Does anyone else think the Franklin should've been an NX class ship? With the reason it was there it would've made perfect sense too. It would've been great to see on the big screen too.
Spoilers Why wasn't the Franklin and NX class ship?
- Thread starter WraithDukat
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For one thing, the filmmakers probably wanted the freedom to do their own designs rather than be trapped by copying what other artists had designed in the past. No point making a multigazillion-dollar movie if you don't show people something new. Introducing a distinct, related class let them pay homage to ENT designs while still putting their own spin on it and letting the movie's art department earn their salary.
More importantly, they could design the sets in a way that served the scenes they had in mind and fit their production budget, rather than having to adapt their shooting process to sets designed for series television. From a creative and logistical standpoint, it's preferable to do new designs rather than be saddled with old ones created for different purposes. That's why the TNG movies trashed and replaced the Enterprise-D at the earliest opportunity.
Also, making it a different ship class we hadn't seen before let them establish whatever they needed about the ship's attributes and capabilities and history without worrying about continuity errors. For instance, why does it only have cargo transporters when NX-01 had personnel transporters? Because it was an older, smaller, less prestigious class of ship, and not necessarily intended for the same purposes.
Maybe it's also the same reason we never saw a Constitution-refit ship in TNG or a Sovereign-class ship in DS9 -- because the producers didn't want casual viewers to get confused and think it was the Enterprise. Which seems unlikely, but apparently it was a real concern. (We never saw an Intrepid-class ship in DS9 either, until "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," where it was done for budgetary reasons, so that they could use the existing Voyager sets rather than build new Starfleet-vessel sets.)
More importantly, they could design the sets in a way that served the scenes they had in mind and fit their production budget, rather than having to adapt their shooting process to sets designed for series television. From a creative and logistical standpoint, it's preferable to do new designs rather than be saddled with old ones created for different purposes. That's why the TNG movies trashed and replaced the Enterprise-D at the earliest opportunity.
Also, making it a different ship class we hadn't seen before let them establish whatever they needed about the ship's attributes and capabilities and history without worrying about continuity errors. For instance, why does it only have cargo transporters when NX-01 had personnel transporters? Because it was an older, smaller, less prestigious class of ship, and not necessarily intended for the same purposes.
Maybe it's also the same reason we never saw a Constitution-refit ship in TNG or a Sovereign-class ship in DS9 -- because the producers didn't want casual viewers to get confused and think it was the Enterprise. Which seems unlikely, but apparently it was a real concern. (We never saw an Intrepid-class ship in DS9 either, until "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," where it was done for budgetary reasons, so that they could use the existing Voyager sets rather than build new Starfleet-vessel sets.)
I was totally fine with the Franklin as it was.
Apart from having to rebuild the much larger, costly and more electronics filled Enterprise sets from scratch, spend time just rezzing up the NX CG model to have it look the same, and deal with people who disliked Enterprise?
The Franklin fleshes out the 2150's and 60's, gives us a new NX Program design and a MACO ship in one go, it's something new, smaller and less costly to build for one movie, and creates something from the ENT era that some fans can pretend is only there because of a different timeline to stop some of the bickering.
The Franklin fleshes out the 2150's and 60's, gives us a new NX Program design and a MACO ship in one go, it's something new, smaller and less costly to build for one movie, and creates something from the ENT era that some fans can pretend is only there because of a different timeline to stop some of the bickering.
Sadly, this does happen. I remember when DS9 A Call to Arms aired a friend of mine asked "wasn't the Enterprise D destroyed? How can it be in that fleet?" I explained "that's another Galaxy class ship." His answer "what, they all look the same?"
Interestingly enough, we did see a few Defiant class ships throughout Voyager, although it actually is possible one of them was the Defiant itself.
I think it was cool to see something new from about the same era. I loved all the retro touches, like the TOS-style nacelles, NX-01 style name and number on the saucer and the 80's style computer graphics.
I wasn't too fond of the Crusade-style uniforms (they're too similar to the Yorktown unis, IMO), but I guess they didn't want them to be blue since they'd probably already designed Kirk's jacket by then.
I wasn't too fond of the Crusade-style uniforms (they're too similar to the Yorktown unis, IMO), but I guess they didn't want them to be blue since they'd probably already designed Kirk's jacket by then.
The exterior could have been NX Class like Enterprise. The bridge changes could simply be accepted as a Bridge Refit.
But I suspect we're just in a different Universe all together. That things did not change at Kelvin. But this Universe was different from the get go. And its future events unfolded differently because of Narada. After all, I don't recall Enterprise or other Earth Starfleet ships from the series having a window with a HUD on the bridge instead of a view screen.
After all, the ship didn't crash until after the Romulan war.
But I suspect we're just in a different Universe all together. That things did not change at Kelvin. But this Universe was different from the get go. And its future events unfolded differently because of Narada. After all, I don't recall Enterprise or other Earth Starfleet ships from the series having a window with a HUD on the bridge instead of a view screen.
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But they didn't want it to be. Why would they? Again, why would creators rather copy someone else's work than create their own? They paid homage to ENT, but in a way that added something new to our understanding of that period -- or, if you prefer, allowed us to interpret it as an alternate version of that period. Either way, that's more interesting than just showing us a ship we've already seen.
The Franklin was probably a bit of a dead end once the NX Delta lead to the building of the NX-01, we don't know what designs and features Starfleet has used nevermind mothballed over the 200+ years of operations.
They painted up the Franklin and gave her to Edison and his garrison as a concession to their years of service, while the Endeavour represented the Federation as the remaining NX class before presumably, a warp 7 full build was created and everyone forgot about both.
They painted up the Franklin and gave her to Edison and his garrison as a concession to their years of service, while the Endeavour represented the Federation as the remaining NX class before presumably, a warp 7 full build was created and everyone forgot about both.
Or maybe there were Franklin-type ships coexisting as part of the fleet all along, and we just didn't see them onscreen. After all, we didn't see the first Intrepid-type ship onscreen until "The Expanse" at the end of season 2, and there's the Sarajevo type that we didn't see until season 4. And "Singularity" had a reference to a Neptune class that we never saw, as far as we know. So there's no reason to assume that we got an exhaustive look at every class of ship in Starfleet at the time.
Indeed, one behind-the-scenes article I read proposed that the Franklin was a MACO ship rather than a Starfleet ship. They were separate services until they were combined at the founding of the UFP, so they could've had separate ship development programs, with the MACO ships using knockoff technologies from Starfleet's programs. Since the show's focus was on Starfleet operations, or joint Starfleet-MACO operations aboard a Starfleet ship, we didn't really get a look at what the MACOs were doing on their own.
The fact that Scotty was describing it as the first warp four ship would seem to suggest that it was a Starfleet ship, given that Starfleet seemed to be the organization that was trying to build upgraded versions of the Archer warp engine. Maybe.
The thing I find interesting (besides the fact that the Franklin is given a "the" in front of its name when it was made in a time when Earth starships didn't use that), is that, aside from the new ship plaque and the addition of the "USS" registry on the hull, the ship doesn't seem to have been given any new tech from the time it was built. It was lost after the Federation was founded, but still had only phase cannons, spatial torpedoes, polarized hull plating, and a transporter not cleared for use on people.
While kudos to the writers for getting their research correct (why couldn't the previous films had this level of attention to detail?), I've sometimes wondered why the Frankin was never given upgraded systems at any point in its life.
I find it quite easy to accept the explanation that it had been an NX vessel (predating Enterprise NX-01, even) that simply got brought back into service later after the formation of the Federation/Starfleet Command. Heck, there's a precedent in StarTrek of this happening (Excelsior NX-2000 becoming Excelsior NCC-2000), and it even ties in with the theme of Captain Edison himself being a former MACO who got into a Starfleet uniform and became an officer.
OTOH, there was fierce competition between the branches of the US military to get the first space launchers done. The UE Military might have wanted to break a few speed records of their own, even if they had no real operational need for a fast warp vessel (although they probably did, what with conducting a logistics-heavy style of warfare and not wanting to wait for two and a half years for the ammo load to reach the colony under attack).
Then again, the warp four ship could just as well have been a commercial endeavor, something that failed to sell originally. But I don't see much need to disbelieve in her having been another UE Starfleet ship, just a competing one to the NX line of designs. Either a hedging of bets, or then a different approach for producing a much smaller vessel for a separate need.
Phase cannons were the hottest new thing at the time. Indeed, the Columbia was credited with a modern "pulsed" variant we never saw in action, and here the Franklin fires pulses.
As for the transporter, it was built to handle cargo. But so, supposedly, was that of the Enterprise. Starfleet just decided it should be used on people from "Broken Bow" on - and, like Scotty here, they faced no problems from the decision.
Did "shields" ever make an apperance in ENT Starfleet? It's polarized hulls in "These Are The Voyages" still. For all we know, shields would not be introduced until around the 2190s or so, and ships like Archon and Essex would be lost while still clad in polarizable armor.
Timo Saloniemi
The bit with the transporter actually fits quite well with my Rise of the Federation novels, because I had them discover in the first book that transporters were causing cumulative damage to people who used them heavily, so they suspended the use of personnel transporters except for emergencies. But cargo transporters would still be in use.
As for phase cannons, my books have them still in use in 2165, and I've hinted that "phaser" originated as a shorthand term for "phase weapon." As for spatial torpedoes, we saw in seasons 3-4 that Enterprise still had a supply of those along with photonic torpedoes. And I think the ships in my ROTF books still use hull plating as well as deflector shields. Maybe the Franklin had exhausted its photonic torpedoes and its deflectors weren't working. (Although I don't remember the film specifying what kind of torpedoes and shielding they had.)
Cool.
Didn't Scotty specifically say that the cargo transporters were only designed for, well, cargo? (McCoy complains that the beam felt funny and Scotty specifically mentioned that he had to modify the systems in order to use it to beam people. The fact that there didn't seem to be a "normal" transporter seemed to suggest that the Franklin was never given a human transporter in the first place.)
Did any other of the Federation founders have shield tech during ENT?[/QUOTE]
Out of curiosity, how come that detail was put in the novel?
Given that the movie probably didn't consult your novel and assumed that transporters continued to work fine after ENT, would that make it a safe guess that, in a continuity that doesn't include Rise of the Federation, the Franklin never received people transporters for whatever reason (cost, priority, etc.)? (That's what I thought when seeing the movie, at least.)
Sure, I agree all the tech onboard would be correct for the era it was launched in. I was just curious how much of that original tech would've been "obsolete" at the time of the Franklin's loss, since it kind of sounds like any refits it received only replaced the systems with new versions of the same, rather than an actual upgrade.
No reason it should've been. NX-01 and its sister ships had them because they were the high-end ships that got the newest prototypes. Going by the novel continuity, the tech may not have trickled all the way down to every ship before it was deemed unsafe. Or maybe the Franklin had a personnel transporter that got removed after the danger was discovered.
Yes, the Vulcans and Andorians.
Because I knew that the creators of ENT didn't want to use transporters, and kept their use to a minimum in the first couple of seasons, though they were used far more routinely in seasons 3-4. Berman and Braga wanted to show a less advanced Starfleet, but UPN insisted on having all the familiar Trek elements. So I wanted to get rid of the transporters to reflect their original goals a bit more closely, and to try to recapture the flavor of the first season, which I think is underappreciated.
Also, I think ENT generally missed the opportunity to show the kind of mistakes and missteps that often occur in the early development of something new, like the ways a new technology can have unexpected downsides, or the problems that resulted from early explorers' well-intentioned interference and led to the adoption of the Prime Directive. I wanted to take the opportunity to do those kinds of story, since the show rarely did.
Look, obviously there are going to be differences of detail between different people's independent interpretations of the Trek universe. There always have been, and we've always had to squint a little and be flexible about the exact details to maintain the pretense that all these different works of fiction by different creators represent some kind of consistent reality. So I'm not concerned with sweating the granular details. As long as it's close enough to allow pretending that it still pretty much fits, that's good enough for me.
At times during the movie, I wondered how the NX-01 bridge would look on the big screen. After all, Trek is no stranger to reusing bridge sets for different ships. It would've been nice to see, but obviously it wasn't a dealbreaker for the movie; and besides, the bridge was made for TV, not movie ratios, and it's difficult to imagine Paramount saving a bridge set from a show cancelled 10 years ago.
