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Ships, Classes, Registries, and Timelines

.honestly Strange New Worlds has given us a decent way to handwave the Constellation's low registry #. have it not be a constitution (or at least, not having started as one) and instead be a Sombra class, which shares a hull but apparently has different internal systems. the ship seen in SNW was the USS Peregrine, with a registry of NCC-1549, suggesting it is probably older than the Enterprise, which itself was established as having been around for a couple decades by the mid 2260's of SNW

i tend to think that the Constitutions were derived from the Sombra's much the same way that the Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser was derived from the Spruance class Destroyers IRL, where they took the hull design and engine systems of the Spruance, and added heavier armaments and defenses to it.
in the Sombra/Constitution's case, i figure the Sombra class probably carried a lot lighter armament and weaker shields, and was probably not meant to be a frontline combatant the way the constitutions ended up. their one stated performance detail is that they were faster than the constituitions, which i'd assume would mean they could sustain high warp longer (since the the connies already can hit some pretty high warp #'s for the time.. but if you can keep those upper end #'s going longer you'd get places faster), probably a side effect of having a potent warp core but not a lot of stuff other than the engines to use its power on. which might have been why the Sombra class got used to build the connies.. if a ship has power to spare, accepting a bit of reduced performance to get heavy guns and strong defenses without having to design an all new hull and powertrain would be convenient. though in the process the crew apparently more than tripled.
 
mithril said:
.honestly Strange New Worlds has given us a decent way to handwave the Constellation's low registry #. have it not be a constitution (or at least, not having started as one) and instead be a Sombra class, which shares a hull but apparently has different internal systems. the ship seen in SNW was the USS Peregrine, with a registry of NCC-1549, suggesting it is probably older than the Enterprise, which itself was established as having been around for a couple decades by the mid 2260's of SNW

i tend to think that the Constitutions were derived from the Sombra's much the same way that the Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser was derived from the Spruance class Destroyers IRL, where they took the hull design and engine systems of the Spruance, and added heavier armaments and defenses to it.
in the Sombra/Constitution's case, i figure the Sombra class probably carried a lot lighter armament and weaker shields, and was probably not meant to be a frontline combatant the way the constitutions ended up. their one stated performance detail is that they were faster than the constituitions, which i'd assume would mean they could sustain high warp longer (since the the connies already can hit some pretty high warp #'s for the time.. but if you can keep those upper end #'s going longer you'd get places faster), probably a side effect of having a potent warp core but not a lot of stuff other than the engines to use its power on. which might have been why the Sombra class got used to build the connies.. if a ship has power to spare, accepting a bit of reduced performance to get heavy guns and strong defenses without having to design an all new hull and powertrain would be convenient. though in the process the crew apparently more than tripled.
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But then we have the Starfleet Museum in Picard. USS Pioneer NCC-1500. With those nice TOS-Pilot nacelles with spikes. Picard really puts SNW and Discovery in an alternate universe. And confirms the classic canon scale for all the ships.
 
I am now convinced that they invented the "new" Sombra class to blow away Connie-looking ships without diminishing the number of Connies in the fleet when it's mentioned later in TOS.
 
I tend to roughly fit 24th century registries together per a sort of range of ships built, which can be anywhere from about 360 a year to over 1100. This construction boom hit it's peak in the 2320-s-2340, after which it dropped significantly. More often the production range would be about 600 to 718 a year, but it seemed quite small in the Voyager era. Maybe also small in the pre ST: Online era (although registries are sort of all over the place, there.

In Picard season 2 and 3, registries seem to jump up much higher though... probably because of some being pre-assigned (like Odyssey-class ones)
Still, for my purposes, an average of 718 a year, from 2340 to 70, seems to work fairly well.
With the USS Nebula (NCC-60147?) launched circa 2355/56. The USS Akira prototype NX-62497, scheduled to launch in 2359 or 2360, but then held back for major redevelopment, perhaps (and similar for the Prometheus and the Norway?) And then all tends to align neatly with the USS Phoenix NCC-65420, launching around April 2363, per it's dedication plague.
Despite that, there is still no fully chronological order, as some numbers are just set aside for filling in later (like with the Norways and Akiras)
Whilst others jump ahead a bit. But the 20000 and 30000 number range were probably simultaneously being filled, at their heyday... and so were the top end of the 60000s, alongside the early 70000s range?
 
By the turn of the 25th century Starfleet is in the 90000s, and probably threatening to hit six digits. Especially if they have to rebuild the fleet yet again after the last major Borg incident.
 
Markonian said:
The highest registry is still that of the 29th century Relativity-G, right?
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Yes, but it had an NCV registry, not NCC. So we have no idea how NCV registries work. Plus, it existed 300 years before the 32nd century, where they are still using NCC numbers with 3XXXXX registries.
 
Dukhat said:
There’s already a USS Gregory Jein NCC-103145, if you can make anything out of that random blob that’s supposed to be the ship:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Gregory_Jein
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That was Greg Jein's birthday - 10-31-1945.

It makes sense when you consider how high some of those registries are getting Voyager was 74656. 20 years later they could easily be ready to add another digit and that ship could be one of the first to have a higher registry. 103145 is a reasonable number.

The way I look at the registries is that they truly make no sense because they are applied to every space worthy vessel. We only see the main ships that have the registry marked. All the shuttles, honorary registries (-A, -B, etc.), and probably even the workerbees, have a registry that we don't seen that use up most of the numbers. The numbers don't follow a set sequence because they apply them to production groups and if they skip one for some reason, they may go back and assign it to something else later. So you can have the 17XX, 16XX, 18XX, 19XX, and 9XX Constitution Class and you have no clue what order they were built in because that is not what the registry indicates. It is just a serial number. For instance, the 747. Here are the first 19 airframes (from https://www.planespotters.net/aircraft/production/boeing-747)
MSN LN Initial Delivery Date
20235 1 Feb 1969
19639 2 Oct 1970
19638 3 Jul 1970
19637 4 Jul 1970
19667 5 Aug 1970
19640 6 Dec 1969
19641 7 Dec 1969
19668 8 Dec 1969
19669 9 Dec 1969
19642 10 Jan 1970
19643 11 20 Jan 1970
19746 12 Mar 1970
19644 13 Jan 1970
19645 14 5 Feb 1970
19646 15 15 Feb 1970
19647 16 Feb 1970
19648 17 Feb 1970
19649 18 Mar 1970
19749 19 Mar 1970

There no correlation between the 3 columns, serial number, line number, or delivery date. LN 2-5 were held back as test airframes. LN 1 is the City of Everett, the first and the one Boeing still owns. Though why the prototype would have a higher serial number is a mystery.
 
yotsuya said:
That was Greg Jein's birthday - 10-31-1945.
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Good thing he wasn't born in, say, January. Then that ship's registry would be NCC-13145, which would make zero sense.

And on the subject of registries making sense: Most registries in the Berman era were chronological and actually did make some kind of sense. And the Paramount+ shows for the most part have adhered to this as well. There's the occasional anomaly (Lower Decks, I'm looking at you), but overall it's pretty consistent.
 
Dukhat said:
Good thing he wasn't born in, say, January. Then that ship's registry would be NCC-13145, which would make zero sense.

And on the subject of registries making sense: Most registries in the Berman era were chronological and actually did make some kind of sense. And the Paramount+ shows for the most part have adhered to this as well. There's the occasional anomaly (Lower Decks, I'm looking at you), but overall it's pretty consistent.
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What I meant about not making sense is that when you look at any class, the registries are all over the place. The ones in service at any given time were clumped, but within that clump, they are all over the place. While they are overall chronological, in the short term they are not. Like Stardates. They introduced some randomness to it that gives us headaches. I was pointing out that the 747 production information is similarly random. Overall it follows a chronology, but in the short groups, especially at the beginning, it bounces around. The Fletcher Class destroyers are another example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fletcher-class_destroyers
 
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Let's look at some examples from the Berman era.

Akira: 62XXX-68XXX
Ambassador: 1XXXX-26XXX
Andromeda: 68XXX-70XXX
Apollo: 11XXX-12XXX
Challenger: 57XXX
Constellation: 2XXX-10XXX
Deneva: 62XX
Freedom: 68XXX
Istanbul: 34XXX-38XXX
Mediterranean: 43XXX
New Orleans: 57XXX-65XXX
Niagara: 33XXX-59XXX
Norway: 64XXX
Nova: 72XXX
Olympic: 55XXX-58XXX
Renaissance: 45XXX
Rigel: 62XXX
Saber: 61XXX
Steamrunner: 52XXX
Wambundu: 20XXX

These are all examples of either background ships or conjectural class ships. I also did not add any ship classes where only one registry is known, since that would not help with determining in what era it was built. And of course I did not add such things as the Excelsior, Miranda and Oberth class, whose registries are all over the place for various production reasons, but we will talk about those below.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Occam's Razor. The simplest solution is usually the correct one. And what's the simplest explanation for most of the above registries? That those particular classes were built during one specific time period, and not scattered throughout the 80 years between the TMP films and the TNG period.

But now lets look at the registries of three particular classes: The Excelsior, the Miranda, and the Oberth. They are all over the place. Now, setting aside for the moment the in-real-life reason why that is, the most logical reason for this, as opposed to the ship classes with the above registries, is that those three particular ship classes were in constant production from the 2280's through the 2360's (a period of 80 years), while other ship classes were just built in small batches during small periods of time, relatively speaking.

Now, the big question is, of course, why those three particular classes, introduced in the 2280's, were in constant production for all that time while other, more advanced designs, were only built in small batches during relatively short periods of time. What made those three classes so special that continuous production of them was warranted, but that the continuous production of 20 and more other more advanced ship classes were not? Not to mention, why did other ship classes that were contemporary to the Excelsior, Miranda and Oberth (i.e. Constellation, Constitution, Soyuz, Sydney, Shangri-La) not continue to be produced?
 
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