Proposed Feature: Stardate Function

[Gastove]

Pro: handy, because Numbers are Hard.

Con: stardate is four-digit-year but single-digit-day-and-month. Which means it is terrible.

Thoughts?

[dill]

I'm assuming that you mean to convert from stardate into Gregorian calendar (and vice versa)?

I agree with both your pro and con. But I do think it would be useful!

[karawoo]

This would be a great function to have. The conversion is different in different series though -- see wikipedia.

While the general idea resembles the Julian day currently used by astronomers, writers and producers have selected numbers using different methods over the years, some more arbitrary than others. This makes it impossible to convert all stardates into equivalent calendar dates, especially since stardates were originally intended to disguise the precise era of Star Trek.

But we can probably have some series argument and get close enough.

[Gastove]

So: I've been chewing on how to do this. The punchline, I think, is this: going to a star date is a hell of a lot easier than coming from a star date.

Making a star date would be as simple as taking an input date (string or DateTime) plus a couple args to lubridate and which series you'd like a star date from -- which set of rules, probably defaulting to the current Star Trek movies (least cannon, most legible). Sometimes, a star date will simply be random numbers within a range. Oh boy, probabalistic date times.

Going back is.... harder. I would propose the following assumption: if you're trying to convert a star date back to Gregorian, what you probably want to know is when one even happened relative to another in the Trek universe. (Did Sisko abandon DS9 to the Cardassians before or after Picard became Locutus of Borg?) It could be that what we'd really want is a query-able timeline, which is even harder.

Thoughts?

[Gastove]

I could, for instance, build a parser to scrape this handy timeline on Wikipedia

[karawoo]

🔥 🔥 🌠 🚀 🕥 📆 🔥 🔥

Well, let's give this a shot. Maybe start with the Gregorian-to-stardate function and see how it goes? I think the conversion to stardate should throw a warning if the date can't be converted exactly.