What is your personal head canon?

I honestly do think this. Why else cast such a old actor as Kirk when Kirk is 28 unless the plan is to have an older Kirk pop up

 

I’ve thought this before, and I think even the latest Discovery kind of supports it:

A Starfleet ship’s command crew doesn’t just head the various departments — it’s also the ship’s primary exploration/operations team, the main “astronauts” that the rest of the crew exists to support. That’s why bridge crew are so commonly chosen for away teams.

 

I think it's more of the Senior Staff / Department heads want the fun jobs for themselves, and they use their ranks to volunteer themselves for all the interesting away missions.

Only not going on them when they have more important matters to attend to or are pre-occupied or assigned to some other task.

If you were the Department Head of ___ Department, you had the opportunity to go on the away mission, or assign a junior officer, wouldn't you be tempted to go on many occaisions?

Especially if it sounds interesting, full of intrigue, or something new & shiny?

 

Possibly ten.

In "The Alternative Factor" the Enterprise was at ground zero of the "winking-out phenomenon" that according to Starfleet involved "timewarp distortion." Lazarus's vessel was allegedly a time-ship that had engaged in time travel, so causality loops could have played a part in the breakdown of physical laws that Kirk prevented.

In "The Jihad" Kirk and Spock were gone for only a few minutes, while their mission seemed to have taken hours. How the Vedala accomplished that is never explained.

 

We should punish Kirk for this...

...and this...

 

[*Scowls in Dulmer and Lucsly*]

 

The Prophets did not completely change Zek back in "Prophet Motive". Many of the reforms that he originally advocated in that episode, courtesy of the Revised Rules of Acquisition, were presumably implemented for real in "The Dogs of War".

 

Pre-Emptive Head Canon (if that's a thing): I don't normally do the Kelvin Films but this one jumped out at me, so here we go. I heard this from someone somewhere else, so I can't claim credit, but I've adopted it...

The Enterprise in the 2009 Film wasn't built, it was re-built. In the prequel movie, if it happens, the Enterprise will be under the command of Captain April. In order to only be a prequel to the Kelvin Films, it has to be set from 2233 onward.

So, the Kelvin Enterprise was older than we thought.

Now I have to go post something about Discovery or Picard, because I feel so weird after stepping so far out of my lane.

 

Appropriate for the name-drop this past week, I think the Ferengi are on the other side of Tzenkethi space. That's why it took so long for the UFP to make official contact.

 

It's been a while, but isn't the Kelvin Enterprise supposed to be enormous compared to the Prime Enterprise?

I seem to remember I think the production people made comments where I think the dimensions would mean it's bigger than both the Enterprise-D and Enterprise-E.

 

Yup, that's what they were going for. I've seen that illustration too.

 

Longer, certainly, and definitely larger than the Enterprise-E, which for all its length has a surprisingly small volume (less than the C, or even just the D's saucer on its own). The volumetrics I calculated for the Abramsprise show that the D still has a slightly larger volume.

 

Yes but it's now 2024 and the SNW Enterprise is explicitly the same ship as the TOS Enterprise but is significantly bigger also. So I don't think these things matter much.

 

Warp factor is the number of shells of the warp bubble surround the ship. Warp 1 is 1 shell, warp 5 is 5 shells, etc... Due to improvements over time, the same amount of warp shells resultetld in an increase of overall speed. This explains why warp 5 in TOS is slower than warp 5 in TNG, despite the fact they both are the same warp factor. This also explains why in TOS the Enterprise could go over warp 10 on occasion.

 

Like phone numbers, the system of assigning hull numbers has changed over the centuries. Any semblance to consecutive numbering is purely coincidental.

 

In the very early days, it was sequential and class/project based.

It quickly devolved from that once we got to 5-Digits (NCC-#####) era of StarShip and Project scopes & build orders got so huge that it was more feasible to re-use old NCC values from lost ships or names of ships that were retired.

 

Honestly, this line of thinking could probably also apply to stardates.

They're sorta sequential and make sense within a given series (e.g., TNG era, advancing 1,000 stardate = 1 year). But trying to apply that uniformly across all of Star Trek to figure out the corresponding Gregorian calendar dates falls apart rather quickly.

 

Yeah and other scenarios exist as well. Matt Jefferies design-plus-hull-number scheme, block numbering based on shipyards, mothballed hulls recommissioned with new names and numbers because the old names had passed on to newer ships, etc.
Just as long as the whole thing is sufficiently bureaucratic and messy enough to cover every contingency.

 

Hell, we also have direct on-screen evidence from the second Defiant that registry numbers can be reused without any alphabetical suffixes at all. Just to add a whole new layer of complexity and confusion.

 

My head canon for this - officially the registry for the new Defiant was the same as the Sao Paulo, but they changed it on the hull just to thumb their noses at the Dominion.