A reference stardate was a time-keeping system using stardates that were encoded in relation to Earth and Federation history. Notably, these stardates used an additional century and year notation that was different from other stardate systems, based on a coordinated year range that runs differently from the Human calendar. (FASA RPG)
FASA's Star Trek: The Role Playing Game developed the reference stardate system to express dates in a manner with the "flavor" of TOS stardates but which progressed more clearly and logically than did the TOS stardates. The basic timeline used by the reference stardate system was that presented in the Spaceflight Chronology, with some modifications to suit the needs of the game. The year system used in the SFC fails to match real-life events or to conform to the timeline of canon dates, so for the purposes of this wiki, all SFC year dates are presented as reference stardates. 1979 is the final real-life year that can be directly coordinated with the year system originated in the ST reference: Spaceflight Chronology, since the Chronology was completed in this year. As mentioned, after this the events of the Chronology no longer match real-life or canon. This wiki's information on data from the SFC reference date system after 1979 continues on 1980-1999 SFC.
Reference stardates were expressed in the following manner:
"A" was a number, positive, negative or zero, representing the centuries before or after the 2000s. (e.g., -1 for dates in the 1900s, 0 for dates in the 2000s, 2 for dates in the 2200s, etc.)
"BC" represented a two-digit number, the decade and year of the date (e.g., the year 2007 would appear as 0/07, 1984 as -1/84, and 2217 as 2/17).
- If greater specificity was not necessary, some reference stardates would be truncated after these two digits.
"DE" was another two-digit number, between 01 and 12, representing the month of the date. ("01" for January, and so on.)
- Again, if greater specificity was not necessary, reference stardates would usually be truncated here.
"fg" was a two-digit number representing the day of the month, and "hi" was a two-digit number representing the hour (of a 24-hour day).
- There are no specific examples, but presumably these could be followed by more two-digit numbers representing minutes and seconds.
July 4, 1776: (reference) Stardate -3/7607.04 (Declaration of Independence signed)
17:40 UT, July 20, 1969: Stardate -1/6907.2017 (landing of Apollo 11)
April 4, 2217-SFC: Stardate 2/1704.04 (Enterprise encounters V'Ger, FASA dating)
February 25, 2007: Stardate 0/0702.25 (date this article was created)
23:37, August 31, 2014: Stardate 0/1408.3123 (Memory Beta's current server date the last time your browser cached this page)
April 15, 2005: Stardate 0/0504.15 (date Memory Beta was started)
|Spaceflight Chronology Timeline|
|1980-1999 SFC • 2000-2049 SFC • 2050-2099 SFC • 2100-2149 SFC • 2150-2199 SFC • 2200-2249 SFC • 2250-2299 SFC • 2300 SFC • 2301 SFC • 2302 SFC • 2303 SFC|