What is the age of the Enterprise (NCC-1701)?
- Thread starter PhaserLightShow
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It's certainly the way to get the point of the question across clearly. The full text can have footnotes and qualifications.
I guess I'd wonder if a training missions Captain would count? As far as Decker goes, they never left Spacedock with him in command. So, they would both be footnotes at best.
The reporter wasn't in the business of including or excluding anybody - she was just counting the times Kirk had commanded an Enterprise.
The very fact that Kirk's five years were considered so exceptional and significant more or less dictates already that we saw only a fraction of the COs of the assorted Enterprises. Apparently, skippers in Starfleet come and go, many perhaps spending but a few months on a Constitution before moving on.
Timo Saloniemi
The very fact that Kirk's five years were considered so exceptional and significant more or less dictates already that we saw only a fraction of the COs of the assorted Enterprises. Apparently, skippers in Starfleet come and go, many perhaps spending but a few months on a Constitution before moving on.
Timo Saloniemi
I don't know that anyone would count or even know about who were the commanding officers when the ship wasn't in active service. Even Spock admits they he is only captain in a training capacity, if they were to go on actual duty, the senior officer must assume command.
Star Trek II said:
I think it would depend. Captain Kirk may not have gotten a choice other than to defer. He didn't argue with Spock about it being a regulation. Kirk was forced to defer to Galactic High Commissioner Ferris in "The Galileo Seven".
Yeah, he does say "as a teacher on a training mission", contrasting it with "active duty". You could go either way, on one hand he's just deferring to the senior and more experienced Kirk, or is he saying he's never actively captained the ship? I think it's too vague to say for sure. The subtext of the scene is clear for me, it's about Spock assuring Kirk he is right to take over.
If we work under the idea that Kirk commanded the Enterprise while on active duty for the last 30 years. Then Spock would've never had the opportunity to command it while on active duty. Though he may have left for his own command at some point.
But Kirk probably didn't command her between TMP and TWOK. He was an Admiral. This was discussed earlier in the thread.
Then it would be a safe bet she wasn't on active duty. But that also doesn't mean she was a training vessel during that time. She could have been mothballed. She could've been a test bed vehicle for new technologies, considering she was the first to be upgraded. In TMP, when Kirk takes command, he reverts to wearing captain's stripes and was obviously in command for the shakedown cruise at the end. We simply don't know when Kirk resumed being an Admiral.
We simply don't know.
This is really the truth. That we don't really know.
We all have a kind of 'agreement', it may even form a consensus, about events between movies and episodes. But the reality is that none of that is actually canon. A lot of material is just fandom filling in the gaps with their own theories, or (as I said earlier in the thread) adopting the Okuda's published theories. But just because those theories have been published doesn't make them any more than conjecture (something the Okuda's themselves acknowledge in the preface to both the Chronology and the Encyclopedia.) Truth is, unless it specifically appears on TV or film, then it doesn't count for anything.
(One might make an exception for material from the 'series bibles' that never made it to screen, eg McCoy having a daughter and being divorced, but on the other hand if that information doesn't get used as the basis for stories then it's kind of neat, but also irrelevant. Or so it was until 2009 when the modern Trek movie finally decided to do something with it.)
The only facts we have about Enterprise and her service history are:
Commanded by Robert April (now that TAS is official, time frame indeterminate)
Commanded by Pike (The Cage/The Menagerie, time frame indeterminate)
Commanded by Kirk (TOS, five years)
Major Refit (TMP)
V'Ger Crisis/"Shakedown Cruise" (TMP)
Out of Front Line Service/Training Vessel (TWOK)
Destroyed (TSFS)
The popular fan theories are that April commanded five years, Pike commanded two five year missions, and that Kirk had his own second five year mission after the V'Ger crisis, but the reality is that none of these are "facts", they are only assumptions.
I think the status of TAS is still open for debate. They mine it for material, and sell it to us. But I'm not sure how official they see it as. Especially considering there are some contradictions, a big one being the Bonaventure.
Assumptions is all us Trek fans have in most cases!
We know that 'the Cage' was 13 years before 'the Menegarie'.
We also know Spock served with Pike for 11 years and 4 months. But we don't know how long Pike actually commanded the Enterprise.
Nor indeed whether Pike's tour-of-duty was made up of five year missions, or something less permanent. "His" Enterprise may simply have been doing local 'milk-runs' of the sort we regularly saw 1701-D do, for example, being based at a Starbase or other facility, during which the events surrounding The Cage simply took place.
Kirk's five-year mission is regularly touted as being "historic", and we know the Enterprise's crew compliment basically doubles between Pike and Kirk's commands of the ship, so it's an equally valid theory to suppose that Pike (and possibly even April) were attached to a ship and crew without it being a 'continuing mission', merely a kind of support craft or one that goes out on short term missions, and that Kirk's was the only one to be a "historic" five year service out into the unknown.
The Okuda's theorised that Pike commanded two five year missions, based on The Cage being 13 years ago, Spock serving with him for 11, and Kirk being in the midst of his half-decade as Enterprise skipper. Several people in this thread follow that assumption. It's a reasonable assumption, the dates match up. But there are no actual facts to prove that was actually the case.
Nor, obviously, to disprove it either.
As already stated: There was no "between TMP and TWOK." They are on time tracks as different as the Abrams movies and everything that came before. The ship seen in TWoK and TSFS is not the refit ship from TMP; they just happen to look alike on the outside. No matter what the Okudas and their successors have tried to do chronology-wise, there is a great deal more evidence against TMP-TWOK continuity than there is evidence for such continuity.
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