Early starfleet.

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Enterprise' started by WraithDukat, Feb 18, 2013.

  1. Hartzilla2007

    Hartzilla2007 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Actually its not. We saw A Constitution next to an NX in In A Mirror Darkly, the Constitution was considerably bigger.
     
  2. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Flagship class?

    The flagship is the ship the carries the flag. Any ship can carry the flag. Be in charge. Since the flag is more about the ships Captain than the ship itself, but a Captain or Admiral expected to be the supreme commander of any engagement is not going to be driving a dinky little rowboat, but still the better Captain is more important than the superior gunship no matter what Janeway, who is in charge of a dinky little rowboat might say...

    If not for that regulation, we'd assume that the guy who looks ten years older than Kathryn would have 10 years seniority in the rank of Captain over her, and should have gotten command of the fleet, but no... Voyager had more torpedoes than Equinox which means that Voyager is tactically superior and Janeway should have promoted herself to Fleet Captain.

    Calling Kirks Enterprise a "Heavy Battle Cruiser" happened in Star Trek III, and those same Klingon's where the only people in all of Star Trek to use the term "transfer the Flag" but then considering all the higher ranked officers are called flag officers arn't all ships then flagships?

    Maybe "ship of the line" is what you were looking for?
     
  3. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Plus a couple of dozen that would like to, but aren't even allowed to call themselves countries.

    Just goes to show that the UN now is close to its version of 2150, whereas United Earth might have started out just as humbly as the UN in 1945 did, representing fifty-one out of the about 150-170 nations around at the time.

    Here?

    http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/4x19/inamirrordarkly2_504.jpg

    That's just perspective at work. Window row comparisons and the like support the backstage specs of Archer's ship being a bit larger than Kirk's, actually - that is, the saucer is wider. The secondary hull of Kirk's ship is a rather negligible component in any case.

    Technically, "flag officer" begins at the rank of Commodore, or possibly Rear Admiral. Plenty of starships in TOS with a Commodore in command, possibly also serving as flagships in the sense of leading formations (the Lexington had three "wingmen", but we never learned whether the Constellation had any).

    Flagship in the civilian sense of "best, prettiest and the one we want to present in our parades and sales pitches" is probably what Flagship of the Federation means whenever Picard calls his TNG vessel that. It's not something we'd associate with Kirk's ship, considering she's not really non pareil, but it might apply to Archer's.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  4. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Archers ship is so IMPOSSIBLY far away from the sphere of human influence (he was 20 years from Earth at warp 1 by the 5th episode, but bumped into the Maywheaters in episode 10. Well thought out there Braga.) that whatever was the Flagship before Enterprise was built, is probably still the Flagship.
     
  5. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    No, it isn't.

    The NX class is 225 meters long, 135.8 meters wide, 33.3 meters high.

    The Constitution class is 289 meters long. We don't know its width, but we do know its height is also greater than an NX, due to the secondary hull.

    Also, the mass of the NX is much less. The NX is about 80,000 tons in mass; the Connie is almost a million.
     
  6. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    No, the novels establish United Earth to have been founded in 2130. 2123 was from an ENT promotional website.
     
  7. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Equally as noncanonical.

    What actually happened in 2123 was that the Up the Long ladder people's great great grand parents, said "fuck this, Earth sucks, Irish Hobo's out!"
     
  8. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    So what? It's all equally fictional. :p
     
  9. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    The NY and NZ classes.

    The only reason the NX-01 was decommissioned was so that it wouldn't have been the first Federation Starfleet vessel called Enterprise. That doesn't mean the NX class itself was a failure.

    Einstein class?

    I believe the saucer is the same size as the Constitution class, not the entire ship.
     
  10. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    There are deeper degrees of fiction.

    You know what canon means.

    If it happened on TV or a Movie.
     
  11. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    From the book Federation: The First 150 Years.
    But since the NX saucer incorporates all the enginnering stuff that the Connie puts in the secondary hull, there would be much less space for people and much more machinery, IMO.
     
  12. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    No need for the saucer to accommodate "all" of the stuff, as the ship also has the sizeable engine booms for the purpose.

    Most of Kirk's ship is empty space, literally - space outside the hull accounts for most of the volume within the box that the greater length and height indicate. Kirk's ship also has bigger engines, main culprits for the greater length, but people aren't berthed there in the general case. In terms of supposedly habitable volume, the difference is minimal... Certainly much smaller than the difference between 430 crew and 80 crew.

    I'm sort of disappointed they went with the Famous Scientists theme - a theme of Rivers of Scotland would have been more interesting. ;)

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  13. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Einstein "Exceeding the speed of light is impossible."

    Cochrane "My ass it is."

    The name of the class of that ship was chosen (in the fictional world?) by a sarcastic asshole (that word again!) with a sick smug sense of humour.

    It would be like calling a new modern US Aircraft Carrier the "USS Joey Stalin".
     
  14. Infern0

    Infern0 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    According to Trek Lit (and it makes sense) The NX was decomissioned because of the Earth-Romulan war where the cost of the NX class was too high to justify production when they could make several cheaper, just as well armed ships for the same price
     
  15. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Then again, with the war over, should it not have been cheaper to just scrap a hundred of those cheaper ships and send out a single Enterprise with the liberated resources? Supposedly, the Daedalus class was crap in deep space, unable to do even a fraction of the job of an Enterprise.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  16. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The final episode said that humans were building warp 7 ships, which given their new alliance with the Vulcans and all the rest who had to hand over their future tech to dim little backward humanity really makes you think that the Humans were just building Vulcan ships now. This "intermingling" totally and completely invalidates the opening credits... 2161 was the end of humanity standing on the merits of it's own history driving to the future. Now every human being going to school gets the benefit of a million years (Yes a million years) of Vulcan Astrohistory and other hard science.

    Enterprise wasn't being decomissioned completely, it was joining the "mothball fleet".

    The mothball fleet was one of two things.

    A. A graveyard.

    B. A fleet of ships with such awkardly slow engines that it's silly to send them out of Earth's solar system. Slow stody warp vessels are still great impulse powered gunships.
     
  17. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Well, humans were dreaming of building warp 7 ships as of "TATV". One wonders if anything ever came out of it.

    Is Kirk's ship a warp 7 vessel, say? Scotty gets a cardiac arrest every time Kirk orders a speed higher than warp 6... OTOH, it seems that any ship can reach arbitrarily high speeds with sufficiently many people sitting on the safety valve - this merely shortens the expected lifetime of the ship and the crew to varying degrees.

    Archer's ship for some reason never had to suffer the indignity of traveling way faster than the recommended maximum speed. I wonder why? Something inherent in the engines? Or just a general strategy of avoiding tugging Superman's cape?

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  18. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    You don't believe in the warp recalibration?

    How Kirk could fly at warp 14 (Warp 36 if you count TAS), but warp ten is infinite speed to Picard, however futureboy Riker is zooming forward at Warp 13 in All Good Things.

    It's certainly a possibility that the Warp Scale could have been recalibrated between Archers time and Kirks as well?

    Leagues, Knots, mph, kph, mach numbers, fractions of C... Multiples of the Speed of light?

    It happens all the time.

    um.

    How do you know when you're dealing with a leap light year and not an ordinairy light year?
     
  19. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    Actually if we want to go strictly by canon sources, it would seem that the NX class was superceded by the "warp 7 beauties" Reed mentions in TATV. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the NX class ceased production or that ships of that class weren't still operational after 2161.

    EDIT- looks like Guy Gardener and Timo beat me to the punch :)
     
  20. jespah

    jespah Taller than a Hobbit Moderator

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    It's possible that, for historical significance, it was retired so as to become the museum it clearly is in TATV (one of the few bits of TATV that actually makes any freakin' sense). I like to think of it a bit like Old Ironsides.