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Constitution Class Ships Seem To Be Everywhere

The "class J cargo ship" class is Mudd's ship in "Mudd's Women."

In TOS-R, the Aurora in "The Way to Eden" is made to be the same class, matching the ship seen in the updated TOS-R visuals for "Mudd's Women." So, we get a really good look at it in "The Way to Eden."

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Class_J_starship
So, if we go by the remastered visual effects TOS S3 " The Way To Eden", that means a class J Starship looks like an old sixties era VW Bus with Warp Nacelles...got it.;)
 
I thought the original "Mudd's Women" fx worked fine. They're at extreme transporter range, which I think was 1600 miles in The Making of Star Trek, and Mudd's ship is just marked as an electronic blip on the screen. Makes sense: it's little and far away. And the original explosion was pretty cool.

The lack of a miniature for the Antares in "Charlie X" worked for me, too. It (unintentionally) created a weirdness in the situation, something Alfred Hitchcock or The Twilight Zone might do to make you sense that something is off kilter. Something is spooky about that ship, that we are not given to lay eyes on it.

OTOH, Bele's invisible ship in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" just announced "Let that be your imagination, because we are not spending any money on this one."
 
FTL is not one speed, it is a fast range of possible speeds ranging from the speed of light to infinite. And thus it is an infinite range of speeds.

But certanly there is no evidence in TOS that starships have a warp factor with infinite speed. And if a ship can not reach infinite speed there will always be some plots involving that ship which are impossible because of matters of insuficient speed.

What was said in "By Any Other Name"?:



And:



The Andromeda Galaxy is about 2,500,000 light years from Earth. Assuming that Kirk meant it would take the Enterprise between 1,000 and 10,000 yeas to travel that far at maximum speed, the maximum speed of the Enterprise would be somewhere between 250 and 2,500 times the speed o flight.

In "the Omega Glory" the Enterprise finds another starship in orbit around a planet:



So Starfleet lost contact with the Exeter 6 months or less earlier, and Kirk apparently hasn't been ordered to find her, but just accidentially found her. Suppose instead that Starfleet command ordered Kirk to go looking for the Exter 6 months ago and the Enterprise has been travelling straight to that solar system for 6 months at top warp speed.

In that case the Enterprise could have travelled about 125 to 1,250 light years from its old position straight to the posiiton of the Exeter. But instead the Enterprise didn't know that anything had happened to the Exeter and was travelling from star to star in various directins at varius speeds on various other missions during those six months.

So the initial distance between the Exeter and the Enterprise when tthe plague struck the Exeter should have been much less than 125 to 1,250 light years.

In "The Tholian Web" they are looking for a missing starship:



Exactly three weeks is exactly 7 days. Assuming that Kirk would round up or down to "three weeks" if the actual time span was somwhere between 17 and 025 days, the Enterprise should have traveled no more than 4,250 to 62,500 light days, which is 11.635 to 171.115 light years, toward the Defiant in that time, and possibly a lot less.

In "The Immunity Syndrome" Starbase 6 tries to contact the Enterprise, and Spock suddenly feels the death of the Vulcans aboard the Intrepid. And then:



There is no statement about how long it takes for the Enteprise to reach the Gamma Seven A system. So I would guess that it takes the Enterprise between one hour and one week to travel the distance, which should be no more than 0.028 to 47.912 light years.

In "The Doomsday Machine" the Enterprises earches for the starship sending out a distress signal:



Later they enter solar system L-374:



But when they find the constellation in system L-374, and replay the Constellation's log:



So the planet killer finished destroying tthe fourth planet and then destroyed the third planet in the interval.

Matt Decker is still alive, so life support has not yet totally failed, and he hasn't committed suicide yet, but he is still very traumatized over the fate of his crew. That gives me the impression that the third planet was destroyed no more than a few days ago. So I would guess that the Enterprise was no more than a week's travel, or 47.912 light years, from system L-374 when the Constellatin sent out the distess call.

And a star system is mentioned later:



So star system L-374 seems to be beyond Rigel as seen from Earth. Since Rigel is about 860 light years from Earth, that indicates that exploring starships should lbe operation on the surface of a sphere of space with a radius of about 860 light years - or beyond it.

A sphere with a radius of 860 light years would have a surface area of 9,294,087.71 square light yers. If 12 starships are equally spaced on the surface of the sphere each would have an area of 774,507.3 square light years to itself. That are would equal a square flat surface that was 880.06 by 880.06 light years square, or a round flat surface that had a radius of 496.042 light years, wrapped on the surface of the sphere.

And that is not allowing for how much more or less beyond the 860 lightyear radius various starships might be at any one time.

There is absolutely no identification of starship classes in TOS. Nobody ever mentions how many starships Starfleet Command has.

Kirk does say that there are only 12 starships like the Enterprise in the fleet. If that is interpreted as meaning there are only 12 starships of the Enterprise's class in Starfleet, then Starfleet needs to have other classes of starships for.the Enterrpsie to meet as many starships as it does.
And the producers of Star Trek only needed typewriters and a couple of models, because they can have any kind of starship they want meet any other kind of starship they want, to tell whatever story they want, because starships don't fucking exist.

And what boggles my mind is that I've seen plenty of space opera sci-fi where multiple vessels of the same class occupy the same area of space at the same time, yet this thread is the only place I've found in any fandom where that idea has been treated as an anomaly that has to be explained and somehow compensated for. Like I said before, this is stupid.

None of this matters, not the volume of traversed space, not the various FTL speeds involved, not the mythical other starship classes that shoulda/coulda/woulda been involved, the creators had stories to tell and a couple of models to work with, so on screen Connies met Connies in space, period, and all the theorizing and agonizing and calculating we might do for the next decade isn't going to change that fact. Nor should we want it to, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with Connies meeting Connies in space.
 
Wow...just wow. Terribly sorry we all collectively peed in your cornflakes, Admiral. We'll be sure to have ourselves lashed to the mainmast and flogged with a cat o' twenty tails (used to be cat 'o nine, but y'know, inflation and all that) and keel-hauled across the bottom of The Love Boat!

Or...you could just relax, and realize that whether folks discuss this or not, it's not likely to up-end the orbital velocity of the planet and make it fall headlong into Sol.

Just saying.

No no, I'm sorry. I plum forgot I'm supposed to always be supportive and positive on this board. Please, don't let me interrupt this riveting discussion again, and I look forward to the next thought provoking thread on exactly why 2+2 should equal 4 when there are so many other numbers.
 
No no, I'm sorry. I plum forgot I'm supposed to always be supportive and positive on this board. Please, don't let me interrupt this riveting discussion again, and I look forward to the next thought provoking thread on exactly why 2+2 should equal 4 when there are so many other numbers.

There’s a difference between not being supportive and positive, and being a belligerent jerk.
 
I thought the original "Mudd's Women" fx worked fine. They're at extreme transporter range, which I think was 1600 miles in The Making of Star Trek, and Mudd's ship is just marked as an electronic blip on the screen. Makes sense: it's little and far away. And the original explosion was pretty cool.

Could be even further. In "Obsession" the Enterprise beamed up Kirk and Garrovick from the planet surface at a distance of 30,000 Km. In "Mudd's Women" we do see Mudd's ship (it's not a blip).
 
Could be even further. In "Obsession" the Enterprise beamed up Kirk and Garrovick from the planet surface at a distance of 30,000 Km. In "Mudd's Women" we do see Mudd's ship (it's not a blip).

You're right. In this sharp frame, it looks like an animated ship, and not entirely featureless:
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x06/muddswomen001.jpg

But on old-style 20th century TV sets, there was no detail in it at all. I always took it for an electronic placeholder, a blip mapped onto the screen by the Enterprise sensors.
 
Knock off the personal crap. My schedule for this time of the year is hectic, and my patience shorter than usual.

If you can't stand someone, put that person on ignore. If you can't refrain from personal comments, walk away from the damned computer until you can.

This applies to only those engaging in the behavior.
 
I thought the original "Mudd's Women" fx worked fine. They're at extreme transporter range, which I think was 1600 miles in The Making of Star Trek, and Mudd's ship is just marked as an electronic blip on the screen. Makes sense: it's little and far away. And the original explosion was pretty cool.

Mudd’s ship was more than just a light effect (like the Thasian ship or the Orion ship from ‘ Journey to Babel.’) It looked like there was some kind of object on the screen.

OTOH, Bele's invisible ship in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" just announced "Let that be your imagination, because we are not spending any money on this one."

Yep. And what made it worse was the crew being in awe about the ship being invisible, as if they’d never heard of the concept before. Unless the writers were implying that the ship itself was made from material that was naturally invisible, which is ridiculous in the extreme.
 
You're right. In this sharp frame, it looks like an animated ship, and not entirely featureless:
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x06/muddswomen001.jpg

But on old-style 20th century TV sets, there was no detail in it at all. I always took it for an electronic placeholder, a blip mapped onto the screen by the Enterprise sensors.

I remember watching this episode on an old fuzzy TV set and I could make out the shape and despite the lack of detail you could model something close to that shape unlike the blips from "Balance of Terror" or "Lights of Zetar"...
 
Knock off the personal crap. My schedule for this time of the year is hectic, and my patience shorter than usual.

If you can't stand someone, put that person on ignore. If you can't refrain from personal comments, walk away from the damned computer until you can.

This applies to only those engaging in the behavior.

And I'm done here; thanks for having me. When threats fly, so do I.
 
Could be even further. In "Obsession" the Enterprise beamed up Kirk and Garrovick from the planet surface at a distance of 30,000 Km. In "Mudd's Women" we do see Mudd's ship (it's not a blip).

That's the range adopted in Star Fleet Battles, too (5 hexes or ~25,000 miles!)
 
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