The Titanic only spent five days on the ocean.
Starship Museums: why?
- Thread starter Admiral Jean-Luc Picard
- Start date
I generally operate on the idea that for X to be true, there needs to be evidence. I don't subscribe to "no evidence to oppose so why not" thinking.
I was just referencing old ships that people took to cross the ocean because international flights weren't a thing yet.
I don't mind the fleet museum, I just feel Spacedock should have just been "another one" and not the original, and a few ships didn't feel like they "earned" retirement. Genuine question. Why not have 2 Enterprises? Why retire the Ent-D if it was fully operational and remained in space for a full year?
It doesn't work, I've tried. If you want to teach me, by all means.
I may have to start a thread somewhere out of the way where I'm just screwing around with this while people drop LOL's messages for me to quote and play with. Thank you.
You can also select just a portion of a post (like you were going to copy the text for pasting elsewhere) and get a little popup that offers the choices +Quote and Reply. The first adds that snippet to your stack of quotes to insert. The second operates the same as the normal Reply but just for that snippet of text.
I find this very useful if a post has multiple convo threads in it—because someone multi-quoted, say—but I'm only following/involved one of the convos.
Another means, click the Reply button on a post to quote it. Write your response. But before clicking the blue Post Reply button to post that post, click the Reply button on another post which will quote that post after what you're already written. Like so:It doesn't work, I've tried. If you want to teach me, by all means.
It's super easy, barely an inconvenience. Also, I should think you'd want to learn multiquote before a moderator gets in a bad mood and decides to issue a warning for spamming for all the multiposts. Which has happened, even with people who claim they can't get multiquote to work.
But that's how fiction works. This isn't a scientific endeavor to test and repeat. It's called speed of plot for a reason. In TNG Enterprise can go warp 10 without issue but Voyager can't and has to invent a new way.
Trek is no stranger to this idea of "because plot."
The mind blower, if one looks at the Star Trek Star Charts, is that the NX-01 is actually faster than Voyager.
Voyager was unusually slow to begin with. If the Enterprise A could make it to the center of the galaxy in a day, Voyager should have been able to make the journey from ass end of the Delta Quadrant to Earth in a week. But the show had to stay on the air for seven years, so...The mind blower, if one looks at the Star Trek Star Charts, is that the NX-01 is actually faster than Voyager.
Should have sent them to Andromeda or the far future. Someplace they would've really been out of reach of Trek elements. Maybe something more primitive where there are very few, if any, space faring societies.
At the same time though, it was always a foregone conclusion they would run into the same old staples of the Trek universe. The first season alone had a Romulan in it. At least being in the Milky Way it's a bit more acceptable that we'd run into Klingons, Ferengi and the lot than it would be if they were in Andromeda.
It was the exact reason I lost interest in it, too much leaning on what came before. Same thing with current Trek.
If they were lost on the far end of Andromeda then it wouldn't have been a story about getting back anymore as they'd be way too far away. Even if they had a prototype FTL drive that could get them home in exactly 170 episodes, 154 of those episodes would take place in the empty void between galaxies.
While there was something about the build of the Excelsiors, Mirandas, Oberths, etc. that were particularly suited for long-term operation...
...the same was not true about the Constitutions.
My hot take: The Constitution-Class is actually kind of a shit design and meant to be more of a technology testbed. They were never intended to be in service for an extended period, they were intended to burn fast and hot as a test platform for new exotic technologies. The Miranda was basically a front-line modification of the Constitution intended to be reliable, not hyper advanced.
Part of my explanation as to why some of those ships lasted so long? They were relatively simple. Excelsior began its life with an advanced, exotic drive system but it ultimately failed. Rather than scrap the design entirely, they replaced it with a standard warp drive. The rest of the technology on the ship was basically "off the shelf" and proved to be reliable even with minimal maintenance.
Contrast to something like the Galaxy-Class, it was jam packed with the latest technology, and had a warp core that would go critical if you sneezed on it. The ships required a massive amount of constant maintenance from highly skilled engineers to keep operational.
I think when it comes down to it, that's the most logical answer. There are some ships that are just... reliable. They just work. You don't need a Scotty or La Forge-level engineer to keep them going. Pretty much anyone can keep an Excelsior operational.
I had the opposite impression, that the Constitutions were the spartan and resilient long-range explorers designed to patrol the frontier for years without support and survive threats people hadn't imagined yet. They weren't flashy but they got the job done. And they did that job for at least 50 years (the Enterprise launched in 2245, the Enterprise A was decommissioned in 2293), though I don't think we have any information on how long the surviving ships were still in use after Undiscovered Country. Maybe they were around for 100 years too, they were just much older than the other classes.
My theory is that they kept making Mirandas and Oberths because there was no real need to design a newer model, but the Constitutions were outright replaced by the Excelsiors, which did the same thing except better. I guess the Sovereign class was the eventual Excelsior replacement, the Mirandas were finally replaced by the California class and the Oberths were replaced by the Nova class.
My theory is that they kept making Mirandas and Oberths because there was no real need to design a newer model, but the Constitutions were outright replaced by the Excelsiors, which did the same thing except better. I guess the Sovereign class was the eventual Excelsior replacement, the Mirandas were finally replaced by the California class and the Oberths were replaced by the Nova class.
Of these two hypotheses, I'd have to go with @Ray Hardgrit 's. It simply makes more sense based on what we saw on screen. Also, they were originally going to use the Enterprise-A model as the Stargazer, so they had indeed intended the class to last as long as the start of TNG. The only thing I don't quite agree on is the idea that the Mirandas were replaced by the California class. Based on PIC season 2, it looks more like the STO Reliant class replaced the Miranda (not that I'm happy about that. I dislike most of the STO ship designs in general.)
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