When Is Starfleet Academy Set?
Although the show is somewhat vague about it, Starfleet Academy is set in the late 32nd century—approximately around the year 3190, a similar timeframe to when Star Trek: Discovery‘s fourth season takes place, which had previously mentioned the reopening of the institute to a new class of cadets in its premiere. The show is, at the very least, set some time after the events of Discovery‘s third season, which saw United Earth rejoin the Federation after a century of independence, as Starfleet Academy itself—based out of the starship USS Athena—spends much of its time docked at the Academy’s ancestral home near the Presidio in San Francisco.
I thought it was obvious that the show is set after Discovery? In the fourth season the Academy reopened on the station/ship where headquarters was; Earth agreed to rejoin the Federation at the end of the fourth season (not the third), and it would have taken time to finalize Earth’s re-entry and then more time to reach a point where Starfleet Academy would move back.
Taking place almost a thousand years after what we would typically consider “contemporary” Star Trek in the late 23rd century period occupied by the likes of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager
Those shows were all set in the 24th century. I really don’t trust the accuracy of this article.
There’s been a little bit of vagueness about the details - even in the recent SFX article, Kurtzman hedged a little bit about just how much it overlaps with Discovery.
“The new show synchronizes with the first two years of Starfleet returning to its full form. The safest way to look at it is it’s like when Discovery ends, we begin - but there’s kind of a two-year overlap.”
So it might be (or parts of it might be) running concurrently with Discovery season 5. It probably doesn’t matter very much.
(although the ongoing IDW comic Star Trek: The Last Starship, whose writers previously teased to io9 that it had connections to the events of Starfleet Academy, suggested that the Federation was on the verge of incorporating every known galactic civilization into the Federation at the time of the Burn, with the Gorn being the last intergalactic outliers)
Although Klingons had been mentioned multiple times across Discovery‘s later seasons, the show never explored much of what happened to the Klingons by the 32nd century.
It’s interesting that they brought up The Last Starship in one context, but didn’t carry that forward to the discussion of the Klingons. As I understand it (without having actually read it), according to the comic,
Spoilers for Star Trek: The Last Starship
The Klingons did join the Federation, but a sect known as “The Black Path” attacked Earth in the wake of the Burn. This directly led to Earth’s secession from the Federation, and presumably the Klingons’ as well.
