so what happend to all the Vulcan, Andorian and Telelrite ships? were they all NCC'ed until a standard design was made ?
But there are Federation starships, and then there are Federation Starfleet starships. A prefix with a double S for the latter defends its place here... Exactly, because this is what the show tells us. How so? We're only talking about Starfleet and its registry schemes here - and we can tell Starfleet hasn't done any exploring. Why this would be, we can speculate on. There isn't anything to explore until one invents a ship capable of reaching outside the Vulcan sphere of influence, apparently. But Archer is the first to study strange new worlds, and it shows in his lack of experience and skill, as well as in the nature of the "firsts" he scores. We have evidence of none - even the Valiant, a mission failure, precedes Starfleet, which wasn't created until some time after Archer's youth. Timo Saloniemi
About "U.S.S." - although TOS establishes that it stands for "United Space Ship", I kinda like what the old Heavy Cruiser Evolution Blueprints did, saying it stood for United Federation of Planets - Starfleet Division - Starship.
Which is probably the same thing, because the latter is a mouthful and would inevitably get shortened in everyday use. "United Star Ship" is simply akin to saying "the States" or "America" when meaning "The United States of America"... ...Whereas "United Space Ship" is an easy mistake to make. Timo Saloniemi