I was reading "Beneath the Raptors Wing" and Noticed that all of the NX class vessels in the book were after shuttles in the currently retiring shuttle fleet. Did anyone else notice this, and do you think the was intended, or just a coincidence?
It is certainly intentional, since the ships are named in the same sequence as the space shuttles: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour. And since onscreen canon gave us Enterprise followed by Columbia, it seems that may have been the pattern they had in mind on the show. Though Columbia was more specifically named by the writers in honor of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia who were lost in 2003, shortly before the ship was introduced to the show. So it may have been coincidence that the first two ships were named in that order, but the books' naming of the subsequent ships is surely intentional.
Though interestingly, the Enterprises A, B, C, D, and E being commissioned in alphabetical order was completely by accident.
It'd be nice to see an NX-class ship named after a Russian spacecraft. Unlike what the Enterprise intro would have the viewers think, Russia actually beat the US into space. I'd hope the earth of 2151 is over the cold war. NX Sputnik, you are ready for launch!
There only ever were two of the big orbiters: the one that flew in space was named Buran, which literally means something like blizzard, and the other was a test article that wasn't named. Sometimes the whole program was called Buran, and it's not quite clear whether the word "Buran" prominently spelled on the side of the spacecraft was the name of the spacecraft itself or the entire program. An earlier test article, a small lifting body, was affectionately called Ptichka, or tiny bird, although that was a rather informal name. It seems that the same nickname was used for the projected second big orbiter - but again it would have been unofficial, and some sources (see Wikipedia) suggest the second big orbiter would have been named Burya (another sort of storm), had it ever been completed. So, if we want NX names beyond the US five, we might use Russian words for storms. And it's anybody's guess whether our heroes would name NX-09 Avenger like their mirror counterparts did... Perhaps Avenger was the name of some other early spacecraft from the English-speaking part of the world (possibly something built by Khan or his fellow supermen in India)? Timo Saloniemi
Given the names of the other Mirror-NXs (one of them's called Khans' Revenge or something like that) I'd doubt it, though the Legacy videogame has NX 09 being the Avenger. But it's a crap game, so we don't have to fit in with it anyway...
I propose that at least one NX be named Vostok or Buran; one should be named Shenzhou for the first Chinese manned spacecraft and one should be named Ariane for the ESA space rocket. in MY romulan war fan-fic, i used Buran, Shenzhou, Dedalo and the US shuttle names and Yamato from Japan. Dedalo is Spanish for Daedalus.
Wiki says the names of the first three Soviet shuttles were Buran, Ptichka, and Baikal in that order.
HM Bark Endeavour was Captain James Cook's ship on his first voyage, which explored much of the South Pacific in the 1770's. His methods were very Trek-like, his ships were humane, and he looked after his men. He proved the usefulness of the chronometer, his maps were fantastically accurate, and his use of anti-scorbutics to prevent scurvy led to their widespread adoption in the Royal Navy. HMS Discovery was one of two ships on this third voyage. The Columbia was a private explorer under Robert Gray, and was the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. Gray named the Columbia River after the ship and was a contemporary of George Vancouver. It is the namesake of the shuttle. See the pattern? The remaining names from Cook's journeys are HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure. Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British explorer corvette in the 1870's. Atlantis was named after a Woods Hole Institute research ship. Alternatively if you want to continue the Woods Hole theme, one could use Knorr (discovered the Titantic) or Melville (sister ship that serves with the Scripps Institute in California).
Well, going back to the book, the NX program is "on hold" in favour of pumping out uprated Daedalus-class ships with Warp 5 engines. Only Enterprise and Endeavour are currently active, the rest were destroyed or lost in the case of Columbia. As the Romulan War progresses and we get closer to the founding of the Federation, the authors have a good deal of freedom to save or kill the NX program. Forming the familiar Federation Starfleet would cause a good deal of administrative upheaval. Also if anyone thinks the NX-class was fated to die, by 1942 the US Navy had lost 4 of its 8 carriers. Lexington, Hornet, Wasp and Yorktown were sunk and Enterprise was out of action for serious repairs. All that was left were the Saratoga and Ranger. The US Navy had to borrow HMS Victorious from the Royal Navy as a reinforcement until the Essex class arrived.
I was always of the opinion that the NX class would only consist of six ships: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor. By the launching of the final ship, Starfleet would be moving into the next generation of ships class, most likely the NY class...presuming of course that past ships went from NA to NW, and there were only limited build runs of each class.
I never liked the idea of canceling the NX program (why cancel your heavy cruiser class during the middle of a war?) At any rate, after the space shuttle line, I always assumed the next set would be named after the original six frigates of the USN. NX-07 United States NX-08 Constellation NX-09 Constitution NX-10 Chesapeake NX-11 Congress NX-12 President As this was the war, the rest would be named for Allied, Italian, and Japanese battleships and aircraft carriers of the Second World War. Also, they all had that new super-cool secondary hull.
Why? In fact, if we jump from pre-unification space programs to pre-unification navies, wouldn't the British Royal Navy be the one that would be regarded as more historic than the U.S. Navy, since it was the first modern navy? If the United Earth Starfleet named its NX-class ships after the U.S. space shuttle fleet because of their status as the first reusable space ships, it would make more sense to assume they'd be naming ships after the first modern navy's ships rather than just naming them after the U.S. Navy ship's just 'cos.