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Path: utzoo!watmath!watdcsu!herbie
From: herbie@watdcsu.UUCP (Herb Chong, Computing Services)
Newsgroups: net.startrek
Subject: Re: Re: new question (stardates)
Message-ID: <578@watdcsu.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 30-Oct-84 13:57:34 EST
Article-I.D.: watdcsu.578
Posted: Tue Oct 30 13:57:34 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Oct-84 23:45:39 EST
References: <183@ttidcb.UUCP> <2999@mit-eddie.UUCP>, <781@sunybcs.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 31


For those that are interested, Andromeda, or M31, is about 2 million light
years away.  Some people have postulated that the warp factor is the
effective speed if the Enterprise had been travelling in real space.
It actually moves slower than the speed of light at all times in some
other ``dimension''.  As for stardates, Gene Rodenberry's explanation
was that stardates were deliberately vague so as not to tie the series to
a particular time using our year counting system.  In the Startrek universe,
this is not the case.  A reasonable system for interpreting stardates
would have account for the way stardates are used.  One way of getting
around the problem is to assume that the order of release of the shows
was not the order of the events in the Startrek universe and only the
order that they were released to the public.  I seem to remember that for
each show, stardates were always increasing through the one show.  This
implies a chronological order the corresponds to increasing stardate.
There are a few shows that don't have this, but only two or three.
Stardates can't only be dependent upon position of the Enterprise and
time (relative to some standard, say Earth) because an unambiguous stardate
could be worked out by knowing the positions of some
reference stars and their motions.  There should never be a ``stardate unknown''
entry in any log unless position and time are not the only factors upon which
stardates depend.

Herb...

I'm user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....

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