The prototype Defiant was NX-74205. Imho, it would be quite cool to differentiate the two ships like this - USS Defiant NX-74205 USS Defiant NCC-74205 It just so...neatly falls into place.
Except it doesn't, because: NX-2000 - 2280s experimental hull NCC-2000 - conventional warp hull are canonically the same hull, USS Excelsior, just in a different configuration. Whereas: NCC-21445 - 24th Century hull (alternatively NCC-2000-A) Is a different Excelsior, possibly even a different class altogether, though given the low registration either that or an Ambassador seems likely, maybe a Constellation at a push.
I still think the very concept of starships having ANY registry number is obsolete and should be retired. Hell, they shouldn't even have the name of the ship on the outside of the hull. What purpose does that serve? All starships broadcast a unique transponder code anyway, so it's not like you need to look out the damn window to ID which ship it is.
How many times in the various Star Treks do the lead characters come upon a ship that's a wreck, or dead in space without power?
How does that preclude taking advantage of the experimental/conventional registry distinction? Alternatively, the replacement Defiant can continue with the NX-74205 registry (as it does in the novels), but then switch to NCC-74205 when it's no longer considered experimental. Which then, neatly, would allow us to talk about the NX-Defiant and the NCC-Defiant in conversation.
Ships still have their name and registry painted on the hull even though they ID via transponders. Normally I resist the idea that something now must persist centuries later, but in this case... IIRC, there's no indication that Klingon, Romulan, etc, vessels have names and numbers on their hull.
The Klingon D7 & K'T'Inga had markings, but since they're always identical the writing might just mean "Klingon Spaceship". The Cardassian Galor class is another example.
Yes, but there's no REASON to. Except to appease the viewers at home, which really isn't necessary. Dialogue is all we need to establish which ship is which.
I think some ships having A or B or whatever is okay. I got a kick out of Saratoga-A and Stargazer-A. There being a future Voyager was weird for a minute but then I remembered how much I loved the idea of there being a "first" Yamato that led to the Galaxy-class Yamato when she had the NCC-1305-E registry for "Where Silence is Lease". (Yes I know it was different for "Contagion"). In my fanfiction I have a Yamato-T. And I would love to know more about the original Relativity, NCV-474439, the forbearer of the seventh version seen in the namesake Voyager episode. For the Defiant though I'm not so much a fan for two reasons, one being that there had already been a Defiant on TOS with a different registry already, and the other being that I was never fond of Sao Paulo being renamed Defiant. I feel like one of the themes of DS9 is not sticking to the status quo. Things change, people die or move on. Blowing up the Defiant and then replacing her not only with the same type of ship but renaming her kind of goes against that, at least to me. The only thing that should never change is the station itself or at least is where the legacy would lie.
Because the registry system is clearly based on some kind of logic beyond just being random numbers. We don't know what information that system is supposed to provide because the writers haven't created the whole underlying system, but it's blatantly obvious that whatever that information is cannot be conveyed by a registry number which literally wasn't even created for the ship in question, but for a totally different ship that existed decades or centuries earlier.
Identifying a ship by sight. [Points at Hiawatha having to be visually identified by her registry... by someone more or less looking out a damn window] A ship could have a power failure, be heavily damaged, have a malfunctioning/broken transponder, transponder deliberately tuned off, could be sending out a false transponder signal, or there could some sort of electromagnetic interference corrupting the signal. It's just a random ID number with a prefix identifying that the ship is part of Starfleet (NCC) or an experimental vessel (NX). Relativity's NCV was most likely the prefix for time vessels. And before the "But Matt Jefferies said..." gets brought up, that was thrown out the window as soon as the Constellation popped up. Plus the officially accepted registries for other Constitution Class ships also negate his original idea of the numbers actually meaning something. And before the "Constellation isn't the same class" gets brought up, its quite clearly meant to be. It was just easier and cheaper to buy an off the shelf model and blow torch rather than messing up their hero models. Its just suppose to be an easy way to identify a vessel. That's it. The numbers have no real meaning other than "this number belongs to this ship".
^ Yep. Ultimately it's just a unique identifier to record the particular ship in the register of all Starfleet ships. There's not much more to it. All we know is that registries are broadly sequential, but they aren't always. There's a specific case for ships called USS Enterprise. The new Defiant is not really clear due to reused FX, but it's probably officially still 75633, regardless of what O'Brien may have painted on the hull.
Or the markings on the hull could be damaged, destroyed, obscured or fabricated. Probably a lot more easily than damaging or destroying the transponder. (Well, deliberate faking would be easier with a transponder than on the hull.) And if the transponder simply loses power they can always locate and restore power to find out what ship it is (one would assume they should be built to survive, just like an airplane's black box). Deliberately randomizing the numbers to be meaningless would be an idiotic waste of time and effort. No matter how fast the computer is, it still has to be programmed and maintained, whereas any humanoid could just look at a list and produce a number one higher than the last ship with far less effort and more speed. And if the numbers are meaningless anyway, there would be absolutely no reason to use them to homage previous ships like was done with the 1701. It's the name that's important in any case. Meanwhile it's pretty clear from the shows that they definitely don't just look at the previous number and add one (unless it took Starfleet over 100 years to count to 2000, then about 100 more to get to 90,000 and somehow they got stuck at only 325,000 after 1000 years... not to mention various other issues). The only thing the makes any sense is within the universe is for there to be some kind of underlying system or other, regardless of the fact that the audience will obviously never understand what exactly it is. And the fact that they use special prefixes for different types of ships obviously points to there being actual logic behind the whole system, too. Or there could be no single underlying system, ie, starfleet changes how they use registry numbers just like they change uniforms. But that would also make the a-b-c suffixes nonsensical, because if the whole systems been changed anyway, there's no logical reason to fear special confusion between a modern Enterprise and one from 100 years ago.
At the speeds that ships travel within Star Trek, not too mention the distances, the idea that primary means of identifying unknown ships is by reading the markings seems pretty silly.
I don't think its an identification thing but more a pride thing, especially in dock. There's nothing wrong with that. I wish sometimes between the 24th and 32nd century Starfleet went totally baroque for a little while on their ships with gold fillagree and anything else they wanted to embellish with.
Quite so. It would be easy to argue that both NX-2000 and NX-74205 were intended by Starfleet to be "X-planes" rather than "prototypes": the former was a modification of an existing capital ship for the sole purpose of testing the transwarp drive, the latter was an experiment on how to produce an anti-Borg platform. That the latter then actually spawned a class would be wartime convenience, and peacetime ship construction would instead involve actual prototypes (possibly with NY numbers) leading into series production, full aircraft style. We basically never see other NX ships on screen, and the idea that they would be prototypes for ship models that later see series production is more a fan convention than something inherent in the material. Sure, Okudagrams and the like list an NX-registered Galaxy or Constellation, but those are obscure things, ambiguous and comparable to the Porsches and ducks on the MSDs. (The United Earth Starfleet use of the letter X is likely to be more logical and more in the naval convention: Archer's ship is introduced as the very first UESF deep space eXplorer, so NX-01 makes great sense there. And since we know that UESF gives its ship classes perfectly ordinary class names (we hear Neptune and arguably Triton), we might also assume that Archer's ship is of the Enterprise class, in which case her also being "NX class" establishes NX as a mission-descriptive thing, comparable to a ship today being CVN class or DDG class...) As regards the letter-suffix ships of DSC, statistically it would appear that all the TOS through VOY era ships we've heard of will get the letter! That is, it really doesn't take much... Timo Saloniemi
After reading through this thread and the discussions around registries, I'm just wondering, Spoiler: In light of Discovery's "Scavangers" Did seeing the Discovery get an "A" appended to its registry due to its "Ship of Thesus" style refit affect anyone's thoughts here? I have to say, as someone who does like the "A" conventions (though I know not everyone shares that feeling), I'm not sure I like it being applied after a ship was refitted. Trek/Starfleet tradition seemed to be the letter gets added when a new ship is added and intended to contribute to the original's legacy, but here, it makes me wonder how the refit-Constitution didn't likewise get the "A" designation. For the record, I'd be in favor of the former Sao Paulo being the NCC-74205, at least following the end of the Dominion War (I agree there's a psychological benefit from making your enemies think the ship they destroyed was only mostly-destroyed, quickly repaired, and put back into service). Other ships in the Defiant line could be given the "A" and so on designations.