Star Trek Beyond

I love how Beyond made a direct connection to Enterprise by featuring an Archer era starship, the Franklin, a cargo ship that would habe existed during the show's time frame. Where exactly does it plug in? Starfleet is relatively new. "First Flight" showed Archer and friends breaking the Warp 2 barrier. "Broken Bow" introduced the Warp 5 Enterprise. If the Franklin was the first Warp 4 ship, can we assume it was intended by the film's production team as a proto-Enterprise, like a technology test bed while the Warp 5 ship was being designed and built?

 

The Franklin was just poor writing. If earth had warp 4 ships like that how is the Enterprise out alone against the universe in ENT. Also why is it nx-328 if Enterprise is nx-01 and I could be wrong but are NX ships always the name of the ship class.

I'm not usually a canon freak but this one does annoy me

 

Who's to say there were a bunch of Warp 4 ships? It could have been just the Franklin as a test bed ship. Given it's small size, the idea works. As for NX, it goes back to Star Trek 3. NCC is the standard. NX generally means experimental. In regards to Enterprise, NX program and NX-class is where it started.

 

Ya but Franklin is Freedom class but NX which is odd a bit like Colombia NX 02. Why would earth feel grounded and frustrated with Vulcan attempts to keep em locked up in regards to the warp 5 engine if they had warp 4 tech they could be flying all over the place while waiting for the 5

 

Fair enough. Maybe the writers of Beyond simply weren't that familiar with the show and just trying to have some fun by connecting the two? Can you use your imagination and plut Franklin into ENT's story without screwing with continuity?

 

Generally Kelvin stuff doesn't really enter my mind when I watch the shows and tend to ignore canon problems when I am actually watching the episodes unless it's something blindingly obvious and even then I can still enjoy an episode of DIS despite the magic jumping tech that shouldn't exist in 23rd century

 

NX-326 was a tribute to Leonard Nimoy, who passed at the start of the movie's production. His birthday was 3/26. Plus, the Franklin wasn't lost until 2164 after the founding of the Federation. It could be ships were given new numbers to go with the "USS"

And warp 5 is a lot faster than warp 4. Warp 4 is 64 times the speed of light and warp 5 is 125. It's warp factor cubed to work out the real velocity in multiples of lightspeed.

 

If it was given a new number then why keep the NX and why throughout the xindi crisis and the entire ENT run did earth not bother deploying any warp 4 ships to help out

 

Perhaps it was the same reason that the Sao Paolo got a new NX registry.

But what about...

That was easy.

 

The NX-class is the exception. The whole design was meant to be experimental. Maybe a small fleet of NX-class ships, but not mass production.

 

I did mention that I didn't like the Colombia being NX. As for the Sao Paulo it was NCC-75633 I didn't realize that the registry reverted back to the old Defiant one when the name changed which is dumb because the registry should be for the body not the name

 

You might not like it, but it does establish that an NX registry is not confined to ships that share their name with the class.

 

True

 

Should have been the NX01 enterprise crashed on the planet. In PrimeVerse it would have been found by some random starship (say the Kongo), perhaps even before Kirk become Enterprise captain. Maybe in that timeline Krall managed to use it to escape the planet, and cause an atrocity (destroying a starbase or colony) before being stopped, explaining why it was never mentioned in polite company - why it wasn't on the "all these ships were named Enterprise" in TMP and why it didn't appear in the D or E's observation lounge - it was wiped from common history books.

Archer himself was unscathed, he'd long since left the NX01 when it met it's fate, perhaps even president by then. I imagine that Ensign Mayweather was still at the conn when it crashed though.

 

NX-Delta was first (Earth) warp-three ship, we know that from ENT: First Flight

Perhaps the Franklin was based on the core of the NX-Epsilon or whatever - a ship between Duval's NX-Delta flight in 2145 and Enterprise's in 2151, merged with a larger but slower ship for service in the Romulan war, in the same way that Starfleet rushed out "kitbashed" ships for the dominion war.

1) It would still be first warp 4 ship (at it's heart), but the merging in say 2158 explains the modern technology
2) It to be a larger ship but not pushing the boundaries of exploration that Archer did, as it didn't exist as a fully functioning starship before the last 2150s. It did Neptune and back in 12 minutes back in 2148, but then sat around in the Sol for a decade
3) It would have a registry number in the 300s, as it received a registry number based on the next in line when it was first created (Can't really launch it called "NX-Epsilon"
4) Kept the NX number as it was based on the NX-Epsilon

 

Always thought the Franklin was a test bed ship, maybe a set of 2 or 3 with the first being the Freedom. Something like a xf or yf in aircraft, a limited production run to do stress test on the engine and other stuff, something like the small NX test craft, maybe why it has NX in it. So you have 3 space frames, maybe one was tested to destruction, and the other 2 mothballed till the romulan war, when it was taken out of mothballs and refit for the war effort. Then afterwards it was part of the federation fleet when it disappeared.
I doubt the NX class was the testbed of technology, the Freedom may have been built in the 2150s and just used to test for the eventual NX, so its probably a Frankenstein test ship.

 

So, Franklin, Freedom and Frankenstein? Makes sense.

I think 326 can be explained in universe with it being pulled out of mothballs for use in Romulan war (setting aside the real explanation) by not giving it a registration until it actually left on a real voyage.

I just don't see an entire ship capable of prolonged space missions existing before Enterprise NX01.

 

@Paul Weaver
It wasn't! well, it wasn't before being refit because of the war, the "Freedom Class" were prototypes, they could go warp 4 run around a bit, but didn't have the infestructor for a prolonged mission of longer than maybe a few months.

In building the NX, parts were tested on the Freedom ships first, see if it work as theorized, then installed on the NX, the Freedom may have ended up with the same engine as the NX as a test, but the ship didn't have the systems to make above warp 4. I mean even on the NX they were tweaking the engine, as Trip said, Its a Warp 5 engine "On Paper" they usually cruzed at 4.5 or so
The ship would go down in history as "The First Warp 4 Ship" because it was a test bed for the NX class.

My beef is that the ship as stated in Beyond still has its old weapons/systems. I would have hoped that the class would have been refit after the war with Torpedos and phasers, maybe a shield grid, and an engine boost to maybe warp 6.

 

I don't see what the issue is, the Kevin universe has different events to the Prime universe so you could say the NX-01 Enterprise launched at a different date and warp 4 was a bigger leap in the Kelvin universe than warp 5 in the Prime...

 

Kelvin only splits after Nero arrived so both universes share the same NX-01 history