Topic: What ever Happened to the Consitution and what is the difference between the Con

[Nemesis]

Were Stardates intended to be "confusing" or were they the result of warping time? 

The original Pilot has Pike ordering "Time Warp factor" not Warp factor".  One of the landing party explains to the (fictitious) castaways that "they have broken the time barrier" to explain the speed of the Enterprise.    So the stardate system could be because where you were in time varied depending on where in space you were.  So you might have an earlier Stardate be later in your personal experience. 

[TAnimaL]

According to "The Making Of Star Trek" (Whifield 1969)  and other sources, stardates were intended to avoid using dates and years and to sound "futuristic," but certainly became confusing. Sometimes they'll talk as tho the 20th Century was "two centuries ago" and some times "300 yrs ago". They certainly weren't intended to hold up to fannish scrutiny! And the tech in "The Cage" was still very unfixed in terms of the ST that came later, borrowing more from "Forbidden Planet" than anything else. It was only later that the stardates really became linear, especially TNG onward.

It's a bit of a fudge, but one could imagine warp technology evolving over the years, and in Pike's time there had been a breakthrough to Warp 7 or 8 (like the Warp 5 barrier ENT talked about) that made the ride different until the tech got better. Remember, in the full pilot (not aired as part of "The Menagerie," so therefore not "canon"), when Pike orders the time warp the bridge gets translucent and Kelso signals with his fingers that they hit warp 7, as if they couldn't speak.

I'm sure that later in life Kirk would have quoted the esteemed Dr. Henry Jones Jr.  - "It's not the years, but the mileage." All that warp travel, plus occasional time-travel, not to mention alien posession, body transfers, mugato poisoining, etc., must have aged a person. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but Kirk's age is never mentioned in the movie era. After all that travel, who knows.

Just found this interesting page on Stardates:
http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.ca/2013/07/captains-log-stardate-unknown.html

[Corbomite]

Part of the problem was that they were broadcasting them out of production sequence. Fans noticed immediately that the star dates seemed to jump around a lot and wrote letters asking what was going on. They came up with some flim-flam to explain it. I think that is in The Making of ST too IIRC.

[Corbomite]

I'd always assumed they'd used some kind of galactic measure as that would apply to the whole galaxy and make conversions from local time easier. That article TAnimaL linked seems to indicate that as well, but not in the way I imagined it.

They never got into it much, but forcing species that have to work together onto the same schedule would cause havoc with circadian rhythms and have certain health and other biological issues. Capt. Sisko alludes to that a bit when he complains about getting used to a twenty-six hour day. Since Bajor wasn't part of the Federation, they were forced into their time schedule, not the Fed one they were used to.

Of course they have a show to write and sometimes little details get in the way and it's just easier to ignore them or assume science has come up with a way to offset that particular problem.