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A small thing that bugs me about post-2009 Trek is the way stardates have been handled extremely poorly or else completely abandoned. The argument is that they're silly, stupid, meaningless, and the audience doesn't know what they mean so they achieve no narrative purpose.
None of those things are true. I love stardates. Even if you don't know how they work and don't care, they do communicate something very important: The Federation doesn't run on a calendar based upon the culture and celestial movements of a single member planet.
Originally, BTS, the reason for stardates was to keep "when" Star Trek was set vague. But that's really firmly established now, and with constantly doing prequels and sequels it's become in the franchise's interest to make it clear when they're set in relation to older Trek.
But you can still say it's 2256 or 2399 and use stardates. Or at least use them well. The TOS-reboot movies just made stardates the AD year with a decimal point, because that gave you the same cadence of a real stardate but would be "easier for audiences to follow"
Which speaks a lot to the way those movies worked - the trappings of Trek but none of the thought. An Earth year with a decimal point is a terrible method of timekeeping and also isn't a "stardate". That's just the date.
Then there's Discovery, which decided to use stardates but not in any way pay attention to how they work. Instead they went with the "they're random meaningless numbers" assumption that many viewers have. Which isn't great when you're the ones making the show.
So we got stardates that placed DIS as contemporary to TOS, and were also completely inconsistent episode to episode, such that at the end of Season 2 when they had to list off a bunch of them in a row they ended up retconning what stardate several S2 episodes took place on.
Finally, Picard didn't use them at all, just Earth calendar dates, as part of Chabon's whole strategy to make Trek "connect" with the audience by making the dawn of the 25th century feel like the mid-21st century plus warp drive, transporters, and aliens.
Aaaanyways, here's how they work:
1000 units is a year. The decimal point is a 10th of a unit. They go up as time goes forward. That's it. TNG starts on 41153.7 and ends seven years later on 47988.0
Nemesis takes place a little under nine years later: 56844.9
1000 units is a year. The decimal point is a 10th of a unit. They go up as time goes forward. That's it. TNG starts on 41153.7 and ends seven years later on 47988.0
Nemesis takes place a little under nine years later: 56844.9
