Stardate

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The Current Stardate is: 240319


Trek Canon uses a fairly arbitrary numbering system for Stardates. It has been written in various places that The Next Generation used a system that corresponded with the show's season numbers, while the original series appears to have been almost entirely random. Whatever the case, Stardates have never corresponded to a real date.

Clearly that would make arranging meetings rather hard for UFS, so we've adopted a rather simpler version of the Stardate.

The format is:

YYMMDD.HHMM


That is: 2 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day . 2 digit hour, 2 digit minute

Anything after the point (.) is optional and would denote time in 24 hour format - in case you need to be specific.

For example:

If the day is April 16, 2007. The Stardate would be 070416 - that is: 2007 (year) 04 (month, in this case April) 16 (day)

If one needs to specify a time - such as April 21, 2007 at 15.00 hours (that's 3pm) - the Stardate would be 070421.15 (notice there is no need for the "00" in 15.00 hours - this simply makes the Stardate length variable like in the shows).

One can specify an exact time, e.g. 15:22 pm, with the full four digits as in 070421.1522. (3:22 am would be 070421.0322)

Of course, all times correspond to Second Life Time (Pacific Standard Time)

Key advantages to standard notation of stardates:

  • If a standard Stardate is used as the fist part of a name on a computer file or SL notecard (as in 070421 - Weekly Research Report) multiple files will be sorted chronologically when sorted alphabetically!
  • Using Standard Stardates makes UFS more immersive.
  • It's Cool

Note

See How to make the forum display Stardates for a neat trick...