User:OhEidhin

Star Trek Online stardates
The MMORPG Star Trek Online uses its own form of stardates based on current calendar dates, or "earthdates". These are based on TNG stardates, projected exactly 400 years into the future. Star Trek Nemesis was around stardate 56844.9, in the year 2379. STO was released in February 2010 with a stardate around 87700, which would be nearly 31 years after Nemesis, or 2410. The game is set in the year 2409, but the stardates progress in relation to 21st century earthdates. However, the beginning of the stardate year (xx000) does not correspond to January 1, but to around May 24/25. This corresponds closely with the method used by TrekGuide.com until 2011: "there are exactly 1,000 Stardates per year...Stardate 00000.0 began on May 25, 2322, at 00:00 hours." So add 400 years from the current earthdate and you get the STO stardate.

The TrekGuide.com calculator does not match exactly, however, since it uses an average year length. STO has exactly 1000 stardates each year, so on leap years, like this one, there are 366 days instead of 365, making the stardate clock run slower and each stardate unit is 1 minute 26.4 seconds longer than other years. The crazy thing is that this altered rate starts and ends with the calendar year, instead of the stardate year that usually starts at 00:00 UTC on May 25. That means that stardate year 90 (90000.00) started at 9:28:06 UTC on May 24, 2012, 14½ hours early. However, January 1 always starts at xx605.48, even on leap years.

So the simplest formula for STO stardates is 1000×(day-of-year/days-in-year + year - 1923 + 221/365). 221 is the number of days from May 25 to the end of year. The day-of-year can include the fraction of the day, which is the hour (UTC) divided by 24, plus the minute divided by 1440, etc. So 5am PDT (12:00 UTC) on earthdate August 18, 2012, is 231.5 days; 1000×(231.5/366 + 2012 - 1923 + 221/365) = 90237.99. --OhEidhin (talk) 09:02, August 18, 2012 (UTC) SD 90237.66