Been lurking forever (well, a decade,anyway), but too often got turned off of posting by how heated discussions could get. I just recently stuck my head in again, though, and I find it a much better atmosphere than I had previously, so I started digging in a bit more earnest. Found this thread, which I am now necro'ing as my first post, as this is something that's been near and dear to my heart for ages.
*ahem* Brace for essay.
Regarding intentions and such... *sigh* There was so much miscommunication and lack of communication back in the day, it's kind of infuriating. Add on top of that Gene's ego plus the tendency of people to look to him for answers (that he'd usually just pull out of his butt), and things get murkier. The earliest somewhat useful reference is The Making of Star Trek (indeed, it was FJ's primary reference, plus photos and film strips ordered from Lincoln Enterprises -- he never really watched the show), but that book has many problems. For starters, Jeffries is barely consulted for it. Something that happened a lot on TOS. He was the Art Director, but the position of "technical Consultant" didn't exist yet. The model shop guys who built the wrecked
Constellation never approached him to ask what number should be on it. The clearest indicator of his partially-thunk-out registry system is the "Court Martial" wall chart. At the time, the 17xx registries were supposed to be for the
Enterprise's stablemates, the 16xx ones for the immediate predecessor Starship class (fandom gives us the
Baton Rouge class, and I have no problem with this), and the lone 18xx would be a subsequent/supplemental Starship class serving alongside the
Constitutions.
I'm gonna go with that last one for a little bit to lay out some of my approach. That lone 18xx-range registry -- 1831 -- was the one with the status bar all the way to 100%, and the one Stone pointed to when he mentioned moving the
Intrepid out to make room for the
Enterprise. The same
Intrepid we learned was crewed entirely by Vulcans ("The Immunity Syndrome"). Probably on a purely scientific mission. The same sort of mission the
Reliant was on in TWOK. So, in my headcanon, the 18th Cruiser design is the
Miranda class, and the later addition of the
Saratoga (1867) and
Lantree (1833) reinforce this. We know it's a Cruiser since the Starships are Starfleet's Ships-of-the-Line, Heavy Cruisers, workhorses, etc. No prefixes were on that chart,because, thanks to the header, it would be known that all begin with "NCC".
The
Lantree is a good example of what the
Intrepid/stock
Miranda looks like. Slotted into the procurement list for the class at 1860, a block was reserved for a more heavily armed subclass, the
Avenger. Still part of the larger base class, though. Ditto the
Soyuz class at 1840 (the
Bozeman is annoying -- all of the numbers on the miniature were 1841, except one 1941 in homage to the film... and that's the one that showed up prominently on screen).
The
Miranda has nearly the same internal volume as a
Constitution, albeit arranged differently. I tacitly consider the Light/Heavy distinction to be inclusion of a secondary hull, rather than simple displacement.
So, ducking back over to Reality-Land, into the '70s and '80s, no one talked to Jeffries about this. FJ made up his own system, Gene thought it looked good and signed off on it -- because he had more important things to do that make sure all the fiddly technical details were right, like Main Engineering being in the secondary hull, rather than the primary, or where the photon torpedo launchers were, or why FJ put physical phaser emitters on his plans when the filming miniature had no such features... I have no problem including the bits of FJ's work that, well...
work, and fudging or ignoring the stuff that doesn't.
All of this is
further complicated by Gene's big falling-out with FJ, which resulted in the Great Bird declaring the plans and Technical Manual non-canon, coming up with Roddenberry's Rules of Starship Design to specifically nullify all of FJ's original designs, and telling FASA and Mike Okuda to ignore FJ's works when they were casting about for starship lists. The only other reference they had was an issue of the 1970s-vintage fan magazine T-Negative, in which a young Greg Jein had written an article wherein he used (by his own admission) barely logical means to line up the known
Constitution class ships with the "Court Martial" wall chart registries. He echoed the uncertainty of the time over whether the
Intrepid was 1631 or 1831 -- it wouldn't become clear until the higher resolution of the DVD release. FASA went with Jein's system (with errors), and Okuda went with FASA (being as they had a license at the time, thus their list was official).
And so the problems propagate.
I have no problem with Okuda's system of "all Starfleet ships have an NCC prefix and the number is assigned at the time the ship is ordered, regardless of class or type". I have it starting in the late 2280s to early 2290s, and replacing the older Jeffries system...
Now, going back a bit, we all know, when we stop to think about it, that the Tre universe and ours split off no later than some time in the early 1800s. I don't know that we'll ever be able to say for sure that ancient aliens
didn't seed the primordial oceans with something to direct evolution toward a shape like theirs (TNG "The Chase") or whether the Greek gods actually existed and were visiting aliens, or any of that. But I have found no record of a Thaddeus Riker serving on either side in the Civil War, so there's a solid fission point there, if not earlier. By the 1960s, things were still largely parallel (although the Trek universe's Amelia Earhart was prettier than ours and the Roswell Incident really
was a crashed alien spaceship, rather than a Project: Mogul high-altitude listening device). Then things start to diverge more and more. My placeholder supposition is that Kennedy wasn't killed. We got increasing tension in the Cold War, no Limited Nuclear Test Ban treaty, orbiting weapons platforms...
...And also the future we were promised at the time, without NASA getting defunded by Nixon or the LNTB treaty scrubbing the cooperative projects being jointly developed by NASA and the US Air Force. Their timeline didn't get derailed. Their Apollo program went through Apollo XX, they had their first La Grangian space station online by 1980, first permanently manned moon base by 1990, first manned expeditions to Mars and the outer planets by 2000. Basically, watch the middle act of 2001: A Space Odyssey. They had nuclear-powered cryogenic sleeper ships with artificial gravity being launched by the mid-1990s. The
Botany Bay was not stolen by Khan, but was the World Court's solution to him and his followers. That ship and probably others) was sent toward Tau Ceti -- a close system with a good star that never, ever gets mentioned in Trek. Wonder why? Eugenic colony under quarantine, maybe? But the
Botany Bay was disabled and knocked off course, drifting further into the constellation Cetus.
So by the time Cochrane had his breakthrough in 2063, we were already colonizing near-space, and each of those would want craft to get around in.
Thanks to Enterprise (even though it's an alternate universe to Prime Trek, I treat some timeline points to be generally reliable/inevitable in both universes), we have the various Human system fleets merging into a single unified Starfleet in the early 2130s, as warp drive and subspace radio improvements tied humans together more cohesively. The first jointly-designed vessel was NX-01, the U.S.S.
Dauntless. "N" indicating a ship registeres to Terra or her colonies, "X" indicating no specific system allegiance (rather than different operating agencies, I have NAR, NDT, and NGL being the prefixes for one or another of the Human-colonized systems)... with U.S.S. a new name title meaning "United Starfleet Ship".
Now, back to the Jeffries era. In addition to the meaning of the numbers, he also speculated later on what the prefix meant -- but, again, no one started interviewing him about this stuff until the '90s. He came up with "NCC" off the cuff, through a well-documented process I won't repeat here. What's relevant is that he later found himself drawing a parallel to the wet Navy Cruiser prefix of CC, and figured that other ship types, like Frigates or Destroyers, would have similarly analogous prefixes -- NFF or NDD, to carry those examples forward. That works for me. The non-repeating three-letter prefixes are for civilian-flagged vessels (N originally for Terrans, later the whole Federation, since they were the driving force behind
that, too), while the doubled letters indicated an active-service Starfleet vessel. NX would continue to mean "not (yet) assigned", getting changed to "NCC" once entering active service. "Naval Construction Contract" and "Naval Experimental" got coined by civilian Starfleet aficionados as a handy mnemonic.
The latter two numbers did indeed indicate production number within the class, and the number(s) preceding indicating that class. As Starfleet's shipbuilding capacity was still limited enough that most classes wouldn't get anywhere near a hundred vessels before being retired or no new ships of the class being constructed due to being supplanted by something newer. By the time of TOS and the films, production capacity was improving enough that some of the more recent classes were brushing close to a hundred vessels, and so they started hammering out a new registry system -- the Okuda system. Existing non-cruiser ships would retain their old-style prefixes until they were retired. New ships of those classes (any that were still seeing new construction) would be flagged NCC. And all new vessels, regardless of class or type, would get a sequential registry number assigned at the time of ordering, starting with NCC-2500.
You might think this extremely problematic, but having discussed several different approaches, this one works best to transition from the one system to the other, with only a handful of ships needing fixes (not counting the mess TOS: Remastered made of the issue). But I'll get to those in their turn...
First, FJ's ship lists don't work. The Destroyers and Transports need different prefixes, the numbers are derived from an erroneous premise, and production runs of over a hundred vessels would break Jeffries' registry model, not to mention being beyond shipbuilding capacities of the day. Between 2245 and 2270, we only have about sixty-five confirmed
Constitution-class ships built (going by the
Defiant's registry), of which most have been lost in the line of duty ("only a dozen like her"). However, I
do use his ship designs, many names, and his Starfleet Headquarters space station as the orbital portion of Starbase 11.
I have worked back from the NCC-2500 starting point I give the Okuda-era registries to fill in the first 24 Cruiser classes, bringing in the best I've found from all over the canon and fandom, with more I'm still sifting. I have the 1st (
Daedalus), 6th (
Caracal), 9th (
Ranger), 10th (
Horizon), 12th (
Mann), 13th (
Archon), 15th (the
Ares' class from Axanar, registry adjusted), 16th (
Baton Rouge), 17th (
Constitution), 18th (
Miranda), 19th (
Constellation), 20th (
Excelsior), 21st (
Federation), 22nd (
Belknap), 23rd (
Enterprise), and 24th (
Menagha/
S'Harien). Still missing eight. From there I have used canon and fandom stuff to fill in as much as I can in the way of Destroyers, Frigates, Scouts, and Transports. I have subclasses, like the
Avenger to the base
Miranda, with the added combat capacity, that change the type of the subclass from what the class started out as. To continue the example, the
Miranda is a Light Cruiser (as I said above, roughly the same displacement as a
Constitution, but not multihulled, no long-range sensor dish, no torpedoes, etc.), while the
Avenger subclass is a Heavy Frigate (capable of independent operations, like a Cruiser, but with more combat capacity than balancing that with scientific). However, it retains the prefix of the base class, to avoid crossing over to a potential conflict (like if there were an eighteenth Frigate design as well). The vessel's loadout/mission profile (CC, FH, DF, etc.) would be an annotation in its file, not emblazoned on the hull.
Ultimately, I only have seven problematic registries from all over the canon: the
Revere is fixed by changing the "NCC" in dialogue to "NDD"; the
Columbia,
Grissom, and
Copernicus need to be "NSS" (for Scout); and the
Jenolan needs to be "NTT" (for Transport). All the numbers remain unchanged for these. And the two whose prefixes are fine but need the numbers changed are the lead ship of the
Constellation class -- needs to be NX-1900, rather than NX-1974; and, like others, I retcon the
Constellation from "The Doomsday Machine" to NCC-1710. Any other perceived issues I'd be glad to speak to.
Thoughts?
--Jonah
).
