News Ships of the Line 2026 Calendar

[David cgc]

The front and back covers and roster for Ships of the Line 2026 have been released (Amazon US Link)

Cover: TOS Enterprise with an FJ Scout, by Lewis Niven​

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January: The Enterprise-A and Reliant near an under-construction space station, by Alain Rivard (he's really got to make an alternate texture set for one of those models one of these days. )​

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February: The Defiant zooming through space by Ryan Begemann​

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March: Voyager visiting a space habitat by Lauren Herda​

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April: The Discovery zooming through space by Sonja Civit Kopeinig and Yok Meyer​

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May: The Enterprise-E with shuttles by John Eaves​

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June: The Protostar by Keene Sin​

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Center: A Galaxy-class and other ships around Deep Space Nine by Robert Bonchune​

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July: The Kelvin Timeline Enterprise-A exploring a weird space thingy by Alexander Klemm​

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August: The Cerritos (and four mysterious spacesuited figures) by Derek Charm​

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September: The Titan-A, Enterprise-D, and Stargazer at Daystrom Station by Doug Drexler and Ali Ries​

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October: The NX-01 orbiting a planet by Marc Bell​

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November: The SNW Enterprise exploring a weird space thingy by Yok Meyer and Sonja Civit Kopeinig​

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December: A fleet of 25th century Starfleet ships blasting out of warp led by the Enterprise-F, by Thomas Marrone​

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Edited by Brian Tatosky​

Lot of new artists for SotL this year! Niven, Begemann, Klemm, and Bell are all popular fan artists, it's very exciting to see them joining the calendar's roster. I think this is Sin's first SotL, though he'd gone pro with Trek a while ago, joining the STO team, creating many of renders for the "trading cards" showing off ships seen in PIC's second and third seasons, as well as doing pre-visualization animation for that show. I've seen Herda's work based on Cyan's classic video game Riven, but the Kopeinig/Meyer collaboration is all new to me. Based on their IMDB profiles, they're both part of the Trek CG team at Ghost and have worked on the P+ shows, so that adds up with them having DSC and SNW images.

Congratulations to all the new and returning artists, and to Brian Tatosky on an excellent first edition as editor! Here's to many more!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Niven's scout seems to be short a main navigational deflector. On FJS's primary-hull-only designs, it's on a tapered stalk growing out of the center of the lower sensor dome. Likely the first microscopic speck of dust it hits at quarter impulse will blow a hole in the hull the size of a basketball. (And yes, that's a Get Smart allusion; apologies to Buck Henry, William Raynor, and Myles Wilder.)

 

[The Wormhole]

Interesting that aside from the cover there's no TV series era TOS on this calendar (January is TOS movie era). TOS usually dominates these calendars. Also, nice to see the new shows getting some attention on this calendar.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Oh hey, January artist Alain Rivard is the guy who keeps making pieces of the Enterprise-A together with the Reliant despite that scenario being canonically impossible! I suppose I have to admire the dedication to the hyperfixation.

 

[Christopher]

Oh hey, January artist Alain Rivard is the guy who keeps making pieces of the Enterprise-A together with the Reliant despite that scenario being canonically impossible! I suppose I have to admire the dedication to the hyperfixation.

Hmm, I was going to suggest an alternate timeline where the Reliant wasn't destroyed, but then I remembered that if the Reliant hadn't been destroyed by the detonation of the Genesis torpedo, there would have been no Genesis Planet for Kruge to go after, so the Enterprise wouldn't have been destroyed, so there'd be no E-A.

Well, maybe it's a timeline where a different ship than Reliant got assigned to search for test planets for Genesis.

 

[David cgc]

Oh hey, January artist Alain Rivard is the guy who keeps making pieces of the Enterprise-A together with the Reliant despite that scenario being canonically impossible! I suppose I have to admire the dedication to the hyperfixation.

At this point, I don't think we can judge him too harshly considering that Prodigy gave us an entire two-episode space battle sequence that was ostentatiously overt that all the ships had the same default names and registries. Maybe he lost the original Photoshop files and really doesn't want to repaint all the texture maps from scratch just to make different names.

Still, I do love seeing different names on ships. I remember being unreasonably excited by, IIRC, the second SotL having an image of the TMP Enterprise crossing paths with the TMP Lexington, just because it was so rare to see the Constitution II that wasn't the Enterprise or Enterprise-A.

 

[Pundus]

Yay! I didn't know when it'd be revealed. I'm very honored to have contributed to the calendar, and for one of my favourite Trek shows too

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Hmm, I was going to suggest an alternate timeline where the Reliant wasn't destroyed

Much simpler scenario: a replacement Reliant. FJS postulated replacements for the four Constitution-class ships known to have been canonically destroyed during the series run of TOS

 

[Christopher]

Much simpler scenario: a replacement Reliant.

Yes, that occurred to me, but that raises the question of why the replacement Enterprise gets an "A" but the Reliant doesn't. So it doesn't entirely resolve the inconsistency issue.

Of course, this leads to my usual rant about how nonsensical it is for different ships of the same name to reuse the same registry number with letters after it, since the whole point of a registry number is to uniquely identify a specific craft and its class and construction order regardless of what names it may be given over its lifetime. And I've seen a Matt Jefferies note somewhere indicating that a letter suffix can be used for a refit of the same vehicle. So strictly speaking, it was the TMP Enterprise that should've been 1701-A (though I think it would've actually been 1701A), and the TVH ship and all later vessels of the name should've had their own unique numbers.

 

[Tuskin38]

Yay! I didn't know when it'd be revealed. I'm very honored to have contributed to the calendar, and for one of my favourite Trek shows too

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Yes, that occurred to me, but that raises the question of why the replacement Enterprise gets an "A" but the Reliant doesn't. So it doesn't entirely resolve the inconsistency issue.

Of course, this leads to my usual rant about how nonsensical it is for different ships of the same name to reuse the same registry number with letters after it

Hmm. And it seems like Rivard went out of his way to make it impossible to handwave: looking at the picture again, it's clear that it's the Reliant (and not some other Miranda-class vessel), and it's the specific Reliant that was destroyed (and not a replacement).

FJS indeed postulated completely different registry numbers for the Constitution-class replacements; in- and out-of universe, the Enterprise successors were apparently very much of an exception, with pretty much the same justification given both in-universe and out.

 

[Markonian]

It’s the second USS Reliant NCC–1864, the one JL Picard later served on. Both in canon and licensed material, we’ve seen Starfleet reuse name and registry combos. Like the USS Defiant NX–74205. Starfleet is also inconsistent in its naming conventions, so some ships get a suffix and others not.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It’s the second USS Reliant NCC–1864, the one JL Picard later served on.

Huh?

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Maybe the Enterprise-A was already under construction during Wrath of Khan, ready to replace the Enterprise in a couple of years when the interior was finished. The ship had done enough to earn the rare honour of its registry number being reused long before Kirk saved the Earth from the Whale Probe.

That doesn't explain why it's docked at a station instead of inside a space dock though.

Incidentally, if you want to see some consistency in which ships get the suffix, they're consistently ships which have a predecessor in the museum. Or which would've been in the museum if it hadn't been blown up or stripped for parts.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Huh?

Markonian is arguing that Alain Rivard's art of the Reliant alongside the Enterprise-A is actually plausible and a reference to Jean-Luc Picard having served aboard a Reliant in his younger days, as noted in the Blu-Ray cut of TNG 2.09 "The Measure of a Man".

USS Reliant (24th century)

The USS Reliant was a 24th century Federation starship operated by Starfleet. Lieutenant Nakamura was assigned to the vessel when he first met Ensign Jean-Luc Picard. Nakamura voiced strong views to Picard about snap inspections and the admirals who pulled them. (TNG: "The Measure Of A Man") In...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

 

[Detached Nacelle]

The second Reliant having the same registry makes zero sense though and has no precedent behind it.

Barring a very farfetched conspiracy that it was given the same registry to cover up the events of Wrath of Khan.

There was definitely a second Reliant flying about in 2327 as Picard mentions it in season 1 of Picard so it isnt a case of the background graphic oddities. Another Miranda I can accept but the registry nah.

 

[Markonian]

Huh?

This one:

USS Reliant (24th century)

The USS Reliant was a 24th century Federation starship operated by Starfleet. Lieutenant Nakamura was assigned to the vessel when he first met Ensign Jean-Luc Picard. Nakamura voiced strong views to Picard about snap inspections and the admirals who pulled them. (TNG: "The Measure Of A Man") In...

memory-alpha.fandom.com

USS Reliant (24th century)

For other uses, see Reliant. For other uses, see NCC-1864. The USS Reliant (NCC-1864) was a Federation starship, a Miranda-class destroyer[1] in Starfleet service from around the 2280s/2290s decades to the 2410s[3]. (SOTL calendar: 2012) This Reliant was launched in the 23rd century, at some...

memory-beta.fandom.com

There’ve been plenty of registry oddities. Two of the NCC-1864s being Reliants is no issue. For instance, DSC mentions there are thousands of Starfleet ships in T’Kuvma’s War when registries we see are NCC-1XXX, thus some numbers must end up getting use simultaneously or frequently.

Again, NX-74205 was used twice for a ship of the same class with the same name.

In the Kelvin comics, the predecessor of Pike’s Enterprise is the same name, class and registry too.

According to Eaglemoss, all the Excelsior prototypes we see in TNG were named USS Excelsior NX-2000.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

The Defiant NX-74205 is pretty much the only time in canon that two ships have had the same name and registry number to my knowledge, and that was a special case because Ron Moore lost his battle to get the model renamed Defiant-A. The second ship may still technically have the unique number NCC-75633 in the Starfleet registry database as that's what it says on the dedication plaque.

 

[Christopher]

Starfleet is also inconsistent in its naming conventions, so some ships get a suffix and others not.

Because the creators of the fiction are inconsistent and never figured out a sensible scheme, or just ignored logic for the sake of nostalgia or (in the case of the second Defiant) the convenience of reusing stock footage.

Maybe the Enterprise-A was already under construction during Wrath of Khan, ready to replace the Enterprise in a couple of years when the interior was finished. The ship had done enough to earn the rare honour of its registry number being reused long before Kirk saved the Earth from the Whale Probe.

Except, as I said, it's nonsensical to treat a reused registry number as an "honor." That's what the reused name is for. The number isn't supposed to go with the name, it's supposed to go with the ship, to identify it uniquely for practical cataloguing purposes, like the Vehicle Identification Number on a car. It's not random, but conveys specific information about the ship itself as a constructed object. But the makers of TVH and later productions didn't understand that, and thus undermined the credibility of the fiction by associating registry numbers with vessel names, treating the numbers as nostalgic memes for fandom rather than something with a practical use in-universe.

I mean, if they wanted the second Enterprise's number to have some resonance for fans, they could've made it NCC-1781, or NCC-1801, or something like that. That at least would've made sense.

Incidentally, if you want to see some consistency in which ships get the suffix, they're consistently ships which have a predecessor in the museum. Or which would've been in the museum if it hadn't been blown up or stripped for parts.

"Would have?" That's stretching the point, since there's no way to verify whether a counterfactual "would have" occurred or not. Indeed, it's essentially meaningless, because presumably every ship that isn't preserved in a museum is eventually destroyed or disassembled -- unless it gets recommissioned as a civilian ship like the Hansens' Raven apparently was, but there's little or no evidence to suggest that's a common practice.

Besides, there are probably a lot of museums, not just the big one we saw on TV. So there may be hundreds of less famous ships on display in various museums around the Federation, and thus there's no way to confirm that only the ships with reused numbers have namesakes in museums somewhere.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Starfleet decides what registry numbers are supposed to be and what traditions they have.

The pattern is: every successor to a hero ship gets a letter except for the Defiant, which couldn't because of stock footage. Those are the ships legendary enough to go into the museum, among others.