tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jul 27 13:34:03 2008

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Re: idea for writing system

Mark J. Reed ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 12:17 AM, Lawrence John Rogers <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is there some known way to compute Star Date?  Do Klingons use Star Date?

Off-topic as it is, I'll jump in: stardates aren't mappable to real
dates, at least pre-TNG, because there's no way to do it consistently.
 Either the "five-year mission" speads out over closer to ten years or
you have multiple episodes overlapping the same date..

... ignoring the fact that the episodes weren't aired in stardate
order, and sorting them that way moves episodes between seasons.

In TNG-land   on we have official mappings and a stated rate (1000
units/year), but even then it's hard to be precise.  You wind up with
things like "Family", showing what is obviously France in the spring,
needing to fall in January.  And there's no way to make the transition
from TOS-style to TNG-style smooth.

There's at least one fan attempt to reconcile the whole thing, but it
depends upon the value of a stardate changing several times over a
wide range of values - imagine the Bureau of Standards declaring that
what used to be a "second" would now be the new "minute"; Y2K looks
like a picnic by comparison.

A better approach IME is to allow the TOS stardates to "roll over"
offscreen in some of the intervals, although then it becomes awfully
convenient that they just happen to appear to be monotonically
increasing in all the canonical stories...

-- 
Mark J. Reed <[email protected]>

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