Ok perhaps the disappearance of the Ambassador Class can be linked to Yesterday's Enterprise. A handful were built for testing and deployment and suddenly one, the most FAMOUS one vanishes. Rumors circulate, and intel reveals that the Romulans managed to capture it intact, with living crew-members. It is decided that no further units will be built with that design using that technology-base because the Romulans know every detail and weakness. It is felt this would prove a liability in a conflict.... which never occures because the Romulans withdraw from contact for many years.
That's a pretty cool idea - hey, perhaps they retired Archer's ship early for the same reason, realizing that every belligerent in the neighborhood had hijacked said vessel sufficiently often or for a sufficient length of time to compromise her military secrets. I'd argue that Ambassador is the largest of the Excelsior family, but not the best solution overall - just like Galaxy is the largest of her family, but only built in relatively small numbers compared with related smaller designs. Production of the giants would finish when the limited need for them was met, while production of the mediumweights would continue until the far greater need for them would in turn be met. Hence the Excelsior generation would extend from NCC-2000 to NCC-45000 or so, save for late experiments, while the Galaxy generation would begin with something like NCC-57000 and run to NCC-72000 - but random factors would dictate that the behemoths of each generation would be built at different relative stages of the generation. Whether there's a generation between those two, it's difficult to tell. There's some family resemblance between the mid-registry Steamrunner and the later Sabre, but all the other designs on that general vein are in the realm of fanfic... Timo Saloniemi
A nice theory, but there are two problems with it (or at least one problem that's canon): a. The disappearance of the Ent-C was a complete mystery until Picard met Sela. So even though we the audience knew what happened, Starfleet didn't, so there wouldn't have been any intel about the Romulan involvement. The last official Starfleet/Romulan contact was the Tomed Incident of 2311, so no one knew about what happened at Narendra III. b. According to my timeline (which of course is conjectural based on registry numbers), the Ent-C was destroyed 30 years after the Ambassador class was commissioned. So Starfleet had thirty years in which to build a ton of Ambassadors before the Ent-C met her fate, so the Romulans wouldn't have been the reason why this didn't happen. Also, if Starfleet did have intel that the Ent-C was captured intact with a living crew, at the least there would have been a rescue mission to retrieve the survivors and the ship, and at the most, the Federation would have declared war against the Romulans. Neither of those things happened.
Actually, the disappearance of the E-C was only a mystery to the folks of the "war timeline". In the timeline that was created at the conclusion of "Yesterday's Enterprise", the Feds readily attributed the disappearance of the E-C to Romulan aggression at the defense of the Klingon world Narendra III, as Picard states in "Redemption". Timo Saloniemi
Yes, you're right about that. Picard makes it sound like it was just a story or a bunch of rumors, but I'm curious as to why Starfleet didn't at least check into it. Did they not want to contact the Romulans that badly that they just ignored rumors that missing Starfleet officers could possibly be alive? (Honestly, I think this is just an oversight by the writers of "Redemption." The fate of the Ent-C should have still remained a mystery. That would have made Sela's existence that much more mind-boggling to Picard, and why Starfleet didn't look into the Narendra III incident further).
Did Sela note that the actual ship survived? For if she did not, it seems more likely that some of the crew went for the escape pods and were picked up by the Romulans.
It would seem that Starfleet knew the E-C had been present to defend Narendra III, but that there were no Fed or Klingon spatial survivors to tell the story of how that defense actually went. So Starfleet in the regular timeline would have no leads to go by, no reason to assume anybody from the ship survived. The result of the investigation to the loss of the ship would be "Blasted to bits by Romulans without survivors or cooperative eyewitnesses", end of story. In the war timeline, we might assume that there were some Klingon witnesses to the "cowardly retreat" of the E-C, and that they told Starfleet nothing but went on a war footing and eventually attacked. Or at least the planetside Klingons knew the E-C had come to protect them, and then the Romulans came and won, and the Klingons afterward were able to ascertain that there was no wreckage of the Starfleet vessel anywhere -> cowardice! Rumors of Federation survivors? Since when did rumors travel out of the isolationist RSE? Timo Saloniemi
Wouldn't be that hard to get rumors out of the Romulan Empire. Free-traders that run between both the Federation and the Romulan Empire would carry the rumors out with them.
I admit it's been awhile since I have seen the episode, but was it established as fact that the Klingons saw the E-C depart the field of battle? Or was it just that her absence (and the assistance her presence would have provided) never led to the gradual thawing of relations (perhaps started with Khitomer in ST 6) which resulted in the Klingons entering into an alliance with the Federation, but instead continued mistrust and misunderstandings eventually led to war.
The latter, apparently - although nothing was stated out loud. About what? Picard in the final timeline never heard about any survivors to the E-C debacle. All he knew was that the ship had been lost fighting the Romulans - a bit of information that would easily have reached him because the loss had been at a Klingon colony, and Klingons were allies. Perhaps Romulans in that battle conquered and annexed Khitomer, making it difficult to get information out later on, but we never quite learn this, and it wouldn't affect matters much anyway. Timo Saloniemi
From the script for "Redemption, Pt. II": GUINAN: How much do you know about what happened to the last ship named Enterprise? PICARD: The Enterprise C? It was lost...at the battle of Narendra Three...while defending a Klingon outpost from the Romulans. GUINAN: And... the survivors? PICARD: There were stories... that there might have been prisoners, taken back to Romulus. But those were just rumors.
Has anyone considered that perhaps the Ambassador was simply an unsuccessful design? Or that there was a policy shift in Starfleet's shipbuilding; hence the 2nd gen Excelsiors? Maybe they suffered an unusually high attrition rate, either through a series of disastrous exploration missions or the Cardassian & Tzenkethi wars? It's possible there were only ever meant to be a handful of Ambassadors built anyway and it was just a stopgap because the Galaxy project wasn't moving forward as quickly as expected. That last one might make some sense as the Ambassador does seam like a bit of the throwback the the old Connie and Excelsior, rather than a logical progression. Fair evidence that the design was made in a relative hurry from tried and true technology, not meant to push the envelope so much as fill a void. Maybe they were built for a war with the Klingons that never came and when relations improved the line was terminated and resources reallocated to other ships.
Also, as we well know, the later appearances of the model featured many alterations, such as redone ramscoops and lifeboat stations - but also changes that would be rather massive in in-universe terms, namely nudging the positions of the saucer and the nacelles vs. the secondary hull. Perhaps the original design was outright faulty, requiring these expensive changes to work properly? Starfleet could have been planning on series production (at least on the silver-bullet scale of the later Galaxies), but decided to jump a generation of giant ships, perhaps first going for the stopgap Niagara in small numbers and then trying out the Galaxy. We could similarly argue that the Sovereign design was faulty at first, requiring the structural changes from ST:FC to NEM, and reducing the numbers built or the pace of production. Of course, the changes in both cases could be minor fiddling or "upgrades" rather than absolutely vital patches. But it does seem that the E-E was almost immediately subjected to a refit. Perhaps the same happened to the first Ambassadors, save for NCC-1701-C, or after NCC-1701-C's demise. Timo Saloniemi
Assuming that's true, then it's not surprising that we see LaForge commanding a Galaxy class later in life. He got fed up with having to deal with the Sovereign's problems and having to refit them every few years!
A quick and dirty explanation for the Enterprise E's altered appearance: Maybe she took part in a fleet-battle at some point and being THE ship of ships she suffered some serious damage which had to be delt with, so she was torn down and refit to Sovvie Block II standards. Or maybe: The damage incurred in FC required a lengthy yard stay. Here she was altered to Sovvie Block I-A standards. How long between FC and Insuckrection?? After the battles in Insuckrection the ship is subjected to another lengthy yard overhaul, while in the yard she is refitted to Sovvie Block II standards and given a serious upgrade in firepower. Post refit she sees combat duty mopping up twords the end of the Dominion War and its aftermath. After a year or two of near constent combat and "firepower diplomacy" she enters the yard AGAIN for a refit, and this is the configuration we see in Nem. The Sovvie is a hanger-queen design in my RPG universe, it was built rapidly using bleeding edge methods and materials and fitted with a mixture of old and new technology... it was intended to get a battle-capable ship to the front lines ahead of the "next Borg incrusion" but the few that were built proved to be tricky at best, with the Enterprise requiring over a year of shakedown and return trips to the yard to iron out some of the more serious flaws. The original Sovvie and the two other non-canon ships were the same way. During combat operations they proved difficult to repair in the field due to the mismatched generations of technology (some key systems were built from scratch and there were no spare parts in the field) and exotic hull materials made welding/bonding difficult without special equipment. Lastly, due to thier intended role as front-line units they routinly got the crap kicked out of them, often vigorously... leading to the problems mentioned above being maginifed several dozen times.
Wrong. Seriously, those DS9 kitbashes were never meant to be taken seriously as bona fide starship classes, while the conjectural classes were. As you keep saying, Rev, wouldn't you rather have an original design for these classes instead of some kitbash that a 10 year old kid could have built?