Ditto regarding the new Enterprise and the Connies being phased out for the Excelsiors. If the Enterprise was the second ship of the class built as her number might suggest, it was probably the second oldest still out there. I imagine the Enterprise-B (but not 'B' suffix) was already in the works at the time, if not in the early stages of being built. The 'A' was just a political gift and a way for the Federation and Starfleet to politically save face and honor Earth's saviours while the real replacement was being built.
I like to think the 'A' was built from construction spares leftover from the refit program (similar to the way the space shuttle 'Endeavour' was built from spare parts to replace 'Challenger') that was also meant to test the ability to graft Excelsior tech onto the newer Constitutions. This would both explain the way the ship seemed 'put together by monkeys' i.e. in a slapped together fashion, and why it had the newer LCARS-style interfaces and interior designs. I am undecided as to whether or not this ship had a name before it was called the Enterprise-A, but am pretty sure it was 90% done at the time of the Whalesong Crisis.
That's a very interesting and plausible idea. It does explain the otherwise totally unbelievable premise of ST V that the ship was a malfunctioning piece of junk.
Then why were Kirk and the crew so flabbergasted when the existence of another ship named Enterprise was revealed to them?
Okay. They arrived back from TWOK, and were immediately taken to be debriefed for their involvement with the Genesis device and planet. The new Enterprise wouldn't have been in Starbase One - she'd have been in an orbital slip, like the NX-01 and the no-bloody-A,B,C, or D before her and the B, after her. Might not have even had her paint yet, or any systems online to speak of. Morrow isn't mentioning the new ship, because several of the crew are known to have a "thing" about the Enterprise, and they aren't looking for any interference in the project.
No, you're missing the point. Even if all that's true, why wouldn't they have
heard about it? The only thing faster than warp drive is gossip. If, as you propose, Starfleet had commissioned a new Connie-class ship with the specific intention from the get-go of naming it
Enterprise and replacing the original ship with it, I find it totally implausible that the crew of the original E wouldn't have heard of this happening. After all, TVH is only 3-4 months after TWOK, and it would take much longer than that to build this ship. And Kirk was a member of the admiralty and Spock a prominent captain. There's no way they wouldn't have known about the decision to make a new
Enterprise well before the events of TWOK.
So the idea that the E-A was commissioned with the specific intent of replacing the E, without any of the E crew hearing a single word about it, just doesn't make sense.
The events of III play out, and the Bounty returns to Vulcan. They are on Vulcan for an unspecified amount of time. At least a couple of months. Some sources place it at a year and a half.
It was explicitly established in the film as three months. The Okuda Chronology's choice to ignore this and set the film a year or more after TSFS is completely inexplicable.
Note: It's called the Enterprise-Class.
No, not necessarily. The bridge simulator at Starfleet Academy in TSFS -- based on the
original refit E's bridge -- has a sign identifying it as "Enterprise Class." But in TUC, Scotty is examining blueprints of the E-A which are labeled "Constitution Class."
Maybe we've just never
seen the other ships with contract addendums on canon sources - doesn't prove they
don't exist.
I've never seen a cat with antlers. You're correct that that doesn't prove they don't exist. However, it does establish that the
probability of their existence is quite low, and that any claim of their existence should be met with extreme skepticism in the absence of hard evidence.
We've seen hundreds of ships in canon. The probability that there would be a significant number of ships with letter suffixes, but that by sheer coincidence none of them ever appeared onscreen except the
Enterprises, is unrealistically low.
And ships are never christened until their construction is complete, are they?
Would Kirk, or Scott, have been aware that there was at least one Constitution-type hull under construction? Almost certainly. But that ship simply would not have been named yet...
Thank you. That supports my point. Certainly the commissioning of the ship had to have happened and been known about. But the idea that the decision to name it
Enterprise came
first -- that the construction contract was treated as an extension of the NCC-1701 contract because someone decided "Let's build a new
Enterprise" -- is ludicrous.
This part, I've always had a massive problem with... though it IS in agreement with Roddenberry's interpretation (that "transwarp was a failure").
The thing is, they would not have built a massive and expensive ship around this new propulsion system had it not been previously tested out and proven out in some other venue. In other words... "Transwarp" MUST have worked. Otherwise, the Excelsior would never have been built at all.
Maybe it was like "Force of Nature" -- they found that it had some serious environmental consequences if they continued to use it.
Although I like the interpretation that what was called "transwarp" in ST III was actually the more advanced, faster warp drive of TNG. Once it became established, the "trans-" was dropped and it just became "warp drive," with the term "transwarp" being repurposed to mean "any propulsion system faster than what we currently know as warp drive." (It has to be a blanket term in order to encompass the incompatible types of "transwarp" seen in various TNG & VGR episodes.) Maybe the renaming was for PR purposes to remove the embarrassment of
Excelsior's failure -- there was nothing really wrong with its technology, but it gained a bad reputation anyway. (Kind of like how nuclear magnetic resonance machines were renamed magnetic resonance imaging or MRI machines because of irrational paranoia about the word "nuclear.")
We don't actually know exactly how much time passes from the day 1701 returns to Spacedock 'til the day Kirk and Co. board teh 1701-A. And to take it a step further... how long from the time of Khan's attack on the 1701?
Given that NuSpock grows from about age 7 to age 50something or more in a matter of a couple of days, TSFS can't be that long after TWOK, although we can assume that his maturation accelerated at the same rate as the planet's instability. A couple of weeks between films seems reasonable to me, though Vonda McIntyre's novelization of TSFS made it three days.
TVH explicitly begins three months after TSFS, but there's no telling how much time elapsed between the
Bounty's return to the 23rd century and the delivery of the verdict at the crew's trial. It could've taken weeks, even months, for the Council to get its act together after the disaster, deal with the business of cleaning up and restoring order to Earth, and then getting around to reviewing evidence and deliberating on the matter of Kirk and his crew. In the film, the spacedock scene seemed to follow immediately on the verdict scene, but it could've been days or weeks later.
So... between the time of TMP and the time of TWOK, how many years passed? Possibly quite a few... and possibly the Enterprise had the crap kicked out of her several times during that period, to the point where her spaceframe was considered compromised, resulting in her being "downgraded" to training duty.
Apparently about a dozen years elapsed. VGR: "Q2" puts the end of the 5-year mission in 2270, so TMP -- at least 2.8 years later -- would be 2273. Now, TWOK, 15 years after "Space Seed," should really be 2282, but again the Okudas' bizarre dating of the movies comes into play; the Okudachron placed it in 2285, and that's been conventional wisdom long enough that it's hard to refute anymore.
I accept it as "Enterprise-class" because, where two contradictory versions are given on-screen, the one that makes the most sense is the one you should accept. Ship classes aren't assigned based upon whether or not two ships look similar... or even whether they're built upon the same hull. No, they're assigned based upon CAPABILITIES.
The idea is that any two ships of a given class are, for all practical purposes, interchangeable. This is the only reason to CARE about "class," after all... you have a job that needs to be done, and you know the capabilities of a certain class of ship, so you send one of the ships of that class to do that job.
That makes sense.
The fact that the Berman-era folks screwed up and gave Scotty a "blueprint" which said "Constitution-class" is something I'm prepared to write off as just another "who cares, they'll take whatever we give them" demonstration by the B&B crew.
Huh? That's a gigantic non sequitur. That blueprint was in TUC, a movie produced by Leonard Nimoy, Ralph Winter, Steven-Charles Jaffe and Marty Hornstein and directed by Nicholas Meyer. Rick Berman was producing TNG on television at the time, but he had no involvement in the movie (beyond calling up Nimoy and asking him to do a guest appearance on TNG to cross-promote the movie). As for Brannon Braga, at the time he was a lowly staff writer in his first year on the show, with only a couple of credits under his belt. He was at the very bottom of a totem pole that had Berman and Michael Piller at the top. He had the smallest possible influence over TNG at the time, and absolutely no influence over TUC. Even if the blueprint had appeared in TNG: "Relics" as you seem to be assuming, it wouldn't have been under Braga's control. There was no "B&B" as a producing entity until 1998, when Braga took over from Jeri Taylor as VGR's showrunner, and no "B&B" as a writing entity until 2000 when they teamed up to co-create ENT and then worked together as a writing team on that show. And the two men went their separate ways after ENT ended in 2005, so there is no longer a "B&B." And there wasn't even a "B" as far as TUC was concerned. Berman only produced the TNG movies, and Braga was only involved with the first two of them as a co-writer.
