Class Development: Galaxy + Nebula + What Else?
- Thread starter DEWLine
- Start date
Nope, they’re not Galaxy class saucers. They are a design that doesn’t match any specific ship class.
I kind of got the impression they were based off of Ambassador-style saucers, but I could be wrong.
I believe Rick stated those had been the inspiration - but the general idea was that some starship class or another had "donated" the saucers, perhaps as production surplus, perhaps as the result of a scrapping spree. And the saucers nicely speak the mid-24th century design language, allowing us not just to revel, but to slaughter birds wholesale: there's supposedly this unseen class of starships, there's this practice of building space stations out of "standard components", there's the possibility that certain other space stations are also made of starship bits, there's thus the option of believing in starships that have saucers like the modules of the Orbital Office cum Regula One...
(As for Setlik III, it's easy to think of "Tribunal" as establishing a date for that - but it actually does not. All the talk is about the release date of Boone, and I don't really see Cardassians letting their prisoners out after two weeks.)
Timo Saloniemi
(As for Setlik III, it's easy to think of "Tribunal" as establishing a date for that - but it actually does not. All the talk is about the release date of Boone, and I don't really see Cardassians letting their prisoners out after two weeks.)
Timo Saloniemi
O'BRIEN: How long you been out of Starfleet?
BOONE: Oh, about eight years now. I settled on Volan Three.
O'BRIEN: After what we went through in the border wars, I don't know how you can live there. You were there at Setlik Three?
BOONE: That's what got me out of Starfleet.
Then:
BOONE: What is this?
SISKO: I'd like Doctor Bashir to give you a physical examination.
BOONE: What for?
SISKO: To help us answer some questions about you.
BOONE: What are you talking about?
BASHIR: For example, why you haven't spoken to your parents in eight years.
BOONE: What's that got to do with anything? I never got along with them.
BASHIR: That's not what they told us.
SISKO: You left your wife about eight years ago. You'd been married a long time. Almost fifteen years, wasn't it?
BOONE: Look, this is none of your business.
SISKO: And about the same time you were discharged from Starfleet after failing several crew performance reviews.
BASHIR: All of it seemed to happen shortly after Setlik Three.
Seems pretty self-explanatory to me. So all we really know is that the Rutledge was operating in 2362. Even if we play devil’s advocate and say that the Rutledge was in fact a New Orleans class starship, 2362 would be the earliest known date that a ship from the Galaxy ‘family’ was in service.
BOONE: Oh, about eight years now. I settled on Volan Three.
O'BRIEN: After what we went through in the border wars, I don't know how you can live there. You were there at Setlik Three?
BOONE: That's what got me out of Starfleet.
Then:
BOONE: What is this?
SISKO: I'd like Doctor Bashir to give you a physical examination.
BOONE: What for?
SISKO: To help us answer some questions about you.
BOONE: What are you talking about?
BASHIR: For example, why you haven't spoken to your parents in eight years.
BOONE: What's that got to do with anything? I never got along with them.
BASHIR: That's not what they told us.
SISKO: You left your wife about eight years ago. You'd been married a long time. Almost fifteen years, wasn't it?
BOONE: Look, this is none of your business.
SISKO: And about the same time you were discharged from Starfleet after failing several crew performance reviews.
BASHIR: All of it seemed to happen shortly after Setlik Three.
Seems pretty self-explanatory to me. So all we really know is that the Rutledge was operating in 2362. Even if we play devil’s advocate and say that the Rutledge was in fact a New Orleans class starship, 2362 would be the earliest known date that a ship from the Galaxy ‘family’ was in service.
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Funny how differently we can read that...
The first snippet seems to establish that it has been a lot longer since the Rutledge days than eight years: there's no connection being made between the time of joint service and Boone leaving Starfleet.
The second bit in turn lists further things that happened eight years ago, in addition to Boone leaving Starfleet. The incident at Setlik is not among those things.
So it all depends on how we read "shortly after Setlik III". How long do Cardassians keep warp captives prisoner?
But it's true that the first Galaxy or kitbash we ever see is the E-D herself in 2363, in "AGT...". OTOH, she's also the only Galaxy-related ship that is ever claimed to be brand new. (Indeed, very few things in Starfleet are claimed to be that.)
Timo Saloniemi
The first snippet seems to establish that it has been a lot longer since the Rutledge days than eight years: there's no connection being made between the time of joint service and Boone leaving Starfleet.
The second bit in turn lists further things that happened eight years ago, in addition to Boone leaving Starfleet. The incident at Setlik is not among those things.
So it all depends on how we read "shortly after Setlik III". How long do Cardassians keep warp captives prisoner?
But it's true that the first Galaxy or kitbash we ever see is the E-D herself in 2363, in "AGT...". OTOH, she's also the only Galaxy-related ship that is ever claimed to be brand new. (Indeed, very few things in Starfleet are claimed to be that.)
Timo Saloniemi
And that's something for the TrekLit board.
We tend to read things differently about a lot of things. In this instance, I’m content to take the dialogue at face value, since there’s nothing ambiguous about it. At least it’s far more informative about the date for Setlik III than ‘The Wounded’ was.
And the whole point of this segue was to establish just how long the Galaxy ‘family’ of ship classes have been in service as opposed to how long the older TMP-era ship classes were. Based on the evidence we have (and admittedly, nothing is very concrete), I’ve always gotten the impression that Starfleet didn’t start developing anything new until at least 2344, which was when the Enterprise-C was destroyed. And it was probably not until the 2350’s when those Cheyennes, Springfields, New Orleans and Challengers started construction (the monkey-wrench FC ships notwithstanding.)
I would accept that scenario. And I have no problem with design diversity even with the same generation of ships (i.e. the Oberth looks nothing like the Constitution, but they’re contemporaries.)
The issue I have with the four FC Jaeger ships is their registries vs. their design attributes.
Akira: NCC-63XXX. Sort of has design attributes of the Galaxy class family, but the angular nacelles and the escape pods fit better with the Sovereign family.
Norway: NCC-64XXX. Has no design attributes of any known ships, but the saucer underside is a cut-and-paste of the Defiant.
Saber: NCC-61XXX. Has some design attributes of the Galaxy class family but has angular nacelles and a bridge dome reminiscent of the Sovereign class.
Steamrunner: NCC-52XXX. Lowest registry of the four, has no major design attributes of any known ships but certain attributes of the Sovereign family (nacelles, escape pods.)
It’s almost like Jaeger saw the Enterprise-D and the Enterprise-E, decided to mesh the two together for some ships, and make completely different designs for others, and then for some reason give them registries that indicate that they are not new ships, but contemporaries of the BoBW kitbashes, of which the end product looks very little like those latter ships.
It’s not that I don’t think Jaeger is a good designer; I just find it hard to find a logical place for those ships. I want to think that the intent was that they were all brand-new designs, but the registries just don’t make a lot of sense if that were the case, unless registry numbers are just random.
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I've yet to be convinced that registry numbers are not issued chronologically.
But there's other yards besides 40 Eri A, San Francisco, Copernicus, Utopia Planitia, Baikonur, etc. supplying Starfleet. Every Federation member has to have a few of their own scattered across their pre-membership holdings.
But there's other yards besides 40 Eri A, San Francisco, Copernicus, Utopia Planitia, Baikonur, etc. supplying Starfleet. Every Federation member has to have a few of their own scattered across their pre-membership holdings.
There is evidence for and against chronological registries. There are some cases where it’s clearly chronological, and some cases where it clearly isn’t. So there’s no true consensus.
I've always felt they were chronological. But only the Constitution class registries from TOS ever seemed to be grouped by class in any way.
Of course, they didn't show us a lot of other registry #'s for multiple ships in any other class....
The conjectural registry # for USS Nebula is lower than the USS Galaxy. If that means anything, the Nebula class came first and maybe the Galaxy class had design issues.
That's assuming SF doesn't assign registry #'s the way the US Navy does, in advance. Like when they had CV#'s reserved for more Essex class carriers that never got built, then didn't use those #'s for other carriers.
Of course, they didn't show us a lot of other registry #'s for multiple ships in any other class....
The conjectural registry # for USS Nebula is lower than the USS Galaxy. If that means anything, the Nebula class came first and maybe the Galaxy class had design issues.
That's assuming SF doesn't assign registry #'s the way the US Navy does, in advance. Like when they had CV#'s reserved for more Essex class carriers that never got built, then didn't use those #'s for other carriers.
I once wrote up a theoretical timeline of registries, both based on either chronological numbers and a non-chronological conjectural timeline where the numbers are meant to be 'batches' (explaining anomalies such as why the more advanced Ambassador class has lower registry numbers than the older Excelsior and Miranda classes, etc.) I haven't updated them in five years, so they are not current to PIC and DSC.
Chronological Timeline of Starship Registries:
https://app.box.com/s/fff3tw52094siaipu743
Batch Number Timeline of Starship Registries:
https://app.box.com/s/ok0nbvxmse2wte4bbr5d
Chronological Timeline of Starship Registries:
https://app.box.com/s/fff3tw52094siaipu743
Batch Number Timeline of Starship Registries:
https://app.box.com/s/ok0nbvxmse2wte4bbr5d
That's just production realities, though. You could say the same thing about the Nebula suddenly being everywhere after "The Wounded," or ask why we stopped seeing Ambassadors and Oberths when the shows switched to CG. I feel like it unfairly constricts the universe to take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. That's how you get stuff like "Starfleet is racist because mostly humans from the United States are assigned to the best ships and everyone speaks English" or "There's only one toilet in the Federation, in the Enterprise-A's brig."
I’ve always been kind of curious why we’ve only ever seen the AWACS dish configuration on the Phoenix and never again. Only the delta-shaped weapons/sensor pod. True, the latter looks cooler, but that ship was clearly designed to support other multi-mission modules. Wondering why we never saw them, outside the usual budgetary constraints.
You have the galaxy class design finishing up with the uss galaxy in early 2260, so you would start another design in the sovereign class. Seeing as these 2 classes have some overlap, the galaxy seems like a long range deep expllorer. After encountering the borg in q who, in 2266/67 designs for more weapon oriented came the the fore, so you have ships like FC ones that are a blend of galaxy to sovereign being cranked out to beef up the fleet.
I'm aware of the production realities, but that wasn't quite my point. Rather, my issue was about the design attributes of the FC ships as opposed to when they were supposedly constructed. They seem to have design cues related to the Sovereign rather than ships built ten or twenty years before the Enterprise-D.
