*Spoilers* U.S.S. Franklin Design?

[Crazy Eddie]

^ It's a waste in a society that DOES use currency, and we do it all the time. The whole reason this even happens is because it's really hard to simulate the strengths and weaknesses of a design, so you don't know what's wrong with it until you actually build the thing and try it out. So a lot of the "one off" designs in naval history weren't intended to be that either, but became that because someone looked at their operational history and said "You know what? It would be so much better if we rearranged some stuff over here and here and here..." and that became a new class of vessel. That's also how we get the different sub-classes and bloc rollouts of ships that originate from the same basic design but are considered different classes because they have different equipment.

OTOH, Starfleet seems to think the refit Enterprise is still Constitution class by all meaningful definition even though 90% of the things that make it "constitution" class were gutted and replaced with new hardware. There goes our answer tot he "one off" question: it's entirely possible that all of the ships we saw in the Kelvinverse other than Enterprise were all the same class of ship.

 

[FormerLurker]

Everyone assumes the Enterprise was the first Connie to be refit. If the Constitution itself were refit first, any and all of the previous Constitution Class ships that undergo the (plausibly) same refit are still Constitution Class, as they're still the same type of ship, with all the same bells and whistles. Any differences are swept under the rug like they were the first time around.

 

[starburst]

^ It's a waste in a society that DOES use currency, and we do it all the time. The whole reason this even happens is because it's really hard to simulate the strengths and weaknesses of a design, so you don't know what's wrong with it until you actually build the thing and try it out. So a lot of the "one off" designs in naval history weren't intended to be that either, but became that because someone looked at their operational history and said "You know what? It would be so much better if we rearranged some stuff over here and here and here..." and that became a new class of vessel. That's also how we get the different sub-classes and bloc rollouts of ships that originate from the same basic design but are considered different classes because they have different equipment.

Thats completely different though either cancelling projects after the prototype or going in a different direction after building the initial version, kinda like the Mirranda variants and the Soyuz Class.

However you said the Defiant and Excelsior were intended to be one offs which as I said the Defiant was always meant to be the first of a new breed of fighting ship, Excelsior is suggested to be cutting edge and not just for the Transwarp Drive.

You just wouldn't build something like that into such a large, new space frame if you weren't intending it to be more than a one off.

Excelsior does go along with the "block subclasses" theory though with the Enterprise B variant seemingly being built alongside the original design.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Thats completely different though either cancelling projects after the prototype or going in a different direction after building the initial version, kinda like the Mirranda variants and the Soyuz Class.

However you said the Defiant and Excelsior were intended to be one offs

They were meant to be PROTOTYPES, which doesn't gaurantee they would have entered mass production, and Starfleet would have only ever built one of them if they hadn't gone forward with the production run. In Defiant's case, the only reason they ever built more of them is because Sisko took Defiant out of mothballs and they found out it was actually pretty useful after all (plus the Dominion threat). Otherwise it would have gone the way of the YF-23: a great design with a lot of potential that nobody will ever build more of.

The same is possibly true of Excelsior, considering the very next Excelsior class starship we ever see is the Enterprise-B and it looks dramatically different from its predecessor. Which is interesting, IMO, because the only ship we've ever heard of referred to in canon as "Excelsior class" was the Lakota, which resembles the Enterprise-B and NOT the Excelsior. With the differences in those two designs they should by all rights be entirely different classes of vessels, but the Excelsior "superclass" apparently covers a lot of ground.

Hence my point:

You just wouldn't build something like that into such a large, new space frame if you weren't intending it to be more than a one off.

And yet even if it WAS a one-off, they probably wouldn't consider it a new class of ship anyway. Like I said, the Enterprise in TMP is still considered Constitution class for whatever reason. Even if it was the ONLY ship in its class to get that kind of upgrade, they wouldn't have changed its classification. And if the Enterprise-A was built to those specifications form scratch, it too would still be considered Constitution class even if it was the only other ship in history ever built to that configuration.

The Kelvinverse Enterprise and Enterprise-A are likely to be considered the same class too, despite considerable differences in design and technology, which to me suggests that in the Kelvinverse EVERY Constitution class starship has a slightly different configuration.

 

[BadMoonRising]

Excelsior Block One, several were built but issues were discovered related to *technobabble goes here.* On top of that there was a breakthrough in *technobabble goes here* and the Fleet wanted to take advantage of that.

So a few ships (block) were slightly modified to take advantage, and while that was happening another breakthrough regarding the original problem. On top of that the improvements proved to be less practical than they though and they reverted back to the original design.

Only a handful of the Block 2 were built, maybe a dozen. Only a handful of those continued in service, with the rest lost, wrecked or retired.... thus making the possibility of spotting one in the wild rare. That's why it was somewhat unusual to see a Block II variant in Deep Space Nine, let alone such a rare specimen selected for rebuilding and refitting.

Howzat?

 

[starburst]

They were meant to be PROTOTYPES, which doesn't gaurantee they would have entered mass production, and Starfleet would have only ever built one of them if they hadn't gone forward with the production run. In Defiant's case, the only reason they ever built more of them is because Sisko took Defiant out of mothballs and they found out it was actually pretty useful after all (plus the Dominion threat). Otherwise it would have gone the way of the YF-23: a great design with a lot of potential that nobody will ever build more of.

Your still ignoring on screen dialog about the Defiant, they may not have ever been produced on a mass scale however she was never intended to be a one off, from the start she was meant to be a part of a battlefleet (which ok doesn't necessarily mean this fleet would purely be made up of Defiant Class ships) and only due to technical issues and a reduced threat from the Borg the project was shelved till the Dominion meant ironing out the bugs and putting in a run of ships (even if it was a limited one).

The other ships we can't assume just because they were a prototype they were intended to be a one off, with the Excelsior yes she was a test bed for Transwarp but she has always seemed (ok yes an assumption) like the next evolution for Starfleet from the Constitution. We have also seen many more original design Excelsiors than Enterprise-B variants through TNG and DS9 which would say to me that there are more of that type than the variant.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Your still ignoring on screen dialog about the Defiant, they may not have ever been produced on a mass scale however she was never intended to be a one off

She was intended to be a prototype. Even the prototype versions of things are intended to be prototypes for SOMETHING. But there's no such thing as a "mass produced prototype," as that is a contradiction in terms.

Hence Defiant wasn't supposed to be the first of the new class of starship, it was supposed to be the ship that helped them decide whether to build more of them. That's an important distinction to make: the only way they would ever build more of them in the future is if and when the first one was proven technically sound. If it wasn't, they would either never build another one, or they would redesign the whole thing and build a new ship with a new design, test that, and if that worked better, build more of them. That is exactly what is meant by "prototype." You don't actually know if you'll build more of them or what the "more of them" will even look like until you've tested the prototype and analyzed the data. Often enough, the prototype has certain problems that can only be fixed with a complete redesign, and therefore becomes a one-off.

The other ships we can't assume just because they were a prototype they were intended to be a one off

Prototypes ARE intended to be one-offs. That is to say, you only build one prototype for testing purposes. It's only once the prototype proves the design is sound and the technologies can be integrated properly that they decide to build more of them. The thing is, what happens in the REAL WORLD is that the prototype always has certain issues or omits certain technologies that aren't needed for critical tests, and is therefore noticeably different from the production model anyway. Again, it's a lot like how the original YF-22 prototype didn't have a weapon system or helmet-mounted fire control system installed, didn't have full battlefield network capability, and wasn't actually combat ready in and of itself. If they had built the entire production line to the exact specifications of the prototype, they wouldn't have half the capabilities they were supposed to have (of course, they'd probably enter service a hell of a lot sooner, but still...)

USS Midway is another good example of this. It was supposed to be the first U.S. aircraft carrier to have an armored flight deck, but the design performed so poorly that they basically abandoned it and started over with a totally new hull design and never even attempted to build another one. If Midway's design had worked better, it probably would have entered mass production itself instead of the Forestall class.

We have also seen many more original design Excelsiors than Enterprise-B variants through TNG and DS9 which would say to me that there are more of that type than the variant.

Sure, but we have no idea what their specifications are. Judging by the cosmetic differences in the model between TSFS and TUC, it's clear that even Excelsior had to be extensively refit when it finally entered service, so there were a lot of things in its design that either didn't work as intended or were improved after testing. If any of those things had been deal breakers for the design, Excelsior would have been the only ship of its class and Starfleet would have moved on.

That's what it means to build a prototype. You don't know how well it works until you build it and test it. If anything goes wrong with it, you'll never build more. Starfleet seems to be really good at improving on flawed designs without radically changing them, which explains the small number of single-ship classes. But it is a strong enough possibility that we can comfortably say that some designs probably WEREN'T continued past a handful of test ships, and both the NX-class and the Franklin class could be good examples of this. NX-02's design is sufficiently different from the 01 as to be almost a different class of starship already; I'd bet even money that NX-03 was completed in what would have been NX-01's 5th season refit.

 

[Markonian]

If we peek at licensed, non-canon sources, we can see that the USS Ambassador was heavily redesigned. There are beautiful renderings (from the SOTL calendar) online.

Other than that, I can't think of a canon prototype that wasn't picked up. Maybe like the Krenim temporal weapon ship - only one was built. In Star Trek Online, it enters mass production as the Annorax class.

 

[Timo]

Without explicit dialogue, it's nigh-impossible to find out whether a ship is supposed to be a prototype / first of her kind or not. With hero ships, we basically always get two names for the price of one: the hero ship name (say, Enterprise) and the class name (say, Sovereign). With non-hero ships, it's extremely rarely that we would get a class name in canon. So out of a bunch of similar-looking ships, the one with the lowest registry may be the one that started it all, or then not; there might even have been predecessors to the Excelsior, just without the Great Experiment bits on.

Similarly, we have no way of judging how many of a given type were built unless dialogue again explicates. We see one, there might be just one. We see three, there might be just three. Any apparent hints from registry numbers might be false - it would just echo real world complexity if it so happened that only NX-01, NX-02 and NX-05 were ever built to the general ENT specs, say.

So, what about the specific case of the Franklin? Scotty does not appear to recognize her by design cues, but has to wait for Jaylah's guiding words and then spy a look at the graphics that give the ship's name and registry. So either the design isn't unique; the design is unique but not immediately familiar to Scotty; or the design isn't unique for the parts Scotty sees but the ship as a whole is nevertheless a unique design. IOW, we know squat...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

^ The ship (and probably it's design) is 100 years old. Even to an anal retentive engineer, it would be hard to recognize it as anything other than a SF ship from an earlier era.

 

[gerbil]

I tend to think that a lot of Starfleet's ships are custom-purposes. For all we know, the Enterprise-B's configuration was designed for a particular type of mission. We also see this with the Nebula Class and, later, with additions to the Galaxy Class.

 

[Timo]

...In counterpoint, starships don't seem to have "particular missions". All of them do pretty much the same thing, that is, everything.

The Franklin is particularly lacking in this "configuration" thing, having very few unique features. At best, we can count two omissions: a sensor/deflector dish and a shuttle landing or stowage facility. But the former omission is common in Starfleet, and the latter doesn't appear to stop the ship from operating shuttlecraft.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tuskin38]

NX-02's design is sufficiently different from the 01 as to be almost a different class of starship already

The only differences are Hull colour and Deflector. How is that sufficiently different?

With the differences in those two designs they should by all rights be entirely different classes of vessels

The Refit Constitution is still called Constitution even though it is almost 100% a different ship.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The only differences are Hull colour and Deflector. How is that sufficiently different?

According to dialog, it had a redesigned engine, dorsal and ventral torpedo launchers, upgraded weapon systems, and a totally reconfigured power grid that included a bunch of big retarded looking plasma conduits running right through the bridge.

The Refit Constitution is still called Constitution even though it is almost 100% a different ship.

Which was kind of my point, now wasn't it?

 

[Markonian]

UPDATE.

The Eaglemoss Franklin has arrived. There's nothing new to be gleaned from the physical model.

But the magazine explains the cool, mysterious armour-ring on top of the saucer started out as cargo doors. To bring aboard the crew before launch. They were beamed aboard instead. The doors themselves were dropped but their design was expanded into the ring.

Maybe parts of the ring still are cargo doors? Leading to a shuttlebay on either side?

The bottom has many smooth surfaces. One of them could be a door. The Pioneer sketches showed a ramp extending downward. #GraspingAtStraws

 

[KennyB]

UPDATE.

The Eaglemoss Franklin has arrived. There's nothing new to be gleaned from the physical model.

But the magazine explains the cool, mysterious armour-ring on top of the saucer started out as cargo doors. To bring aboard the crew before launch. They were beamed aboard instead. The doors themselves were dropped but their design was expanded into the ring.

Maybe parts of the ring still are cargo doors? Leading to a shuttlebay on either side?

The bottom has many smooth surfaces. One of them could be a door. The Pioneer sketches showed a ramp extending downward. #GraspingAtStraws

Great news! Hope mine makes it here tomorrow!

 

[137th Gebirg]

UPDATE.

The Eaglemoss Franklin has arrived. There's nothing new to be gleaned from the physical model.

But the magazine explains the cool, mysterious armour-ring on top of the saucer started out as cargo doors. To bring aboard the crew before launch. They were beamed aboard instead. The doors themselves were dropped but their design was expanded into the ring.

Maybe parts of the ring still are cargo doors? Leading to a shuttlebay on either side?

The bottom has many smooth surfaces. One of them could be a door. The Pioneer sketches showed a ramp extending downward. #GraspingAtStraws

Very cool! Did you order this individually or did it automatically come to you as a subscriber ordering all specials?

 

[Markonian]

Very cool! Did you order this individually or did it automatically come to you as a subscriber ordering all specials?

As subscriber it comes automatically. But you get a letter in advance, allowing you to opt out.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Ah - I see you're in the UK, which is why you got yours first. I'm a subscriber in the US - opted in for all specials - and we usually get those things 2-3 months after you do for some odd reason.

 

[Tuskin38]

The Pioneer sketches

The Pioneer?