Tutorial #5 - Military Time and StarDates
Our group uses military time. It's a simple concept, but one that can take a little getting used to. Here’s a quick example: six twenty-three a.m. (6:23 a.m.) is written 0623 hours.
No problem there. Six p.m. is a bit more difficult, though. In military time, the clock does not start again at noon, but instead continues to count up until midnight. So six p.m. (6:00 pm) is 6 + 12 or 1800. We then add the word “hours,” after the time. So if we were speaking the time for the previous example, we’d say “eighteen-hundred hours,” or 1800h.
It’s simplest to just add 12 to everything after noon. 4:00 p.m becomes 1600h. 8:00 p.m. becomes 2000h. At midnight, the clock starts over, so you’d say: Zero-hour, or 0h.
Our Website
Please keep in mind that our website has plenty of good information on it. You’ll find the Cadet area the most useful, at first. You can find that by going to our website’s URL, at “http://www.starbase118.net”, and clicking on the “Prospective Members” section.
StarDates
The Star Trek universe uses a special dating system, due to the fact that everyone is moving around the galaxy at different times of the night and day. Our calendar is based on the Earth moving around the sun, but not everyone in StarFleet comes from Earth. So we use a system called “stardates.”
On the show, stardates were usually selected arbitrarily as a series “start value” and an “end value,” so they didn’t really mean anything. For our purposes, though, we need a way to keep track of everything that’s happening In Character. You will be glad to hear that the UFOP Stardate system is very simple indeed. The format of our stardates is as follows:
yyyymm.dd
Where:
yyyy = The current UFOP year
mm = The current REAL month
dd = The current REAL date
The current REAL date is simply the current date. For example, if today is the 18th day of the month, the number you’d put in for “dd” would be 18. Note that the date portion is always two digits, so the 4th of the month would be 04.
The current REAL month is a two digit number representing the real month. If it is January, the number is 01, in February is 02, and so on.
The current UFOP year is figured by adding 377 to the actual current year. So, in the year 2000, we added 377 to create a UFOP year of 2377. In 2004, we added 377 to create a UFOP year of 2381.
When you add all these parts together, you have a stardate. Let’s try one: June 15th, 2004 would become 238106.15. And the time, if it’s 6:30 p.m.: 238106.15 – 1830h.
To make it easy for you, the stardate can always be found on the Main Menu of the members area of the website.
