Why The Huge Gap Between TMP & WOK?

[Christopher]

I always figured he meant the Enterprise was 20 years past her expiration date. That jives with the reason there's no refit: it would cost much more to upgrade the systems than to scrap and replace with a new vessel.

Which makes no sense, because the refit wasn't nearly that long before -- about a decade give or take two years, depending on how you estimate it. Given that the refit was practically a complete rebuilding of the entire ship right down to the spaceframe, there's no sense in calling it obsolete just a decade or so later.

Morrow's "20 years" line has been driving the fans crazy since 1984. It's impossible to reconcile it with the chronology as we know it. I just assume Morrow misspoke. In my e-novella Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again, as an in-joke, I put in a bit where Morrow said he was bad with dates.

As for the reason Starfleet would scrap a ship that was completely rebuilt just 10-12 years before, that's rather harder to explain away. The fan theory I find most plausible is that Starfleet's bureaucrats had embraced the Excelsior project as the next big thing and wanted to allocate their starship construction/maintenance budget to it at the expense of the Constitution class. Maybe it was internal politics, the new guard pushing their own preferred shipbuilding project to put their mark on the fleet while mothballing their predecessors' preferred class -- kinda like how incoming TV network execs may cancel shows their predecessors were identified with in favor of their own pet projects. Then, when the transwarp experiment fizzled, they had to un-mothball the Connies and go back to relying on them for a while longer. (Maybe that's why they had one available to turn into the Enterprise-A -- because it had been completed but not launched due to the suspension of the program.)

 

[Phoenix219]

That's a problem because the Enterprise was captained by others than Kirk for quite a few years before Kirk got her.

So? He's not talking to the other captains. He's talking directly to Kirk, about Kirk's experiences with the Enterprise, and Kirk had taken the Captain's seat 20 years before. It seems like the simplest explanation that can be made to fit both the timeline and the dialouge. It had been 20 years of rough and tumble space adventure since Kirk had personally taken over.... 20 years that Kirk can personally identify with. It fits well enough to work for me.

 

[locutus101]

So? He's not talking to the other captains. He's talking directly to Kirk, about Kirk's experiences with the Enterprise, and Kirk had taken the Captain's seat 20 years before. It seems like the simplest explanation that can be made to fit both the timeline and the dialouge. It had been 20 years of rough and tumble space adventure since Kirk had personally taken over.... 20 years that Kirk can personally identify with. It fits well enough to work for me.

So what did they do? Give him a five year mission, and another one and another one...

 

[Grayh]

This has bothered me for a long, long time, but deepspaceyork has given a basis for an exclamation I can accept. The Enterprise may not be seen as worth another refit, the basis of the ship is old. This could also help to explain why the ship seems to become old between TMP and TWOK, maybe the refit didn't go as well as planned. The Mary Rose analogy is great!

BTW, hello, new to the forum, long time Star Trek fan.

 

[Christopher]

So? He's not talking to the other captains. He's talking directly to Kirk, about Kirk's experiences with the Enterprise, and Kirk had taken the Captain's seat 20 years before. It seems like the simplest explanation that can be made to fit both the timeline and the dialouge.

The dialogue is, "Jim, the Enterprise is twenty years old. We feel her day is over." And it was to explain why the ship would not be refitted and why Scotty was being reassigned to the Excelsior. He was unambiguously talking about the ship, not about Kirk.

Besides, at the time of the movie, Kirk hadn't been the captain of the Enterprise for several years at least. He'd been an admiral at Starfleet Command, and apparently had a role at the Academy. (He's often been interpreted as its commandant at the time.) Spock had been the captain of the Enterprise for some time, and Kirk had only temporarily resumed command for the Regula I mission, then stayed in command while the ship returned home after Spock's death.

Indeed, if we assume a second 5-year mission after TMP, then Kirk had been in command of the ship for only about half of the 20-year period in question, and had been an admiral based on Earth for the other half. If we instead assume, as some fans and tie-in writers have done, that he went back to the admiralty shortly after TMP, then he spent only a bit more than a quarter of that 20-year period as the Enterprise's captain. So, in any case, there's no way Morrow was talking about Kirk's time in the captain's chair. That just doesn't work. He was talking about the ship.

People have been trying to make sense of this error in the script for 32 years now, without success. The only in-universe explanation that makes any sense is that Morrow was an unreliable narrator and misremembered how old the Enterprise was -- or else he was engaging in a Trump-style disregard for the truth and making up whatever "facts" served his agenda at the moment. In real life, people make mistakes or distort the facts. So there's no reason why every line uttered by a fictional character has to be literally true and accurate.

 

[locutus101]

So? He's not talking to the other captains. He's talking directly to Kirk, about Kirk's experiences with the Enterprise, and Kirk had taken the Captain's seat 20 years before. It seems like the simplest explanation that can be made to fit both the timeline and the dialouge. It had been 20 years of rough and tumble space adventure since Kirk had personally taken over.... 20 years that Kirk can personally identify with. It fits well enough to work for me.

You're wrong. He's talking about the ship.

 

[Warped9]

The continuity is all messed up post TOS.

TMP should have been set about a decade after TOS. But it wasn't and we need to work with that. We can rationalize that things had changed quite a bit while the Enterprise was on the frontier and hence the differences we see in TMP. Yeah, you have to squint some for it to work, but there you go.

TWOK was essentially a reboot when it didn't need to be. But setting the film (in universe) several years (about 8-10) after TMP is workable except for making the ship a training vessel. I HATED that crap. But it does leave about a decade of untold stories.

Things get really screwey in TSFS when we learn the ship is at the end of its line. So in less than ten years the ship has gone from state-of-the-art to training ship and ready for the scrap yard. Bullshit.

To that end I basically ignore film continuity post TMP. As far as I'm concerned they're still out there on their second 5-year mission.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

As for the reason Starfleet would scrap a ship that was completely rebuilt just 10-12 years before, that's rather harder to explain away. The fan theory I find most plausible is that Starfleet's bureaucrats had embraced the Excelsior project as the next big thing and wanted to allocate their starship construction/maintenance budget to it at the expense of the Constitution class. Maybe it was internal politics, the new guard pushing their own preferred shipbuilding project to put their mark on the fleet while mothballing their predecessors' preferred class -- kinda like how incoming TV network execs may cancel shows their predecessors were identified with in favor of their own pet projects. Then, when the transwarp experiment fizzled, they had to un-mothball the Connies and go back to relying on them for a while longer. (Maybe that's why they had one available to turn into the Enterprise-A -- because it had been completed but not launched due to the suspension of the program.)

This seems pretty plausible to me.

 

[locutus101]

Archer's ship was put out of commission after only ten years.

 

[Christopher]

Archer's ship was put out of commission after only ten years.

It was an earlier model. (And according to the books, it was mothballed because of the damage it sustained in the climactic battle of the Earth-Romulan War.) NCC-1701 was in service for 20-30 years before being rebuilt from top to bottom, so why give up on the rebuilt version after just 10-12 years? Especially since we saw in TNG that other starship classes with the same technology (Miranda, Constellation, Oberth, and the slightly newer Excelsior) proved viable for as much as 80 years.

In context, Morrow was saying "We feel her day is over" as an explanation for why Starfleet was shifting its focus to the Excelsior -- which, in the movie, represented the competition, the flashy new replacement. So I still say it was about politics. It wasn't that the Connies were actually past their prime, just that Starfleet wanted to shove them aside in favor of the exciting new transwarp program. And then transwarp fizzled, and the Connies and their contemporaries became the anchors of the fleet once again, at least until they retrofitted the Excelsiors with standard warp drive.

Then again, considering that we never saw a Connie in the 24th century, I suppose there could be some merit to the idea that they had some flaw that gave them less longevity than their contemporary classes. But it's hard to see what it could be.

 

[Tomalak]

I regret that we never got the chance to see more of the version of Starfleet and the Federation that TMP let us glimpse.

It's called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

 

[Christopher]

It's called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Not really. It kind of started out that way, since a lot of its core ideas were recycled from the Phase II plans and it had some of the same concept artists as TMP, but it soon diverged from that as the production staff changed. And it wasn't the same in the ways I was thinking of -- the diverse TMP crew, the set and costume designs, the flavor of the period. Not to mention that TNG undid a number of TMP's logical innovations, like seat restraints, security armor, and engineering radiation suits. (I'm tempted to add the medical-monitor belt buckles, but the combadges kind of incorporated that function, at least in theory.)

 

[wayoung]

It was an earlier model. (And according to the books, it was mothballed because of the damage it sustained in the climactic battle of the Earth-Romulan War.) NCC-1701 was in service for 20-30 years before being rebuilt from top to bottom, so why give up on the rebuilt version after just 10-12 years? Especially since we saw in TNG that other starship classes with the same technology (Miranda, Constellation, Oberth, and the slightly newer Excelsior) proved viable for as much as 80 years.

In context, Morrow was saying "We feel her day is over" as an explanation for why Starfleet was shifting its focus to the Excelsior -- which, in the movie, represented the competition, the flashy new replacement. So I still say it was about politics. It wasn't that the Connies were actually past their prime, just that Starfleet wanted to shove them aside in favor of the exciting new transwarp program. And then transwarp fizzled, and the Connies and their contemporaries became the anchors of the fleet once again, at least until they retrofitted the Excelsiors with standard warp drive.

Then again, considering that we never saw a Connie in the 24th century, I suppose there could be some merit to the idea that they had some flaw that gave them less longevity than their contemporary classes. But it's hard to see what it could be.

My understanding, and I fully accept that you have a far deeper knowledge than me and feel free to correct me, is that the fleet was much smaller in the TOS times than the TNG/DS9/VOY times. Only 12 Connie's were made in the TOS age (which was, what, 20 years into the Connie Lifespan already?) and then they were replaced with Excelsior as the heavy duty all purpose ship in the TOS movies era. So why continue to support an outdated model that was kinda experimental in that only a limited number were ever made to begin with, when you have the Excelsior's as their replacement being made in bulk?

My understanding of TUC is that they decommissioned the A because of how badly damaged it was (the Klingon Torps going right through the hull) and didn't want to extend resources to repair an older, limited model when they could put them towards the more common Excelsiors. So it would make sense that there were Excelsiors and Miranda's still in action in the later series, and not Connie's, if there were only a few created and Starfleet decommissioned them upon incurring heavy damage/wear and tear instead of repairing once the Excelsiors started coming off the assembly line in bulk.

 

[Tomalak]

Fans have often speculated that the Enterprise-A and the rest of her sister ships were retired as a condition of the treaty with the Klingons - a sort of spin on the Washington Naval Treaty which meant it made sense to scrap the older cruisers in the fleet and replace them with newer Excelsior-class ships.

I quite like this idea, and indeed it could be a reason for Morrow scrapping the Enterprise years earlier in TSFS - in the next film the Klingon ambassador refers to ongoing peace negotiations. It could well be that the entire Constitution-class fleet was destined for the scrapheap for years leading up to the Khitomer treaty, forever a political football kicked around by the admiralty.

This would also make sense of Kirk being "rewarded" with a shambles of a ship, herself years old and requiring extensive work by Scotty just to become operational. She wasn't retired due to damage - it was clearly on the cards for months given the Enterprise-B was launched a year or two later, and Starfleet hadn't had time to assess the damage before ordering her to be decommissioned.

 

[Lord Garth]

The only in-universe explanation that makes any sense is that Morrow was an unreliable narrator and misremembered how old the Enterprise was -- or else he was engaging in a Trump-style disregard for the truth and making up whatever "facts" served his agenda at the moment.

Yup. Morrow wanted to make Starfleet great again... wait, no. On second thought, Morrow wasn't that bad, he was just doing his job. He doesn't deserve to have Trump projected onto him.

 

[wayoung]

Yup. Morrow wanted to make Starfleet great again...

That's Cartwright, not Morrow

 

[Christopher]

My understanding, and I fully accept that you have a far deeper knowledge than me and feel free to correct me, is that the fleet was much smaller in the TOS times than the TNG/DS9/VOY times. Only 12 Connie's were made in the TOS age (which was, what, 20 years into the Connie Lifespan already?) and then they were replaced with Excelsior as the heavy duty all purpose ship in the TOS movies era.

Well, no, all we know is that there were 12 of them in 2266/7. (Or 13, depending on whether Kirk's "12 like her" was meant to include the Enterprise itself.) They could certainly have built quite a few more in the subsequent 18 years. Obviously they did build more along the lines of the refit, since the E-A had to be a pre-existing ship that was renamed. And we have evidence for several others -- two more were glimpsed in Spacedock at the end of TVH, several were indicated on the Operation Retrieve graphic in the home-video version of TUC, and the wreckage of at least one was seen at Wolf 359 in "The Best of Both Worlds" (proving that they weren't entirely abandoned in the 24th century).

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Constitution_class#Ships_commissioned
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Unnamed_Constitution_class_starships

My understanding of TUC is that they decommissioned the A because of how badly damaged it was (the Klingon Torps going right through the hull) and didn't want to extend resources to repair an older, limited model when they could put them towards the more common Excelsiors.

That was not stated in the movie itself; it's a fan rationalization. In fact, in the movie, it was the command crew, not the ship, that was supposed to be "decommissioned." As Kirk's closing log entry said, "This is the final cruise of the starship Enterprise under my command. This ship and her history will shortly become the care of another crew." So the makers of TUC didn't intend the ship itself to be decommissioned, at least not permanently. (I think ships can be decommissioned and then recommissioned for another purpose, or with a new name.) The fact that the E-A was retired and replaced wasn't established until Generations three years later.

Fans have often speculated that the Enterprise-A and the rest of her sister ships were retired as a condition of the treaty with the Klingons - a sort of spin on the Washington Naval Treaty which meant it made sense to scrap the older cruisers in the fleet and replace them with newer Excelsior-class ships.

Although the Connie at Wolf 359 argues against that -- unless it was pulled out of a museum and put back in service for the emergency.

This would also make sense of Kirk being "rewarded" with a shambles of a ship, herself years old and requiring extensive work by Scotty just to become operational. She wasn't retired due to damage - it was clearly on the cards for months given the Enterprise-B was launched a year or two later, and Starfleet hadn't had time to assess the damage before ordering her to be decommissioned.

It was longer than that. The Okudachron puts The Voyage Home in 2286, though that doesn't make much sense since it's only 3 months after TWOK/TSFS, which were in 2285 (and Kirk's birthday is generally presumed to align with Shatner's, March 22). The Undiscovered Country and the Generations prologue were in 2293. So there were 7-8 years between the launch of the E-A and that of the E-B. Not very much, but certainly a lot more than "a year or two."

On second thought, Morrow wasn't that bad, he was just doing his job. He doesn't deserve to have Trump projected onto him.

Few people do, granted. But how much do we really know about Morrow? We only have two scenes to base an opinion on, and they give the impression of a hidebound, unimaginative, narrow-minded individual. At best, he's not one of Starfleet's greats.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

But how much do we really know about Morrow? We only have two scenes to base an opinion on, and they give the impression of a hidebound, unimaginative, narrow-minded individual. At best, he's not one of Starfleet's greats.

But if he had a best friend, it'd be Jim Kirk! That's something, right?

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

Few people do, granted. But how much do we really know about Morrow? We only have two scenes to base an opinion on, and they give the impression of a hidebound, unimaginative, narrow-minded individual. At best, he's not one of Starfleet's greats.

His stating that he doesn't break rules because he's the Starfleet C&C certainly lends credence to this idea, though I've always wondered if Morrow's behavior was more the result of his head being on the chopping block than his being a typical bureaucrat. His absence in TVH suggests he was forced to resign due to the fallout from Genesis, Kirk/Spock, etc. He may have already been feeling the heat when Kirk approached him about retrieving Spock.

 

[WebLurker]

...or the writers said it was twenty years old because it had been twenty years since TOS and they were more interested in telling a new story than digging through 90 hours of TV looking for any mention of the exact age of the ship....

As I understand it, the mistake largely came about because of the assumption that the Enterprise was new in TOS season one. I always kind of took it to be a script error we're supposed to replace with the correct number. Besides, the point of the line (the Enterprise is past retirement age) is works regardless of the number used.