intrepid from enterprise before or after uss franklin
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I believe the original idea was that both the Intrepid-type and the warp delta-type ships were supposed to have a top speed of warp 2; however there was nothing in the show's dialogue that ever stated this. Therefore, there's nothing canon that confirms that they couldn't go beyond that.
As for when the Franklin was originally built? Since we don't know when the Intrepid-type was built, we can't answer that part of the question. But we can definitively determine that the Franklin was built before the NX-01, since the former was the first ship to reach warp 4, and the latter was the first ship to reach warp 5.
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I think the script or concept art or something called the Delta and Intrepid "warp 2" ships. Franklin was warp 4. But, it didn't make it to the screen so it isn't binding.
That's all if the USS Franklin even exists in Enterprise's world, though. Don't expect to see it ever mentioned in Discovery or the other forthcoming CBS-AA Trek shows, owing to the CBS/Paramount split - which the AU premise was in part designed to facilitate.
That's all if the USS Franklin even exists in Enterprise's world, though. Don't expect to see it ever mentioned in Discovery or the other forthcoming CBS-AA Trek shows, owing to the CBS/Paramount split - which the AU premise was in part designed to facilitate.
Whatever the original design specs of the two ship types from "The Expanse", one might expect an upgrade at some point, that is, before their first appearance already.
It is relatively unlikely that either of those types would be recent and "parallel" to Archer's supership. But the Intrepid has its share of very similar design elements and need not be utterly ancient. Those warp nacelles just happen to be really big compared to NX-01, quite possibly suggesting clumsiness of more primitive technology (after all, plot considerations more or less rule out superior performance as a rationale).
Much the same goes for Franklin. We first meet her at the twilight of her career: she predates Archer's exploits by implicit history, but is first seen years after Archer stopped flying NX-01. She might have undergone quite a few refits, then. And when we meet her, she's UFP Starfleet and carries an NX registry. While Earth clearly did not paint "NX" on experimental starships (because there's no way NX-01 could have been Starfleet's first-ever experiment!), the UFP Starfleet is known to do exactly this. How could a decades-old ship be experimental? Why, because she's testing all-new warp engines, ones promising performance better than Archer's warp five. But, unfortunately, just kicking up stupid ST:TMP style wormholes that strand the ship beyond all help.
So comparing the Franklin directly to the ships of "The Expanse" by simple eyeballing may get us nowhere much. The nacelles on the ST Beyond ship are more TOS-like than those in "The Expanse" - there's the taper towards the stern, the solid unobstructed ramscoop domes, the aft end cowlings and domes. The "The Expanse" ships have engines closely matching the NX-01 ones - and we can argue the "old" Delta (with supposedly antiquated lifting body hull in a fleet that later will have saucers only) fittingly has the less TOS-like engines, with pointed forward domes (lots of flying in atmospheres?), an aft cowling less distinct from the rest of the nacelle than in Intrepid or Franklin or TOS (plus hiding a blue-glowing rather than grey dome), extra ribbing and whatnot.
So my completely personally biased preference for a timeline is Warp Delta (novels call her Ganges; warp 2 or 3) -> Franklin (but initially with older engines that just barely break warp 4) -> Intrepid (operational with warp 4 drive, or perhaps conservatively just warp 3) -> Enterprise. As for weapons or protection... Upgrades are decisive there. In "The Expanse", the two newly seen types both fire death rays that NX-01 originally lacked; in ST:B, the Franklin has "spatial torpedoes" that may be "original" because UESF could already do better with the Enterprise, but also "pulsed phase guns" which are likely to be a refit.
Timo Saloniemi
It is relatively unlikely that either of those types would be recent and "parallel" to Archer's supership. But the Intrepid has its share of very similar design elements and need not be utterly ancient. Those warp nacelles just happen to be really big compared to NX-01, quite possibly suggesting clumsiness of more primitive technology (after all, plot considerations more or less rule out superior performance as a rationale).
Much the same goes for Franklin. We first meet her at the twilight of her career: she predates Archer's exploits by implicit history, but is first seen years after Archer stopped flying NX-01. She might have undergone quite a few refits, then. And when we meet her, she's UFP Starfleet and carries an NX registry. While Earth clearly did not paint "NX" on experimental starships (because there's no way NX-01 could have been Starfleet's first-ever experiment!), the UFP Starfleet is known to do exactly this. How could a decades-old ship be experimental? Why, because she's testing all-new warp engines, ones promising performance better than Archer's warp five. But, unfortunately, just kicking up stupid ST:TMP style wormholes that strand the ship beyond all help.
So comparing the Franklin directly to the ships of "The Expanse" by simple eyeballing may get us nowhere much. The nacelles on the ST Beyond ship are more TOS-like than those in "The Expanse" - there's the taper towards the stern, the solid unobstructed ramscoop domes, the aft end cowlings and domes. The "The Expanse" ships have engines closely matching the NX-01 ones - and we can argue the "old" Delta (with supposedly antiquated lifting body hull in a fleet that later will have saucers only) fittingly has the less TOS-like engines, with pointed forward domes (lots of flying in atmospheres?), an aft cowling less distinct from the rest of the nacelle than in Intrepid or Franklin or TOS (plus hiding a blue-glowing rather than grey dome), extra ribbing and whatnot.
So my completely personally biased preference for a timeline is Warp Delta (novels call her Ganges; warp 2 or 3) -> Franklin (but initially with older engines that just barely break warp 4) -> Intrepid (operational with warp 4 drive, or perhaps conservatively just warp 3) -> Enterprise. As for weapons or protection... Upgrades are decisive there. In "The Expanse", the two newly seen types both fire death rays that NX-01 originally lacked; in ST:B, the Franklin has "spatial torpedoes" that may be "original" because UESF could already do better with the Enterprise, but also "pulsed phase guns" which are likely to be a refit.
Timo Saloniemi
NX-01 was the first starfleet ship to reach warp 5. Franklin could have been from a different agency and incorporated into UFP Starfleet later. Could have been a UESPA ship or navy craft capable of hitting warp 4 but for much shorter durations.
That would mean that dates given for NX-Alpha and NX-Beta would be irrelevant to whatever records it was hitting, as they were two different development paths.
It's hair splitting, I know. I like it better when episodes don't get too date specific so they leave room for stuff like this.
Anyway, I think the Intrepid could have been a parallel development to the NX program or shortly after.
As Franklin seems to have been a one-off ship, it makes sense that it wouldn't get much more mention, even if it IS prime inverse.. I mean, they've discussed Daedalus class vehicles a few times over the decades but we've never seen a definitive one. Franklin was a one-off ship that might have been kept on active duty due more to war time shortages than anything else, and then lost in what were surely one of numerous exploratory losses later. Might have been something that Starfleet officers talked about on trivia night along with SS Valiant. I figure the Kelvin was like that too. Maybe a few made at most and scrapped young as the needs of the fleet didn't require them any longer.
Why would the Franklin be one-off? I mean, nothing in the movie outright suggests this, so there's nothing particularly wrong with the "Okudagram" in that movie saying she's part of a Freedom class that supposedly includes at least the Freedom.
Why the Freedom didn't break warp four yet may be due to utterly random factors, or the Franklin being the first (or only) of the lot to be converted to engine test duties, or whatever. For all we know, she was originally part of a much bigger class, say, Pioneer, of which only a smaller surviving bunch starting with Freedom was later used as Federation testbeds for wormhole-prone engines. Or whatever. The sky isn't the limit there.
Things in the Trek universe don't deserve mention in general, really. It's an entire universe - Klingons or transtators or a ban on genetic engineering can go unmentioned until they do get a mention, there being no set schedule for it. We still don't know what ship did warp six first, or warp seven. Although we probably shouldn't care, because when warp six first becomes an issue for mankind, it already operates alien ships capable of exceeding it...
...Speaking of which, Earth in ENT has its share of alien ships taking part in swarming action - the "Twilight" convoy, the "Storm Front" fleet. Are those in Earth hands? Did they do warp nine for Earth before NX-Alpha reached warp two? One would expect they should have. So perhaps this whole speed records thing is a bit of an embarrassment to starship enthusiasts of the human persuasion.
Timo Saloniemi
Why the Freedom didn't break warp four yet may be due to utterly random factors, or the Franklin being the first (or only) of the lot to be converted to engine test duties, or whatever. For all we know, she was originally part of a much bigger class, say, Pioneer, of which only a smaller surviving bunch starting with Freedom was later used as Federation testbeds for wormhole-prone engines. Or whatever. The sky isn't the limit there.
Things in the Trek universe don't deserve mention in general, really. It's an entire universe - Klingons or transtators or a ban on genetic engineering can go unmentioned until they do get a mention, there being no set schedule for it. We still don't know what ship did warp six first, or warp seven. Although we probably shouldn't care, because when warp six first becomes an issue for mankind, it already operates alien ships capable of exceeding it...
...Speaking of which, Earth in ENT has its share of alien ships taking part in swarming action - the "Twilight" convoy, the "Storm Front" fleet. Are those in Earth hands? Did they do warp nine for Earth before NX-Alpha reached warp two? One would expect they should have. So perhaps this whole speed records thing is a bit of an embarrassment to starship enthusiasts of the human persuasion.
Timo Saloniemi
True. Not a one-off per say. But then again the fact that it's called Freedom Class doesn't mean there was ever an SS Freedom. In fact most of the classes of ships shown in Star Trek haven't actually seen some progenitor ship. Where is USS NX?
But even if that's true, and there was at least one other ship like Franklin, or a boilerplate design study that managed to get a registry, they still may not be that common, if there was commonality in that early period.
(real reason being obviously the Paramount/CBS thing and books from that period being written prior to Beyond, etc) We have a 80 or so year period between the first flight of the Phoenix and the NX-01 where there are a profoundly different series of ship types designed, like Conestoga, Sarajevo, XCV Enterprise , Franklin, NX) .
It just doesn't seem very likely to me that any of them underwent large scale production, in my thinking. We're all just imagining here, anyway.
the ENT universe is a bit smaller than subsequently, though, and that's the era Intrepid comes from. It would be fun to see one in a ship yard or something in Discovery, but if they ever did that, people will start crying "Fan wank!"
After learning that Vulcan could have gotten to the lost colony on Terra Nova in a few weeks to check on the plight of those poor folks, but did nothing, I think the urge to get faster ships would have been all the more poignant, that plus the state of affairs in the local neighborhood.
That would be helpful, yes, considering the resolution that reveals Freedom also reveals the really odd bits about character bios.
Whether primitive ships would be built in low or high numbers is an interesting question, too. Earth would need lots of them to make up for the low speeds. Are there bottlenecks in production? Or merely limitations in performance?
How many Boomer ships? The skippers we meet seem to know all the other relevant skippers by nickname and marital status and infamous birth marks - but even in a fleet of ten thousand such ships, the nearest ten would probably become intimately known, as the low speeds would keep the pool of ten unchanged for months at an end at least.
How large the UESF? A handful of captains get a mention. But not repeat mentions, meaning they could be random names from a lot of thousands. Vulcans apparently launch mere dozens of ships for their major war. Would Earth need to make up for inferior quality by strength of numbers? Could she?
No registry numbers on the ships we see. There are only two Enterprise class ships, as per their telltale numbers; if we learned whether the Intrepid is CC-01 or CC-999, we'd learn a lot.
The Franklin is highly unlikely to have been NX-326 originally. Was she perhaps NCC-7317 during her United Earth service career?
Timo Saloniemi
Whether primitive ships would be built in low or high numbers is an interesting question, too. Earth would need lots of them to make up for the low speeds. Are there bottlenecks in production? Or merely limitations in performance?
How many Boomer ships? The skippers we meet seem to know all the other relevant skippers by nickname and marital status and infamous birth marks - but even in a fleet of ten thousand such ships, the nearest ten would probably become intimately known, as the low speeds would keep the pool of ten unchanged for months at an end at least.
How large the UESF? A handful of captains get a mention. But not repeat mentions, meaning they could be random names from a lot of thousands. Vulcans apparently launch mere dozens of ships for their major war. Would Earth need to make up for inferior quality by strength of numbers? Could she?
No registry numbers on the ships we see. There are only two Enterprise class ships, as per their telltale numbers; if we learned whether the Intrepid is CC-01 or CC-999, we'd learn a lot.
The Franklin is highly unlikely to have been NX-326 originally. Was she perhaps NCC-7317 during her United Earth service career?
Timo Saloniemi
Well, the Franklin could have been a 1 off test bed, Maybe "Archers Engine" could have been 1 design being tested, and the Franklin's warp 4 engine could have been another design house's ship. ( think Lockheed, Boeing) and that the franklin's engine succeeded in braking warp 4, but was a dead end in breaking warp 5.
Might have been mothballed, or used as a test ship until the outbreak of the Romulus war, then it was upgraded with weapons and a maco crew during the war, and served honorably. After the war she might have been put in Starfleet service for the first years, refited for exploration. and then lost in space.
As for who came first? Canonically? No clue, no specs were given for the Intrepid and warp delta, so they could be brand new or a decade old. the Franklin being a warp 4 ship would only be a few years older than a NX
Might have been mothballed, or used as a test ship until the outbreak of the Romulus war, then it was upgraded with weapons and a maco crew during the war, and served honorably. After the war she might have been put in Starfleet service for the first years, refited for exploration. and then lost in space.
As for who came first? Canonically? No clue, no specs were given for the Intrepid and warp delta, so they could be brand new or a decade old. the Franklin being a warp 4 ship would only be a few years older than a NX
I'm not sure we should add any connection to the MACO here. If the ship did have history with that organization, would Edison have hated being forced to command her so much?
At one point, we thought that saucers might be a recentish thing in Starfleet history in Kirk's time still. Then "Broken Bow" proved us wrong. Are saucers new at the time warp 4 gets broken? Or are they older news still, appearing occasionally in the first couple of hundred years of Earth starshipbuilding, but with the first examples built in the 2060s already?
The TAS Bonaventure is credited with both saucers and primacy in warp drive. It's not difficult to contest the claims, though, even when staying true to what was stated. In the simplest model, the ship with the saucer could have been the first Bonaventure with warp drive fitted, at a totally random point in the timeline - say, in the 2190s or 2240s... Losing big time to the first Discovery with warp drive fitted (2076), less to the first Enterprise with warp drive fitted (2102), and beating the first Trump (2256).
If we want to stick with the most literal interpretation possible, though, then Bonaventure predates every other warp vessel that ever gets glorified with the designation "ship". And the Valiant of "Where No Man" fame was a "ship" already, in the early 2060s.
Timo Saloniemi
At one point, we thought that saucers might be a recentish thing in Starfleet history in Kirk's time still. Then "Broken Bow" proved us wrong. Are saucers new at the time warp 4 gets broken? Or are they older news still, appearing occasionally in the first couple of hundred years of Earth starshipbuilding, but with the first examples built in the 2060s already?
The TAS Bonaventure is credited with both saucers and primacy in warp drive. It's not difficult to contest the claims, though, even when staying true to what was stated. In the simplest model, the ship with the saucer could have been the first Bonaventure with warp drive fitted, at a totally random point in the timeline - say, in the 2190s or 2240s... Losing big time to the first Discovery with warp drive fitted (2076), less to the first Enterprise with warp drive fitted (2102), and beating the first Trump (2256).
If we want to stick with the most literal interpretation possible, though, then Bonaventure predates every other warp vessel that ever gets glorified with the designation "ship". And the Valiant of "Where No Man" fame was a "ship" already, in the early 2060s.
Timo Saloniemi
The number was changed, but the rest remained the same (a partial reuse of Kirk's service record which Krall reads earlier)
The only really concrete bit of data I can think of is that Franklin cannot have broken warp 4 more than six years before NX01 launched. Because that's when the Warp Delta broke warp 3.
Intrepid we know basically nothing about. The design of the saucer and nacelles suggest it is roughly contemporary with the NX class.
Otherwise, lots of room for speculation. As mentioned above, the writers intent was I think for Intrepid to be an old warp 2 ship.
Intrepid we know basically nothing about. The design of the saucer and nacelles suggest it is roughly contemporary with the NX class.
Otherwise, lots of room for speculation. As mentioned above, the writers intent was I think for Intrepid to be an old warp 2 ship.
And we can contest even that, because Duvall broke warp three in NX-Delta specifically, as part of the NX project to develop the Warp Five Engine. The achievement wasn't explicitly called a speed record, unlike warp two earlier on in that adventure. Any project aiming at warp five would have to get past warp three first, even if warp four were old news at that time.
But it's probably not a complication worth making, unless we learn something new about the Franklin that necessitates this.
Or then Henry Archer's team cut corners in building the ship that would house the Warp Five Engine, by recycling leftover components that were decades out of date.
Warp two being "old" isn't necessarily all that defensible: while some Boomers were thinking that their lives would be revolutionized by the adoption of warp three-plus propulsion, a century later in "Friday's Child" freighters are still going no faster than warp two. So the option to upgrade may have been there for quite a long time, and UE Starfleet would certainly take it (for reasons of prestige if nothing else) but most Boomers might not (they couldn't afford it, they couldn't afford the pit stop, they couldn't make a business case for using it, it wasn't compatible with their ships).
But yes, the bottom line is that we still haven't visited these particular eras thoroughly enough to stop speculating. Soon we will have the 2250s down pat, and will learn more about the 2260s. We already have a pretty extensive view of the 2150s, the 2280s-90s and the 2360s-80s. The rest is clouded at best.
Timo Saloniemi
...If anything, the Intrepid is the more advanced than Archer's ship in certain respects, having the powerful death rays installed and operational. Refit or design feature? The guns are supposed to be highly modular anyway, as per "Silent Enemy". But plugging them into an ancient design might be more work than exploiting a socket in a ship that is just a decade older. Then again, the Delta / Ganges also has the death rays...
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
