In-universe, we can always rationalize. Perhaps the -A was a ship already refitted to TMP specs and found surplus to requirement or hopelessly outdated for her day? Once given over to Kirk as a symbolic gesture, she finally broke down, much as described by Scotty, and requiring actual repairs with modern hardware: no sense in digging out outdated 2270s consoles when there were modern ones in stock.
The turbolift stations never made sense vis-á-vis the exterior. Even in TMP, we'd do best to assume that the bridge was actually lower down than Probert thought, at a depth where the turbolift stations could comfortably be mounted anywhere on the rim of the facility. That way, the ride from the upper docking port to the bridge also makes sense: the port is one deck higher than the bridge and for that reason requires the lift. We could then both forget about the idiotic idea of the lift merely rotating to let Spock through, and accept that since the ride takes a finite amount of time, Chekov could precede Spock to the bridge via competing lift or staircase or whatever.
Moving from the upholstered ST5 look to the bare ST6 one is a sensible one IMHO: Starfleet no longer cares about making the old and high-maintenance ship look respectable, and rips out the vanity covers and carpeting to facilitate practical ops and repairs.
Timo Saloniemi
Due to the red padding at the back of the bridge in Star Trek 6, I actually fell that the bridge in that move looks more like a "comfortable step towards TNG" then the version from Star Trek 5 where the padding less noticeable. Despite the turbolift locations, and since some feel that it might be tough to fit them anyway, don't have a problem thinking that the bridge in ST5 and ST6 s the same module that has been modified in the meanwhile. It is partially taken apart at the start of ST5 anyway.
The problem is that there's zero information about what qualities a starship has that makes it be classified as a light cruiser, heavy cruiser, medium cruiser, frigate, (insert naval term here), etc. The Constitution class, the Ambassador class, and the Curiosity class were all referred to as heavy cruisers, but there's no indication as to why this is so, or why, say, the Galaxy class is not classified as a heavy cruiser.
Although as written material it might not be fully canon, I think the solution to your problem is the explanation given in the TNG tech manual: the Galaxy is a big, comfortable ship with families moreso than others in the past, thus making it an "Explorer," as opposed to a cruiser.
I'm curious how you came to that conclusion.
I compared scales given near the bottom of the page in an article at Ex Astris Scientia. Then I was trying to build scale models that made the bridge modules (and to a lesser degree the saucers) of the of the two ships the same size and found that it would be about the same size as the movie Enterprise at that point.
With nacelles that closely resemble the Excelsior prototypes, and no neck to the pod, I think the somewhat larger size I found supports the idea the ship is a newer design, post TMP, and that the pod is uninhabited and full of mission specific equipment, not a warp core. At this size a small crew could be in the saucer only, and the little doors on the model that look like shuttle bays would at least accommodate small travel pods or something like that.
“Frigates are thus usually used as escort vessels to protect sea lines of communication or as an auxiliary component of a strike group whereas destroyers are generally integrated into carrier battle groups as the air defence component or utilised to provide territorial air and missile defence.”
Actually, with the communications officer having a more prominent role than on most other shows, the Enterprise could have been doing some kind of communication work during TOS. I have been thinking about making a thread on this if I have not already, but it is interesting to me how the different bridge layouts might reflect different roles for the ship. In TOS the communcations officer is right behind the captain, then in TMP sciences is behind the captain, and then on other shows it is the weapons station or just a background system. Maybe this in some way indicates the role of the ship?
Putting it in Star Trek terms... If the Excelsior Class became the new standard "heavy" cruiser for Starfleet with maybe stronger or heavier shielding and perhaps a little more punch, then the old Constitution Class could have been re-designated "light" cruiser simply because technology had marched on.
That is similar to what I was thinking could have happened, but I'm not sure if I like the idea or not.
How so? A destroyer today basically never operates solo. A frigate might, since frigates are the de facto capital ships of smaller navies that don't engage in fleet operations to begin with.
But Kirk is not from today. He might be from the RN of Horatio Hornblower, with a very workable definition of "frigate" (essentially the same as "cruiser" before those became bogged down first in the heavy/light nonsense pre-WWII, and then in the "cruiser gap" nonsense of the 1970s).
Would I be throwing a total monkey wrench into this conversation if I pointed out that, as I understand it, destroyers in the US navy are now of a size that they pretty much can do the roles of escorts, frigates, cruisers, or any other class that is not a carrier?
