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"Warp 7 beauties" = the Daedalus class?

If we want to remove the Daedalus from consideration as a Warp 7 Beauty, what else does that leave us with? What else do we know was operating in that timeframe?

The NX-Refit

The Franklin (Freedom Class)

That's pretty much it.

But what about The Kelvin? Her registry was pretty low. 2233 is only 72 years after the founding of the Federation. She certainly didn't look like a new ship. Maybe she, and her class, are older than we think?

Since this stuff gets rewritten as we go, what about the Bonaventure from TAS’ “The Time Trap”?
 
Since this stuff gets rewritten as we go, what about the Bonaventure from TAS’ “The Time Trap”?

Going by the strict dialogue, Bonaventure should be older than NX-01, not newer. Bonaventure was the "first ship to have warp drive installed".

I take TAS with more than just a grain of salt. Alot of it just flat out doesn't work in the slightest, and was officially not canon for decades. However with the Bonaventure, in my own working out of the Trek chronology, I assumed it was the first true "starship" to have warp drive, in the last 21st century. The Phoenix and the probes and what not had warp drive, but Bonaventure was the first ship with a crew set out to explore.

For that theory to work, it has to be prior to 2069, when Conestoga was launched. I tend to ignore any visuals from TAS, so i'm seeing Bonaventure as a small vessel cobbled together somewhere around 2067 just a few years after the Phoenix flight, probably with some help from the Vulcans. While the Vulcans were trying to keep Earth contained, a diddly little vessel flying around at Warp 1 wasn't really going to have the range to do much of anything, and gives the humans something to rally around.

EDIT -

Just wanted to pop this in here as we talk about the Daedalus. I've put alot of thought into post-ENT era and have a whole slew of theories/headcanons. One such is the origins of "NCC". In my version of events, the Daedalus is actually based on a somewhat older design that never actually made its way into production, designed as a military ship by a now-defunct Earth military (I have it pegged as US Space Force). Starfleet pulled the design out of mothballs, needing something designed for military operations and realized it was an easy ship to build.

(trying to reconcile "old" canon with new), the initial purpose of the Daedalus was essentially as a mobile missile platform. Given they needed huge amounts of ordnance, Earth was unable to manufacture photonic torpedoes at that scale and fitted these vessels with massive amount of old-style nuclear warheads. Being wartime and nobody wanting to get creative with naming, this design was given the simple name of "Nuclear Combat Cruiser", the first to roll of the line being NCC-10 Daedalus. (Mirroring what someone said earlier, the Sphere is the habitation area, the secondary "tube" is mostly taken up as munitions storage/missile launchers)

Much like the NX-Class, the NCC-Class didn't have an official "name" other than its letter designation. At the end of the war, the refit NX-Class became known as "Columbia-Class" after NX-02, the first to receive the refit, and the NCC-Class was dubbed "Daedalus-Class", starting a tradition that would last for centuries.

It was the NCC/Daedalus-Class that projected Earth from minor power to the most powerful fleet in the quadrant, and upon the formation of the Federation, most Starfleet ships would be given a registry beginning with "NCC" in honor of the now-legendary class of starship. (The NX-Class, of course, would also be remembered and honored with experimental or one-of-a-kind vessels receiving the "NX" registry.)
 
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Is there anything in the canon that says the Horizon can't be the ECS Horizon? I mean.... they had the book.

Nothing explicitly says it can't, and indeed in one of the novels it was. The non-subspace communication was explained with them having flipped a switch during maintenance.

There was a Daedalus class USS Horizon (at least there was a model of one on Sisko's desk), but that doesn't mean they have to be one and the same.

There was an implication the Horizon in PotA wasn't the ECS horizon, at least pre-2161 -- the Horizon mentioned in Piece of the Action was implied to be a Federation starship, however I don't count that too seriously -- Kirk didn't say it, he just said he was from the same "outfit". Kirk's not an internet nitpicker, he's not going to be going "Actually the Horizon was part of a civilian Earth Cargo Service and we are part of a Federation starfleet, a interstellar semi-military organisation".

Actually, the book was “Chicago Gangs,” not “Chicago Mobs of the Twenties.”

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We could rewrite the Bonaventure as the first Warp 7 starship.

You keep the first warp moniktor, but make it so it represents th new breakneak speed for future starships.

...

Didn't the calendar already do that for their reimagiend Bonaventure?
 
Nothing explicitly says it can't, and indeed in one of the novels it was. The non-subspace communication was explained with them having flipped a switch during maintenance.

Kirk didn't say it, he just said he was from the same "outfit". Kirk's not an internet nitpicker, he's not going to be going "Actually the Horizon was part of a civilian Earth Cargo Service and we are part of a Federation starfleet, a interstellar semi-military organisation".

I like to think it was ECS Horizon.

Exactly the thing on nitpicky speech... humans don't always speak super precisely, and there was no reason for Kirk to do so anyway. Nothing about the dialogue would disqualify it.


We could rewrite the Bonaventure as the first Warp 7 starship.

You keep the first warp moniktor, but make it so it represents th new breakneak speed for future starships.

Also plausible. I kind of like that idea because when it comes down to it, Bonaventure has never been treated as any sort of particularly big deal. Warp 7 is really just a mild improvement over Warp 5, not a huge milestone breakthrough. The big warp milestones seem to be hitting Warp in the first place, and cracking Warp 5.

In that case, the visuals of Bonaventure make a bit more sense... for all intents at purposes at that point it's a Pre-Constitution Constitution.
 
Not sure why warp 4 to warp 5 is any more of an advance than warp 5 to warp 6 tbh, but then warp isn't linear nor even based on any particular formula - it seems to vary a lot based on the conditions of space, and if you know the right routes/methods from say Vulcan star charts you can get to Q'onos in 4 days below warp 5, which would put a speed of at least 1 light year per day

Maybe Warp 5 class engine you get allows access to the certain subspace regions which allows higher real-term speeds, regardless of the actual output -- access to an "intersteller jet stream" if you will, for high speed movement along certain known charts, where if you're pootling along with a Warp 1/2/3/4 class engine you are stuck in the multi-weeks to get to another system.
 
If we want to remove the Daedalus from consideration as a Warp 7 Beauty, what else does that leave us with? What else do we know was operating in that timeframe?

The NX-Refit

The Franklin (Freedom Class)

That's pretty much it.

But what about The Kelvin? Her registry was pretty low. 2233 is only 72 years after the founding of the Federation. She certainly didn't look like a new ship. Maybe she, and her class, are older than we think?
What about the Valient?
 
She is a sexy AF ship.

I think she's ugly as hell, but in the best possible way.

Not sure why warp 4 to warp 5 is any more of an advance than warp 5 to warp 6 tbh, but then warp isn't linear nor even based on any particular formula

I don't know either, but it DOES seem to be a milestone. It wasn't "The Warp 4 Complex" or the "The Warp 6 Complex". Warp 5 was the "Big Deal". This seems to be confirmed by the Vulcans too, who seem to treat achieving Warp 5 as a major milestone.

We could talk for years about the possible technicalities of it, but I think Warp 5 just hits an exponential increase in range. We know prior to 2152, humans not been able to make it further than 100 LY's, it was noted when NX-01 crossed 100 LY's they were the furthest anyone had been, which was probably a Boomer cargo ship, which we know could take... many years to make a journey. Enterprise got there in about a year, and that's not with just a straight line direct flight. Lollygagging around and going on adventures, it took them about a year to go 100LY's where it would have taken any other Earth ship many years.

I feel like Warp 5 is when space "opens up" and people can actually get around. Warp 1-4 lets you hobble around the local neighborhood. In the 4's opens up space quite a bit, and when you actually hit 5... you're basically at "average speed" for anyone. You're part of the galactic community, or at least, the Quadrant community.

What about the Valient?

Launched in 2065.
 
In the above, I think Warp 3 is the barseat to meet. Warp 5 seems to have been Henry Archer's/Cochrane's personal goal.
 
Launched in 2065.

Maybe. All we know was it was not launched after 2065.

Where no man has gone before has been dated to 2265. Kirks log was that it was lost "over 200 years ago", meaning pre-2065. It it had been 200 years and 6 months Kirk wouldn't have said "over 200 years ago" either.

The dates are problematic for a warp ship, but then Kirk's concern about distance to Earth bases, or Spocks use of hyperdrive and rockets in "The Cage".

Taking it at face value, possibilities are

1) wildly misreading the dates (maybe the record was originally "launched in 2150" and whoever was in charge of entering the data onto the wikipedia page saw the 21 and put "mid 21st century")

2) it was a pre-WW3 ship like Charbydis, launched before ww3 and the 2050s and affected by similar anomolies that affected Voyager 6, the Ares, and (later in the mid 23rd century) later Friendship One

3) Temporal wars have been shifting the date. (Checks date since Strange New Worlds season 2). As explained in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, dates are changed by alien interference, Humanity's progress is pushed back, but then other events push humanity forward again. The events we saw with the Shatner/Nimoy events are not neccersarilly the same we saw in the Stewart/Riker First Contact days, and againin the Mount/. Hell we've seen people changing history -- Sisko did it on more than one occasion for example, just small changes in the end, but still changes. Perhaps Kirk scaring those Whalers in 1986 caused a butterfly effect which delayed WW3 by a few decades.

either way, a warp capable manned deep space probe does not need to be fitted neatly into events revealed in latter episodes
 
Maybe. All we know was it was not launched after 2065.

Where no man has gone before has been dated to 2265. Kirks log was that it was lost "over 200 years ago", meaning pre-2065. It it had been 200 years and 6 months Kirk wouldn't have said "over 200 years ago" either.

The 2065 launch comes from a computer readout in ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly". It's barely visible, but it's there.

The dates are problematic for a warp ship, but then Kirk's concern about distance to Earth bases, or Spocks use of hyperdrive and rockets in "The Cage".

Dates in the immediate-post Phoenix launch are all problematic, including ones given in during ENT. Conestoga launching in 2069 seems kind of crazy as well, but that's what it is.

2) it was a pre-WW3 ship like Charbydis, launched before ww3 and the 2050s and affected by similar anomolies that affected Voyager 6, the Ares, and (later in the mid 23rd century) later Friendship One

I could throw an addendum on that to keep this AND the 2065 launch... it's possible Valiant was an existing vessel, perhaps built but never launched due to WW3, that was then modified to use a warp drive? Or really, it's never even actually stated it's a warp vessel... perhaps in the rapid recovery post-Phoenix, Earth got a few more spacecraft up and running, both warp and not.

) Temporal wars have been shifting the date. (Checks date since Strange New Worlds season 2). As explained in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, dates are changed by alien interference, Humanity's progress is pushed back, but then other events push humanity forward again.

*sigh, yes. This is probably the "real" answer now. I hate this so much. This was like the canonical answer version of "It's a TV show, nerd". Realistically after that revelation, nothing actually matters in terms of "continuity" anymore.

Which is also paradoxical in that we know for essentially 100% certain that DSC/SNW takes place in a different timeline from TOS due to this, and yet, we ALSO are told by Paramount that DSC and SNW takes place in the same exact timeline as TOS. So the Temporal Wars change things, but they actually don't?
 
Eh, the Valiant's dates is the same issue as the Squire of Gothos or any of the issues TOS has with the movies and TNG onward. The events and timeframe of TOS should be massaged by the later canon.

Plus, the date technically isn't real canon like the Bonny or Daedalus so...
 
Eh, the Valiant's dates is the same issue as the Squire of Gothos or any of the issues TOS has with the movies and TNG onward. The events and timeframe of TOS should be massaged by the later canon.

Yeah but even so, the TOS dates do correlate with ENT dates in this case. We know from ENT that Earth was launching manned warp craft in the late 2060's.

Bonaventure and Daedalus both have much more unknown launches. All we REALLY know of Bonaventure was "before the 2260s" and that Scotty claimed it was the first ship with warp drive. If we dismiss Scotty's claim to actually mean something else, we're got about 2 centuries the Bonnie could fall in.

The Daedalus-Class is also quite non-specific, with the only things we know for sure are they were retired by 2196 and were in service prior to 2167. We get alot closer with them, but realistically they could be as old as like, shortly after the Phoenix or Post-Romulan War.
 
Personally I like what the books did with the Deddy. They’re so prolific post war because a bunch of them was made, and the upgraded models were sufficient to handle peacekeeping roles while SF constructed more advanced ships for exploration.

or maybe that’s my headcanon IDK no more :p

Regarding launch dates, no one has made mention of Valint in Enterprise. And Conestoga seems to have been a one off. The cargo ships I don’t think were built till the 2090s as low warp ships. NX started in the 2110s. The ability to start reliably producing ships seems to have been in that time frame.
 
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