” and parcels them out to the episode writers to avoid mix-ups. The numbers are of the form 40000.0, sometimes with two decimal places. The initial 4 was assigned arbitrarily, the second digit refers to the season, and the remaining three usually progress from low to high as the season progresses. But everybody is still pretty vague on what the numbers mean in the context of the show.
Trouble is, star dates don’t follow this logical scheme. During the original series star dates ranged from 1312.4 to 5943.7 –a span of 4,600 days, or about 12 and a half years. We know from the opening voice-over that the Enterprise was on a five-year mission. This means that either (1) Kirk and friends were running up some serious overtime, (2) there’s more to star dates than meets the eye, or (3) nobody in the show gave the matter a moment’s thought. The real answer is obvious, but Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance (1976), written with some input from producer Gene Roddenberry, gamely attempts to account for things by saying star dates are “a function not only of time but of a ship’s position in the galaxy and its velocity.” How mere mortals could cope with a calendar of such breathtaking complexity is not explained.
