Registry

[Steve Willis]

The Defiant is larger and obviously can be on independent assignments from DS9

 

[Tomalak]

Yeah, I don't see why a Starship would be tied to the station like that when the smaller runabouts were registered like independent ships. The Defiant also had that "experimental" registry number, long after the Defiant class had seemingly gone into production. I liked to think the new Defiant was really NCC-74205. Keeping the original one "NX" might have been linked to the cloak, which presumably the new one lacked - the agreement with the Romulans might have stated the cloak was only to be used with asset number NX-74205 so it was never changed.

 

[Longinus]

What ship wouldn't be? But in this case we could argue that Starfleet wanted to play tricks with the Dominion and make them believe that the original Defiant had not been lost at all.

This is actually the best explanation I've ever heard for the Defiant registry issue. Personally I just ignore it and pretend the second one had different registry. It is barely visible on screen anyway.

 

[Tomalak]

Would the Dominion really be that confused and intimidated? Surely they'd just think, "Oh, Starfleet gave Sisko a replacement ship. Maybe we should have just destroyed those escape pods after all?"

 

[Longinus]

Would the Dominion really be that confused and intimidated? Surely they'd just think, "Oh, Starfleet gave Sisko a replacement ship. Maybe we should have just destroyed those escape pods after all?"

I said the best explanation, not a good explanation.

 

[HMS Ark Royal]

Naval ships honor the name by using it again. Just the name though, as far as I know, unless any one knows of a contrary example,

The previous HMS Ark Royal was R09... The new HMS Prince of Wales is going to be built with the pennant number of R09 but it is widely known in naval circles that her name might be changed before launching to HMS Ark Royal. In addition, HMS Endurance was given the pennant number of A171 and, when she was scrapped and replaced, the replacement was also named Endurance and given the same pennant number of A171

Still, one has to think that Captain Harriman must have felt immense pressure in taking command of the Enterprise B.
Did Starfleet consider him to be something special I wonder, a cut above your standard officer?

Of course - its an exceptional officer that kills Kirk

 

[DeepSouthTrekFan]

I think Retconning created much of what we call Trek lore. In the beginning, I guess they were lucky just to hold a story together. So glad it all worked, tho