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But the question is, what's more official? A chart made with what seems to be just preliminary information that would change later, and was not meant to be seen up close, or an official publication like the Encyclopedia, made by the same guy who made the chart, with information that he clearly wanted to have supercede this chart?
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That's pretty clear-cut if one just thinks of the fictional Star Trek universe in terms of what we actually see. Intent counts for nothing if it's offscreen; on the other hand, onscreen often starts out as accidental and becomes intentional only in retrospect, when it's quoted in later onscreen material.
There is no
Encyclopedia in Star Trek, even if there is Star Trek in the
Encyclopedia.
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However, that would then mean that these are the class ships of the Apollo and Hokule'a class, which have much higher registries than the respective ships of their class.
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We know of no other
Hokule'a class vessels; the
Tripoli, with an Okudagram-provided low registry from "Unification", has no canonical class identity AFAIK. As far as we can tell, there's no pressing reason for the
Hokule'a to be a class ship, or a
Hokule'a class to exist - but if the class does exist and has this class vessel, there are no contradictions in that case, either.
As for
Apollo class vessels, the
T'Pau has no canon class identity and in any case does not have a NCC registry. The
Ajax has no class identity, making her low registry irrelevant to the argument. The same goes for the
Clement, whose registry appears to be noncanonical as well.
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Are you referring to that mentioned-but-not-seen Excelsior class Lexington from TNG?
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No, I mean that if we are to say that the
Nebula class
Lexington was built as a replacement to the low-registried
Lexington from the list, in the mid-2360s, then in light of the
Endeavour precedent the new
Lexington really should have a 71000 range registry.
But then I go on to say that for all we know, she does. The 61000 range registry for the new
Lexington is noncanon, as we never see any registry on the hull of the
Nebula class
Lexington. So we can pretend that NCC-30405 was, say, a
Niagara, whereas her
Nebula class replacement as seen in DS9 "really" has a registry such as NCC-71447.
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The problem with that is that Sisko's Saratoga has it's number on the hull. We therefore can't reconcile it being the same ship.
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Indeed, this is a rare case where hull labeling does create problems.
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Wasn't the registry of the Excalibur printed on its saucer?
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If so, it was never seen. All the shots that might even in theory have showed the registry were stock footage from "Yesterday's
Enterprise", and all the new shots were from the rear. So, the Okudagram registry can freely take precedence in that respect. The only question remaining is, which Okudagram? Tachyon grid or "Measure of a Man"?
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The Yamato is an interesting case for me. I think that Okuda remembered the name, but not its class, so now we have this situation where one starship has four registries.
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And if we accept a particular one out of the four, we're automatically closing the door for any rationalizations of the rest: if the explicit dialogue reference to NCC-1305-E is the real deal, then any ships preceding this vessel
should have registries in the NCC-1305-Letter format. And probably also any ships succeeding this vessel.
If we dismiss that particular one, then we can pretend that there were multiple different ships. But we still meet a
Galaxy class vessel before we get to read a chart with a 20000-range registry, after which we meet a
Galaxy class vessel again. It's a bit unlikely that the modern ship Riker claimed was NCC-1305-E was really NCC-24383...
OTOH, the discrepancy between the number seen in the Okudagrams of "Contagion" and the number painted on the saucer in the same episode is trivially explained. Not only is the hull number too blurry to really warrant establishing, but the computer readouts may have been corrupted by the software weapon.
Timo Saloniemi