One of the ships that has fascinated me the most through my Trek fandom is the XCV-330 Enterprise. It's had a few appearances as paintings or a little sculpture, but we've never gotten a story or anything beyond that. We know it was in commission from the mid-2000s to 2129 if Memory Beta is to be believed, so why haven't we gotten any adventures with it? I, for one, would love to see something come of that unique design.
How have we never gotten anything about that XCV Enterprise?
- Thread starter ace2k
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I alluded to it in DTI: Watching the Clock, and featured it briefly as a museum ship in Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference.
glances at how the ENT staff wanted to make a first season about Archer supervising the construction of the NX-01 to be launched at the end of the season, only to be overridden by studio executives who insisted on TOS/TNG/VOY mark zero from the beginning of the season
I guess no one with the authority has been brave enough to sponsor an entire Star Trek premise which would, at best, explore two or three stars.
Probably because that time period hasn't ever been covered in the franchise. Not onscreen or in any tie-in material.
I once pitched the idea of doing books set between first contact and Enterprise, filling in the untold story of the early years after contact, but my editor Margaret Clark said no, since there were too few familiar characters or story elements in that period. (Which is what I liked about it, since I like having the freedom to create my own characters, worldbuilding, and storylines in the empty parts of the continuity.) That's when she pitched me on doing a post-Enterprise series instead.
I would have quite enjoyed that!
One way to get around it would be having (a) familiar character(s) travel back in time. Or have a character telling the story of an ancestor, or paralleling an old story with a series-era plot.
I think we get a glimpse of the XCV Enterprise grounded in ice in one of the Roddenberry Archive shorts. No clue if they plan to do more with it. Their version is based on the Roddenberry "Starship" show pitch which went nowhere.
Wasn't a ship of that class...
Kind of surprised it hasn't been in more Treklit aside from the old Spaceflight Chronology, really.
Wasn't a ship of that class...
Under all those tentacles and stuff in an episode last season?
Kind of surprised it hasn't been in more Treklit aside from the old Spaceflight Chronology, really.
Which, as I understand it, is where the ringship artwork originated, before getting recycled in ST:TMP as a past Enterprise.
I'm not convinced the Starship project was ever much more than a vague idea and concept art, since we've never seen a series pitch document or learned any story details. But Majel Roddenberry did attempt to develop it as an animated series, in collaboration with Stan Lee's media company and anime legend Leiji Matsumoto (Space Battleship Yamato, Captain Harlock). It fell through when Lee's company went bankrupt. Its concept of a sentient starship as a main character was then salvaged as an element of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
I would have read that series. It's a shame that Clark felt that it wouldn't have enough appeal.
Considering these days there's very few Star Trek novels published, and what few that are are either tie-ins for the streaming shows or TOS, it's even less likely we're getting something with few if any familiar characters or story elements than at a time when new Trek novels were a monthly release there were at least a few novel exclusive series in circulation.
...True. :-(
Actually I misremembered. I just went back through the relevant e-mails, and it turns out the reason Margaret said no to my pre-Enterprise pitch was that the licensing contract at the time was restrictive in some way that would've made it difficult to get approval for books in a new timeframe that the novels hadn't already covered. She was concerned that the sales/marketing people would've shot down an idea focusing on new characters rather than established TV characters, but that was her read of their likely reaction, rather than her own.
Maybe. All we saw was a rounded bit of hull that matches the nose-pod of the ring ship, though it was pre-first contact, so it probably didn't have a ring, if the ring is indeed the warp engine. It does imply the Ring Ship was part of a series of designs that started off as sublight ships.
Christopher, would this potential series taken place somewhere in the period of 2120 - 2140? I'm basing this on what you said about placing it between FC and ENT, as well as the original depiction of it in the Spaceflight Chronology, which had this class of ship in operation between 2123 and 2165. The Goldstein book listed it as being capable of warp 3.2, which does fit in rather nicely with pre-ENT technology levels.
It was never more than the beginnings of an idea, and I pitched Margaret two possibilities, one that would've focused on Zefram Cochrane and Lily Sloane shortly after first contact (and probably worked in other characters known to exist on Earth around that time), and another that would've been a multi-book Lost Era-type series with multiple authors, spanning the entire gap. It wasn't specifically about the ringship, though I'm sure I would've wanted to include it in the latter version.
What I established in Patterns of Interference was that the XCV program was abandoned sometime before 2130, in favor of Henry Archer's Warp 5 program. Which was consistent with what I established in Watching the Clock about the 250th anniversary of its final flight being sometime prior to the novel's 2381 setting.
Of course, the Spaceflight Chronology's dating scheme is irreconcilable with canonical dating, since it assumes everything happens about 60 years earlier, e.g. TOS happening in something like 2207-10, and presents an entirely different version of the intervening history.
Especially when you consider Decker's comment in TMP that Voyager 6 was launched 300 years ago, and the Chronology had the refitted Enterprise in 2215.
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