Ship Registries Questions

[Herbert1]

Sorry, but no. Once TSFS introduced the NX for experimental starships, that's the way I roll. But I do think that NX is a temporary registry for a brand-new design ship that is converted to NCC once it goes into mass production (I personally think that was the case with the Excelsior in TUC).

ENT did something a bit different with NX registries, but that was in the pre-Federation era, and the NX-class was the end result of the initial NX Program, anyway, IMO...

It gets confusing when Star Trek mixes both naval ship and aerospace nomenclatures and concepts. It's sometimes difficult to reconcile the two.

The United States Navy does not give an experimental designation to the first ship of a class, even if the ship is undergoing sea trials and has not been comissioned. It reserves the designation strictly for ships testing new technologies, such as the IX-529 Sea Shadow.

That was just nonsense on the part of Star Trek: Enterprise. If a ship has an NX designation it should be experimental and be testing the new technologies. It shouldn't be in service performing missions. Where were the yard engineers on the NX-01? Where were the flight recorders sending telemerty to the yard?

 

[captcalhoun]

and in "A Piece of the Action" Kirk says that the Horizon, operating a hundred years ago was a starship. i doubt that was a Connie...

As for why I didn't include either the Horizon or Archon on my previous list... yes the hundred years was a factor, but not as much as them never being referred to as either the U.S.S. Horizon or U.S.S. Archon in those episodes. The U.S.S. Valiant was added to the list because of this even though it was from 50 years earlier. Without the U.S.S. before the name it is hard to tell if these ships were even part of the fleet or some other organization.

This might help. Although he says Enterprise is a starship, he doesn't say the same about Horizon. He does however, confirm that Horizon was from the same organization that sent them:

KIRK: This is Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, representing the Federation of Planets.

OXMYX: Hello, Captain. You're from the same outfit as the Horizon?

KIRK: Yes.

well, Kirk DEFINITELY describes Archon as a starship in "Return of the Archons" in his opening log entry, because i remember checking that episode after getting irate at Diane Carey claiming there were no starships before the Enterprise in Best Destiny and Final Frontier.

 

[Vance]

well, Kirk DEFINITELY describes Archon as a starship in "Return of the Archons" in his opening log entry, because i remember checking that episode after getting irate at Diane Carey claiming there were no starships before the Enterprise in Best Destiny and Final Frontier.

Yeah, but Carey got things wrong in other places as well. The Archon may be a starship (and, indeed, apparently was) but just not a Constitution Class starship.

 

[Unicron]

"Therin of Andor" has stated that Gene Roddenberry was angry with Franz Joseph because Joseph sold a license to Task Force Games that became "Star Fleet Battles". If this is true, then the infamous what is "canon" memo makes a lot more sense.

The impression I've gotten from Therin is that FJ retained control over the designs he created for the Technical Manual, as part of his original contract with Roddenberry. At the time that SFB was created, that contract had already been fulfilled. So there was really nothing Gene could do to stop FJ from allowing his designs to be used in SFB, which they were. That was indeed an impetus to the famous memo, because Gene was concerned about how fans would interpret the SFB game and other spinoffs vs. the episodes and movies, the official source. I think perhaps he was more worried about that particular item due to its connection with FJ's work on the TM. I don't really know.

* shrugs *

In all fairness, while I do not agree with the effect that Gene's "canon" memo has had on the franchise at large, I do think he genuinely wanted to protect his personal vision of Trek and to keep things (spinoffs and merchandise) from potentially spiralling out of control. I'm not sure his method of doing that was sound, but some part of his reasoning may have been.

I'm kind of mixed on some of Mike Okuda's work, which I largely respect. I personally count the W359 ships as canon, because they're onscreen and Mike has provided clear details on them to identify the ships. OTOH, I definitely have disliked the registry scheme that he and Greg Jein contributed, because it's way too random IMO. It made what could be a small problem worse by creating registries out of the blue for the ship of the week, rather than keeping an ordered system as FJ and others did.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Sorry, but no. Once TSFS introduced the NX for experimental starships, that's the way I roll. But I do think that NX is a temporary registry for a brand-new design ship that is converted to NCC once it goes into mass production (I personally think that was the case with the Excelsior in TUC).

ENT did something a bit different with NX registries, but that was in the pre-Federation era, and the NX-class was the end result of the initial NX Program, anyway, IMO...

It gets confusing when Star Trek mixes both naval ship and aerospace nomenclatures and concepts. It's sometimes difficult to reconcile the two.

The United States Navy does not give an experimental designation to the first ship of a class, even if the ship is undergoing sea trials and has not been comissioned. It reserves the designation strictly for ships testing new technologies, such as the IX-529 Sea Shadow.

It's real easy if one thinks of Starfleet as its own organization and not an extension of the United States Navy (or any other Navy, for that matter). There are obvious similiarities, but there are also noticeable differences in how they do things. Starfleet observes some naval traditions and procedures, but also has abandoned or altered others, which makes sense from an organization hundreds of years into our future, IMO. There are bound to be things that have changed dramatically.

I think Starfleet hull registries fall into the category of things that aren't exactly like U.S. Navy hull registries.

That was just nonsense on the part of Star Trek: Enterprise. If a ship has an NX designation it should be experimental and be testing the new technologies. It shouldn't be in service performing missions. Where were the yard engineers on the NX-01? Where were the flight recorders sending telemerty to the yard?

As far as we know, Trip Tucker could have been a yard engineer who landed the chief engineering slot on the NX-01 and it's definitely plausible that NX-01 may have been transmitting performance reports to Starfleet the whole time. The ENT episode "First Flight" suggested that there were several engineering steps leading up to the development of the NX-class, including the NX-Alpha, NX-Beta, etc.

While we may question the creative decision or originality in using "NX" as the designation for Enterprise's ship class, there is a precedent for pre-TOS ships to use letters as ship class names, most notably with the "DY" series of ships...

 

[Captain Robert April]

Sources for this?

Unfortunately, the original articles seem long gone. Karen Dick's comments still mention that Franz Joseph often responded to letters 'in character', which seemed to be Okuda's problem. Okuda took offense at the snide and snobbish tone that Franz Joseph took in his letter. I never personally saw such a letter, so I can't say what the offensive part actually was.

Unfortunately, Okuda himself is one of the few Trek 'people' that remains isolated from the fandom, and doesn't seem willing to engage in discussion about such things.

Hm.

Never had a problem getting a response from him via email.

Maybe it's just the fact that he's got work to do and can't waste a lot of time arguing over minutia?

 

[darkwing_duck1]

Speaking of articles...does anyone remember the name of the site that has all the interviews with FJ's daughter about the Tech Manual controversy?

I want to say it was "Hidden Treks" or "Forgotten Treks" or some such but I can't seem to run it down...

 

[aridas sofia]

http://www.trekplace.com/franzjoseph.html

 

[Vance]

Maybe it's just the fact that he's got work to do and can't waste a lot of time arguing over minutia?

Well, in this case, how would you ask now to clarify the issue? I admit, though, I am awfully curious about Franz Joseph's replies (I never saw one), but if Karen says they were 'caustic' though 'in-character'... wonder if anyone has one that they could post.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

http://www.trekplace.com/franzjoseph.html

Danke!

 

[Timo]

I do think that NX is a temporary registry for a brand-new design ship that is converted to NCC once it goes into mass production (I personally think that was the case with the Excelsior in TUC).

Like Herbert says, it's a bit confusing to have naval and aerospace jargon mixed, although this is probably a realistic prospect for a "space navy"...

The USAF way is to reserve X for testbeds of radical new technologies, and Y for prototypes of operational vehicles - but the old USAAF instead used X for the first prototype and Y for the second, and the X might have been a radical new breakthrough while Y was the near-operational refinement. I could see Starfleet assigning an X to designs that feature radical new technologies that have so far only worked on test rigs or on paper. It may be, after all, that some things require such large-scale test rigs that there's no point building one that doesn't subsequently become an operational starship.

ENT did something a bit different with NX registries, but that was in the pre-Federation era, and the NX-class was the end result of the initial NX Program, anyway, IMO...

One might even argue that the X there didn't mean Xperimental but Xplorer. That is, like today's pennant codes, and unlike NCC, it identified the "category" or "type" of the vessel. Since UESF in the 2150s would have only one Xplorer-type starship class in service, one could freely use "NX class" as a class identifier, just like people used "AEGIS class" to identify the Ticonderogas before AEGIS systems appeared on other USN and foreign classes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

ENT did something a bit different with NX registries, but that was in the pre-Federation era, and the NX-class was the end result of the initial NX Program, anyway, IMO...

One might even argue that the X there didn't mean Xperimental but Xplorer. That is, like today's pennant codes, and unlike NCC, it identified the "category" or "type" of the vessel. Since UESF in the 2150s would have only one Xplorer-type starship class in service, one could freely use "NX class" as a class identifier, just like people used "AEGIS class" to identify the Ticonderogas before AEGIS systems appeared on other USN and foreign classes.

Plausible, especially if there were earlier ship classes that might have been designated "MX-class" or "DX-class" prior to the NX Program. But I also think it kind of goes back to what I said in another post about different organizations with slightly different classification systems over the course of a few centuries...

 

[Timo]

Plausible, especially if there were earlier ship classes that might have been designated "MX-class" or "DX-class" prior to the NX Program.

Or, alternately, the N isn't a model-specific letter but further defines the overall "mission class" or "type" - say, New Xplorer (as in "equipped with warp 5 engines", a distinction at least as significant as the difference between conventionally and Nuclearly powered ships today), as opposed to plain old Xplorer. This would also account for the overall NX program: the test rigs from NX-Alpha to NX-Omega would all be directly and solely related to the effort of creating a N-type engine for the X-type starship...

Or perhaps N stands for Naval, so that a civilian freighter might be of J class, but the same type adopted for Starfleet use would be of NJ class... This could carry on to UFP Starfleet, too, even if the letters X or CC or AR coming after the N no longer indicated the specific type of vessel, and instead reflected her operational-organizational status (experimental, active, leased, whatever).

It would be nice to have some continuity between UESF and UFPSF, but also a few differences - and the rank braid schemes, uniform color schemes and ship registration schemes all are good candidates for this sort of almost-continuity.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

Well, we also have the matter of slightly older ships having registries of NV, etc.

I think in this case, NX only means that X was the next letter in the sequence. For the most part, I think they pretty much blundered into dovetailing with the classification system hinted at in TOS ("Class J starship").

 

[Timo]

Well, we also have the matter of slightly older ships having registries of NV, etc.

Uh, huh? The only registries in all of ENT were NX-01 and NX-02, which doesn't really allow us to narrow things down much.

(Supposedly there was a sketch of some sort that showed "NC" or "NO" on the hull of the ship that eventually became the Sarajevo - but that was an offscreen sketch only. Did anybody see that one, or hear about it? And then there were e.g. those Y-500 class ships - which doesn't really allow us to establish whether that means ships with registries in the range Y-500 to Y-599, or merely what it seemingly states: a class of ships that all are designated "Y-500".)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vance]

or merely what it seemingly states: a class of ships that all are designated "Y-500".

Though hardly conclusive, generally speaking, a designation system like that (in the real world, take for what you will) usually means the lead ship is Y-500, and the further ships of the series would be sequential after that. While Y-500 is just a nice round number, but it's entirely possible that a 'new' Y-series ship, say, Y-519, would be the first of ITS class.

This is the approach that Last Unicorn Games and Decipher took with the class.

But we have, nor now will we likely ever have, nothing to define it concretely or definitively in Star Trek.

 

[Timo]

I rather like that approach for early Earth space forays, on the basis that the registry of a ship could just as well be its type description: each ship would be an incremental improvement over the former. That way, some of the type designations cum registries in the list Picard studies in "Up the Long Ladder" might make good sense: it would be possible to identify an individual ship by saying that it is DY-432, but OTOH there might also be a dozen examples of DY-500C.

But Picard's list doesn't support an all-out interpretation of all DY numbers as registry numbers, since there are indeed multiple ships labeled DY-500C. An alternate simple approach, then, would be to say that the DY number indeed primarily refers to the model of the ship, and that it can only help identify an individual vessel in those (rare or common) cases when she's the only one of her type.

But yeah, nothing conclusive there.

Where does that "NV class" notion come from? (And wouldn't it rather be "Envy class" unless we get it in writing? No, seriously, we could also be looking at a TOS Jay class thematically named after various birds...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

Some of the background ships had registries of NV, NW, and so on. I used to have some really nice orthos of them, but that computer got lost in the eviction heap.

The pics might still be available on hobbytalk, but you'll have to dig back a few years.

 

[Timo]

Explicate and expand, please. "Background ships"?

There were no registries painted on any of the CGI models that actually appeared on screen. That much is certain; we have seen the CGI orthos of all the prominent and background Earth vessels save the ship in the opening credits that flies past the Moon; those orthos show the lack of any sort of pennant art past the ship's name (if that); and it would make no sense to have such registries on alien ships.

Would those designations have been some sort of artist nicknames for the vessels? A bit strange, when the Intrepid's known nickname was "half-saucer" and the Moon ship's was "Emmette"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Robert April]

Unfortunately, I'm still waiting out a one-week ban on hobbytalk (I'm guessing someone didn't take kindly to my statement that JJ Abrams could do me the great honor of eating my shorts and I still wouldn't come within ten parsecs of this disaster he's about to foist on us), so I can't go digging myself.