Star Trek Stardate + Warp Visualizer

Comparing sci-fi ships means picking one common yardstick, and speed relative to light is the only one that survives crossing franchises — 'warp 9.6' and '2,000c' both cash out to a multiple of 299,792 km/s. The TNG warp scale isn't linear either: v = w^(10/3)·c up to warp 9, then the curve gets divided by (10−w) above that, so speed diverges toward infinity as w approaches 10 — which is why canon treats warp 10 as an unreachable asymptote, not just 'one more notch.' That's why nudging from warp 9.6 (Enterprise-D's rated max) up to warp 9.975 (Voyager's) is roughly an 18× jump in real speed for a change of only 0.375 in the warp number.

One stardate ticks by in roughly 8 hours and 45 minutes of real time.

In the original 1967 Star Trek Guide, Gene Roddenberry told scriptwriters to invent each episode's stardate by picking any four digits and a decimal — 1313.5, for instance — and to keep it consistent only within a single script, never between episodes. The in-universe excuse was that a stardate depends on a ship's speed and galactic position, so relativity lets it drift. The franchise's most scientific-sounding timestamp was, from the start, a deliberate continuity dodge.