While the specifics of what exactly a Star-date is may elude the majority of casual viewers, it has become as intrinsic to the show as the famous transporters or warp drive, normally featuring at least once per episode since the show’s creation. While its use within narrated captain’s (and crew members’) logs have waned in recent years, it used to be a real staple. Picard is potentially the most famous user, and implementer, of the concept, starting the majority of episode with the phrase.

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The idea behind the concept is fairly simple: they are a means of stating the date. It’s a way for the Federation to establish a more universal, standard method of timekeeping rather than relying on the plethora of different time zones of its members. On Earth alone, there are 24 different time zones, each of these using human/Earth-specific methods of measuring time. When adding more and more cultures into the mix, each from different planets with likely vastly different concepts of time, it’s clear how impossible it would be for the Federation to juggle them all. And so, Star-dates were born. This method of tracking time relied on the tracking of regular external elements, such as solar pulsars and natural events, rather than internal, culture-specific time tracking.

The layout is fairly simple. The large number at the start indicates how many days have passed, where the following number indicates the specific time within the day. For example, take ship’s counselor Deanna Troi’s mouth: “Counselor Deanna Troi, Personal Log, Star-date 44805.3. My mother is on board.” It has been 44805 days since the creation of Star-dates, and the time is 3.

This all becomes a lot more complicated, however, as it is never fully specified the specifics in how Star-date time works. Is this 3 in the morning, or is this just the third hour of the day — if hours are the same as hours in the real world? The lack of a sunrise and sunset makes this all possible, the ship running in watch rotations, making the notion of ‘3’ being early or late in the day entirely subjective to that person’s shift pattern. Audiences are also never given a clear inclination as to how long a star-day is, but again, this is entirely irrelevant to life aboard a spaceship that can theoretically choose a day time.

The non-universe reason as to why Roddenberry chose to use Star-dates in the franchise comes from his initial desire to avoid precisely establishing when the show is set. It’s supposed to be the distant future, but as audiences have seen, sometimes media set in these then-distant futures, riddled with high-tech gadgetry, have come and gone. Back to the Future 2’s future being set in 2015 being a prime example. The franchise would later give more specifics as to how far into the future they were, but at the start, Roddenberry was specifically against it. He wanted to allow for it to be the distant future no matter when the show was watched.

The other necessity behind creating the Star-dates was to avoid having to accurately give clarification as to how long things took. The lack of a precise and trackable watch meant that the show never had to divulge how long it took for them to travel at warp from, say, Earth to Romulus. This allowed for far more creative liberties and avoided a lot of continuity headaches, especially in the early days of the franchise.

It’s worth mentioning that the Kelvin universe films (in another example of complete disregard for a core element of the original franchise) chose to use a different Star-date system. This one put the actual earth year at the start, and then gave a percentage that accounted for how far into the year they were. For example, July 2nd, 2360 would be 2360.50, as this is 50% though the year.

At the end of the day, the use of Star-dates through the franchise helps give logical credibility to the ever expanding world of Star Trek. There are a lot of gaps in the official creation and use of the specifics, but it’s the type of futuristic necessity that makes the universe feel so alive.

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