My current all consuming obsession with the post 5YM>TMP period led me to consider this question. I expect there is no explicit suggestion but I look at Kirk and Scotty's faces in the shuttle and I think to myself 'they haven't seen this design before'. Any suggestions, speculations, thoughts or flights of fancy on the subject of the refit welcomed.
Scott had been working with Decker on the refit, so I believe he had been working on the ship. Or else, he wouldn't have been qualified to be Chief Engineer. The first refit? Probably. You would think if other ships were already in that configuration, they would know the intermix formula they needed.
What I should have said is Scott has a 'eh, look at that, ain't she a beaut' look on his face. Pride.
Realistically, all starfleet ships would go through periodic refits. But the Enterprise was the first to go through the refit that gave us the TMP-era Constitution Class ships. At the time of the V'Ger incident I think the understanding was that she was the most advanced ship in the fleet and represented the next 'paradigm shift' if you will in terms of her saucer section design, the nacelles, etc.
The Enterprise D wasn't the first Galaxy class, yet LaForge was shown to periodically fiddle with the fuel mix. The TOS Enterprise seemed slightly different that the 2nd pilot Enterprise, so there was a alteration inbetween at some point.
One thing to fiddle with it, quite another to seem to have no idea what the mix is after eighteen months of putting the new engine together.
An alteration, but not a major rebuild. The Enterprise in TMP was refit so much that it was essentially a new ship. Dialogue suggests that the crew needed time to basically learn how to operate the upgrades properly, so I wouldn't see this as the same type of upgrade. Personally, I see the design changes as one of the results of the deep space exploration that Starfleet had recently done, such as Kirk's five year mission, and finally putting the new discoveries into action in Starfleet design.
Yes, clearly there were various minor refits during the April and Pike era, as well as a refit after the ship limped home from Delta-Vega following WNM. I would also suspect that Pike, with a rather more military background than April or Kirk, probably ordered the more subdued color scheme seen in "The Cage."
If she wasn't the first to be refit, it would seem they'd have some clue as to what intermix formula to use.
True, but early on TNG was going for that TOS "ship's engineer is tinkering on the fly" feel, thus Geordi's modifications. In any case, the stresses of space travel, combat, extra dimensional being encounters, etc would necessitate someone deciding to throw away the owner's manual and try something new.
Not overtly. We saw parts of ships (nacelles and pylons) that could've been Constitution-refits in Spacedock at the end of TVH. Similarly for destroyed saucers and engineering hulls that could've belonged to that class at Wolf 359 or in DS9's "The Sound of Her Voice." Those were all reuses of the Enterprise-refit model, but if you wanted to, you could argue they were just as likely to be members of contemporary classes like refit Federation-class or Hermes-class ships that used the same family of components. Likewise, computer displays in TVH and the Operation: Retrieve chart in TUC had Constitution-refit icons on them (in the latter case representing ships generally accepted to be Constitution-class in fandom and behind-the-scenes), but, again, you could say that was just a generic "starship" icon denoting a cruiser-sized vessel (since the same displays also had Excelsior icons).
I like the idea that Starfleet didn't originally intend to redesign the Enterprise, but they wound up doing so as a result of the ship getting new engines and various other upgraded systems during the refit. "I know engineers. They love to change things." --Commander L.H. McCoy, M.D.
Non canonically, the answer is yes in the old FASA Trekverse. The USS Enterprise was the only cruiser from the original batch (Starfleet built several Constitution batches) to survive the five year mission intact, and the extent of the modifications for the new systems led to it becoming a new subclass, the Enterprise class heavy cruiser.
Well, it's unrealist, not only they changed the exterior shape, but even the internal arrangement (the corridors are less wide, they should had dismantle every bulkhead and mount it some inches from where it was )
Or the new corridors could've been built within the frames of the old ones, with the difference being made up by storage, new equipment, conduits, and hiding all those exposed pipes and machines that were in the TOS version. That's what happened in reality, after all. The TMP corridors were built within the footprint of the Phase II corridors, which were just as wide and square as in TOS.
Problem being that apparently turbolift locations changed. Leading Kirk to ask an Ensign where a particular turbolift is at. If it was an almost new ship, likely very little of the original remained.