(Originally posted on Reddit)
Some of you may know that I cut my teeth on Star Trek nerdery in the 1990s on USENET and rec.arts.statrek.tech as, among other things, a Trek chronologist, doing up and figuring out timelines before Michael Okuda came up with his Star Trek Chronology and started setting some of those years in stone. That never really leaves you, so every time someone mentions years and dates on any show, my ears perk up and my brain files that away to do math later.
So given this obsession, I'd like to go into why I'm dating SFA as taking place in 3191 even though Memory Alpha is (for the moment) going with 3195.
Looking at it, I can see that the Memory Alpha dating is based on a couple of things:
First is an assumption that the Burn takes place in 3069, which is reflected throughout the wiki. This is because in DIS Season 3, Burnham arrives in the year 3188, spends a year as a courier before Discovery arrives in 3189. In Season 3, we are told that the Burn occurred about 120 years prior. Note that the dialogue is not exact on this point, but that makes the Burn, for Memory Alpha, around 3069. I'm not sure that I'd date it that exactly, but there we go.
Second is this article from Paramount, which declares, "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is set in the 32nd century, at the upper end of the Star Trek timeline. More specifically, it takes place 125 years after The Burn, a catastrophic event that ravaged the galaxy, and hobbled the Federation."
So Memory Alpha takes that at face value, and puts SFA at 3069-ish+125=c.3195. Again, that is based on a 3069 baseline, and really, it could be earlier than that because nobody's ever said that it's exactly 120 years. It's always "about" or "more than".
Except that, with the broadcast of SFA: "Kids These Days", 3195 can't possibly be true.
Now, I acknowledge that stardates in the DIS era have been all over the place and I've expressed confusion as to how they line up with the Gregorian calendar in my prior annotations, but I'm still stubbornly sticking to my assumption that the Berman-era convention of 1000 stardates to 1 year as established by Okuda is still in effect.
Taking that into account, let me bring you through my working:
Regardless of when the Burn took place, we have a definitive dating for DIS Season 5. DIS: "Jinaal" says the year is 3191 - no ifs, ands or buts. They were setting up the Academy the previous season, so SFA must take place around that year, either just prior or after. This is important because "Jinaal" establishes an objective baseline that doesn't depend on vague qualifications like "about" or "around". But so far, so good - 3195 can still work since it's definitely after.
Then we see "Kids These Days"'s opening scene taking place on Stardate 853724.6, which puts it (853000-41000) 812 years after TNG Season 1. As TNG: "The Neutral Zone" establishes TNG Season 1 taking place in 2364, 812 years later gives us 3176.
"Kids These Days" then jumps ahead 15 years - which makes it 3191, not 3195. So while both years can be consistent with DIS Season 5, 3191 is starting to look closer to the mark.
Nahla says in "Kids These Days" that this is the first Academy class to return to San Francisco in over ~~120~~ 100 years. She says later that episode that she's had over 120 years to think about what she could have done differently as a mother. 3191 is "over 120 years" after 3069, so that's also consistent.
So given these data points, I think on-screen evidence - especially the stardates - point us towards 3191 as the year SFA takes place, not 3195, which would be way out of any margin of error.
And regardless of what Paramount says, I think on-screen evidence trumps press statements. And if you really want to make both the press statement and the on-screen dating evidence be consistent, then you've got to push the Burn's baseline year back to 3066 or 3067 (125 years prior to 3191), because, again, nobody said it happened exactly 120 years before 3189.
I don't pay a lot of attention to such things, but I was under the impression that they switched to the TNG-era stardate system following the time jump. Did things smooth out after that point?
Yes, they did - on the face of it - switch to a Berman-era Stardate system of 1000 stardates to a year and 2364 (TNG Season 1) as a baseline for 41000.
But things got weird really fast.
So Burnham travels 930 years ahead of Discovery's original time (2258) to land in 3188 (as her suit computer said in DIS: "That Hope is You, Part 1") and spends a year in that time before Discovery itself showed up (DIS: "People of Earth"), so the year should have advanced to 3189.
Yet Burnham's log in "People of Earth" detailing how she spent her year without Discovery is dated 865211.3. If we work backwards to TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint", which took place on Stardate 41153.7 in the year 2364 (TNG: "The Neutral Zone"), that makes the 865000s the year 3188 instead, which can't really be.
Furthermore, if we are following the 1000 stardates equals 1 year convention, 221 stardate units brings us only to March 22 of that year, so we can't even say that she landed at the start of 3188 and made her log at the end of that year.
Then comes Season 4's DIS: "All is Possible", which has the stardate 865661.2, allegedly a week after the previous episode DIS: "Choose to Live", which places it back in 3188, and 661 stardate units takes us only to around August 29!
Season 4 starts five months after the end of Season 3 (as stated in Season 4's premiere DIS: "Kobayashi Maru"), and it's highly unlikely that Season 3 took place in the space of one month (between March and August is only six months). So whichever way you slice it, the Stardates are off by at least a year, if we're still following the TNG convention.
But that's not all. Season 5's DIS: "Under the Twin Moons" is on Stardate 866274.3, which places it in 3189. However, this is also an impossibility since, as I've noted, Burnham arrived in the 32nd Century in 3188, then spent a year before reuniting with Discovery (3189), then months passed between Seasons 3 and 4, and also between Seasons 4 and 5, so at a minimum it should be 3190. And in the very next episode DIS: "Jinaal", they definitively call the year as 3191.
If we lived in a sane universe, DIS Season 3 would have covered Stardates 865000-866999 (3188-3189), Season 4 Stardates 867000-867999 (3190), and Season 5 Stardates 868000 onwards (3191) and we could breathe a sigh of relief. But the given stardates don't.
One way to resolve it is to throw out what we knew about TNG stardates and just live with the idea that the 1000 stardate units stretch out over the course of 2-3 years. However, that idea makes this old Trek chronologist's face twitch.
Doesn't it also get thrown out by the fact that a sizeable number of stardates are easter eggs, references, or random numbers?
Since TNG the system set up by Okuda has been more or less consistent, with a progression of 1000 stardate units a year.
Anything from the TOS period (including DIS and SNW) is still up for grabs, and since in post-DIS shows it’s been a bit wonky, but it’s still the best system we’ve got.
TOS itself could actually fit within the TNG system. It runs from the low 1000s to the high 5000s, perfect for a five year mission. One of my geekiest beefs with nuTrek is that they opted for apparently entirely random 23rd century stardates when they could have embraced a unified system.
Yes, that system would still have a hundred contradictions if you looked too closely, but if you’re willing to squint and look the other way on a bunch of particulars, it could at least be defined and used consistently going forward.
Super pedantic thing to worry about but it sticks in my craw anyway.
One of the big problems for 23rd century Discovery and SNW is that year zero on the TNG system seems to be in the early 2260s, during or after the events of those shows. If they wanted to maintain the familiar Stardate references in captains logs, etc, they had to fudge the numbers somehow.