USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?

It's fairly popular among some of the fan-base as well. It's in Star Trek Online, and eaglemoss also made a model of it.

 

I had no idea it was anything but a cool concept design. I'll have to look that up!!

 

It was never really intended for ENT season 5. It was really just Doug evolving his design closer to TOS for a calender image IIRC.

 

It's funny, as i was watching the Discovery Season 2 finale, my first thought when Enterprise was about to enter warp following the battle and it had that huge gaping hole in its saucer was how much it looked like an updated Columbia-class (NX-01 refit).

 

I think the altered version looks wrong for that design, proportionally. Not everything needs to be made to look like the original Enterprise.

 

Although there were starships before and after, it’s important that during TOS era, starships were talked about as the kinds of vessels that very specifically needed crews of 430 or so:

“Charlie X”:

RAMART: Like a whole city in space, Charlie. Over four hundred in the crew of a starship, aren't there, Captain?
KIRK: Four hundred and twenty eight, to be exact.

“The Ultimate Computer”:

DAYSTROM: You can't understand. You're frightened because you can't understand it. I'm going to show you. I'm going to show all of you. It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship.

Why didn’t the writers add “like the Enterprise” if they obviously hadn’t named the Constitution class? Because to them, a starship was a vessel like the Enterprise, and while Kirk’s ship didn’t seem more special than others like it, it’s not as if there were “galacti-ships” superseding them.

From that point of view, all Discovery could’ve been was a starship in a former sense of the word, or perhaps just a science vessel, but either way Kirk’s ship was in the top category of that time, the one that deserved the unusual ‘starship class’ plaque even on DSC, the one that we would later refer to almost exclusively as the Constitution class (because by then it would’ve taken, say, 1012 to crew a starship in TOS sense of the word).

 

Which I find cool. Kirk's ship would be when Starfleet finally got right something that it had been trying to achieve since the days of Archer...

Good point. Although one I'd like to steer around if possible.

We might still assume that "starship" is a very broad category, and it just happens that the one thing common for the category is the crew count, which keeps creeping up from 80 in the 2150s to 210 in the 2250s to 430 in the 2260s to 500 in the 2270s and so forth. But the problem there is, it's pretty absurd to think that ships of different description would have crews of the exact same size. The Royal Navy never had a common "cruiser" or even "heavy cruiser" crew count, say, despite certain pressures for extreme standardization.

And the upward creep is already in question from onscreen fact. The old Essex from "Power Play" had 230 people back in the 2160s already, supposedly long before they got ships like Pike's. And Archer's ship was already as big as Pike's/Kirk's, and could easily have accommodated 200 or 400 people, if she required that many people. But much of Archer's and Kirk's team appeared to be passengers or "payload specialists", the ships sometimes flying around with just a handful of people awake. And every visually portrayed starship adds to the incredulity of there being a single allowed crew count.

So perhaps I have to discredit the witnesses? Only, I'll do it with a positive spin. Charlie Evans and Dick Daystrom would know pretty exactly the crew count of not just a Constitution class starship, but of Kirk's NCC-1701 specifically, down to the latest revisions and crew rotations and (in the case of Charlie) Ensign Willow's sick leave and the stowaways on Deck 14 that even Kirk isn't aware of. That they would pretend not to be that much in the know is just Conversation 101...

Timo Saloniemi

 

You're right as in the way that it was never confirmed for Season 5, but Doug said he did pitch the idea before the series was cancelled. So we'll never really know if it would have been approved or not.

The Refit design he eventually made came after the series was cancelled. So even if the idea had been approved, it may not have looked like the one we got.

 

If there were a fifth season, the budget would have been cut so much that they wouldn't have been able to afford to discard all the stock effects shots.

I think it was a nice idea but wouldn't have happened. Ironically Doug's idea probably had a chance to live because the series cancelled.

 

Basically, we got the best of all worlds: the novelists doing "early Federation" stories embraced the design, meaning the original Enterprise class (let alone Archer's Enterprise herself, declared a structural loss in the Romulan War) never was part of the Federation Starfleet - it was "written and designed out" just in time to satisfy the canon requirement that Kirk's Enterprise be the first-ever occurrence of that name in UFP Starfleet service.

The novels treat Drexler's design as the Columbia class of starships, consisting of one proof-of-concept refit of an Enterprise class ship (the Endeavour) and a small bunch of newbuilds, compromise-ridden vessels plagued by teething troubles and the woes of multicultural design input. And no, there never was a refit of the actual NX-01 in the novel continuity - the wreck of that one became a museum specimen in the original config, in harmony with offhand "TAtV" remarks. And no, there never was a Columbia class USS Columbia, either - the class name was decided upon for esoteric sentimental reasons... Complex and convoluted enough to feel like real-world naval practices, I guess.

Memory Beta has the dirt on this. Unfortunately, it makes no distinction between the novel continuity, the STO antics, or (of all things) the Ships of the Line calendar art, so extracting the above from amidst all the rest of the dirt takes some work...

Timo Saloniemi

 

There is a minor difference between the Columbia-class and the NX-01 Refit as depicted; Drexler's version kept the shuttlepod drop-bays where they were, now nearly blocked by the neck, but the novels mention they were moved so they flank the neck, instead.

As for the class name, the oddity of naming the ships after one that was missing years before the first one was built isn't the weirdest one in the novelverse; the original idea was that there was never a USS Vesta, and only the seven ships named for the seven hills of Rome were built. Luckily, that never made it into a book, and it was eventually revealed there was a Vesta, but it had been disassembled and mothballed before the class went into production because of some structural damage during flight testing, and was eventually rebuilt.

 

anybody read the new novel "enterprise war"? i keep seeing reviews that say it dives deep into the mechanics of the ship...

 

I mean, to an extent. The ship certainly does a couple things we've never seen the 1701 do on-screen.

Spoiler: The Enterprise War

Specifically, there's an emergency saucer-separation. Engineering can, more or less, operate independently, along with the saucer. The saucer ends up ditched, upside-down, in a liquid-methane ocean on a frozen moon, and there's some trouble getting it working sufficiently to flip it back over and then take off. There's also the standard compartments we don't see on-screen that are in most Trek tie-ins; a good amount of time is spent in one of the observation rooms ringing the lower sensor dome on the saucer, which was turned into a makeshift communications station. There's also a slightly out-of-place reference to the ship having been equipped with laser batteries around "The Cage" which had been replaced with phasers.

 

I really think people should ignore that 'laser' reference in The Cage.

 

I feel like there's a bit of a lag in Star Trek tie-ins adjusting to the current era having a very different perspective on continuity and tech than we became used to in the Berman era (if not reaching back to TMP, or even the Franz Joseph books correlating and expanding on what was scene in TOS after-the-fact). It's generally been pretty vague in the novel, but it does have mentions that are meant to be consistent with the Discoprise being a temporary variation between "The Cage" and TOS (or just as easily ignored). The upcoming Eaglemoss book, on the other hand, has to, by its very nature, tie itself into knots and use a lot of slight-of-hand to prevent the DSC visuals from being a retcon, so it can include the TOS versions of models, sets, props, and costumes. It's a weird flip on the old days when tech manuals were filling in the gaps and smoothing out contradictions; now they're making everything more baroque and complex rather than redefining the status quo to account for the new material. I wonder if TOS-R had never happened, if they'd also be throwing in retractable nacelle-spikes and a telescoping bridge module to account for stock footage in TOS using all the different versions of the model interchangeably.

 

Seeing as how even on DSC the one-man pods used in Season 2 were equipped with cutting lasers I can definitely buy that some Starfleet weapons of that era were based on 23rd century laser technology. It's not as if more recent iterations of the franchise haven't mentioned lasers as being used by Starfleet.

 

Update on those Eaglemoss and Novelverse books trying to retcon the Discoprise as a temporary refit: The forthcoming Short Trek focussed on Spock joining the ship features the Disovery version of the USS Enterprise... years prior to "The Cage"

 

Not necessarily. I think that, in principle, lasers could be used to carry heavy particles, which would do the actual damage. I don't remember exactly how that would work, but it could be a precursor to phasers that they still called "lasers" at the time.

 

Yeah, for that Eaglemoss Enterprise book I'd ignore the Discoprise and simply incorporate her into a seperate tech book including other Discovery stuff - I'd likely end up buying both and I doubt I'd be the only one, lol