I’m very impressed by Fourmilab’s “Calendar Converter”: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar/. Unfortunately, all I know about Java is that it’s not terribly secure (allegedly). Learning how to make a page like that would take me a very long time. As a quick alternative, I’ve created a spreadsheet. Originally, I had an embedded copy on this page, but the service hosting it has lost it for me, and didn’t mention it.
Although you can’t try it straight away like before, I’ve got a copy of the spreadsheet you can download. (Thanks to Tyson Thorpe for telling me my page was broken.)
Also, my thanks to Dirk Schwalbe for suggesting that I make some notes about how the spreadsheet works, so that anyone who’d like to tinker with it or create their own version can.
Earth Calendars
C.E. or “Terran Old Calendar”
The “Old Calendar” is exactly the same calendar as we use now, as established in TOS “City On the Edge of Forever”. The overwhelming evidence is that there are no significant differences between the Earth calendar we use today, and the Earth calendar as used in “Star Trek”. Insisting on using something different is just pointlessly confusing. In keeping with modern academic usage I’ve identified the era (the way years are counted up) as C.E. or “Common Era” rather than A.D., although they’re based on the same year 1. Conveniently, the C.E. era has a year 0, which corresponds to 1 B.C. in the Christian era. I’ve used this to simply give “minus” dates for events predating the era, instead of the rather clunky B.C.E. way of expressing them. It made the sums a lot easier, too.
“New Calendar”
Alien Calendars
Alpha Centauri Calendar
As explained at The Cochrane Chronology Conundrum, I’ve assumed that the planet in the Alpha Centauri system that Zephram Cochrane retires to has years considerably longer than those on Earth, up to 1.77 times longer.
Bajoran Calendar
Klingon Calendar
Ocampa Calendar
This is a bit of a cheat. After playing with all kinds of alternatives, I decided that the Ocampa calendar is least implausible when you assume their years are pretty much identical to ours.
Vulcan Calendar
“Official” Stardates
I’ve included this calculator for the sake of completeness. It’s based on the stardate calculator here: http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/sternenzeit.htm. That calculator is in turn based on the way stardates are arranged in the “Star Trek Chronology”, aligned so that each 1,000 stardates corresponds exactly with a year, and thus each year is divided into exactly 1,000 units. The original calculator doesn’t “roll back” to the 23rd century, but I thought it was only fair to allow “official” stardates to be generated for earlier dates, too.
I would like to stress that this way of calculating stardates is “official” only in the sense that I decided to call them that. Some date references in the “expanded universe” of “Star Trek” (novels and games) do use this system to convert stardates to conventional dates. It has not been used in the actual television series.
After creating “year to view” calendars for my stardating system, I decided to do the same for the “official” stardates. I haven’t made a huge deal of pointing out where the problems are. It’s always fairly obvious, and anyway, there’s supposed to be more going on than the basic dates suggest. What that is I haven’t tried to speculate. I’ve also not “tweaked” any of the dates, on the principle that the “tweaked” version is my own version of a stardated chronology.
by Strauchius on 08 Feb 2011 14:34, last updated on 13 Mar 2024 08:29
