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Names for future Vesta Class Starships

Thats the impression I got with those three movies. Yet, I would like have seen an Excelsior-centric movie. I liked seeing the Excelsior in TUC, especially if it was with Kirk and Company rather than Sulu going Solo.
 
I'm totally not good at thinking about starship names, but:

It could be possible that the 7 planned ships carry colorscheme X and all the Vesta's after that carry a different scheme, just to make that first group more "exclusive".

Then it would not really matter if the name would be different, as the scheme has already closed the first group.:)
 
The idea that NCC stands for Naval Construction Code and is based on naval hull numbers is the invention of fanon. Specifically, the invention of a man who writes under the pseudonym Aridas Sofia. He co-wrote Ships of the Star Fleet with Todd Guenther.

The idea that "NCC" stands for Naval Construction Contract goes back to the '70's at least. It might even come from The Making of Star Trek (I can't find any of my 3 copies at the moment to confirm that.)
 
I think the whole idea of letter suffixes is lame. In real life, when they give a new ship the same name as the old one, they don't give it the same registry number with a letter after it, because that makes no sense. A registry number exists for bookkeeping purposes, a way of uniquely identifying a ship, its series, its characteristics, its place in the sequence, etc. It's silly to break the sequence and obscure that information by using an earlier ship's number in order to "honor" that earlier ship. The reuse of the name already honors it.

So I have no desire to see the "bloody A, B, C or D" perpetuated on other ships. It's bad enough that it gets used on the Enterprises at all. (I wish the new Enterprise introduced in TVH had been, say, NCC-1781 instead of 1701-A. Heck, it would've been an even easier repaint job on the miniature.)

I don't believe that this invention is any less lame than the fact that the ship-specific symbols on uniforms in Star Trek have been replaced by the arrowhead design used by Enterprise NCC-1701 since Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the exception being the crew of Epsilon IX). This arrowhead has since been adopted as the symbol of Starfleet and has been modified over the years as the shape of the comm badge,

I guess it depends on whether you believe that Kirk's Enterprise was a legendary ship and was truly exceptional and its five-year mission needs to be commemorated or it was one of many historic ships in Starfleet.

I certainly can accept the suffixes much easier than I can accept a third-year midshipman, however gifted, receiving a commission to captain the Enterprise. At least CS Forester had the good sense that when he went back to write his prequel Mr. Midshipmen Hornblower in 1950 that Horatio Hornblower didn't instantly rise from midshipman to post captain.
 
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I got the impression from STIV that the 1701-A, (although based on the refit 1701 design) was much more advanced, with all the latest trimmings, like okudagram consoles and...err...shiny white paint (I think Mr Scott's Guide may have made an impression too, giving the -A cool stuff like Transwarp drive). STV then came along and depicted the ship as a pile of junk offloaded on our heroes, and STVI implied a tiny, cramped, worn out ship, as obsolete and over-the-hill as her crew.

Wasn't the bridge set used in TVH actually the set they built for the Star Trek Experience (or whatever it was called) at Universal Studios back in the day?

It always bugged me that the set changed so drastically for STV (amongst other things about that movie). The bridge in TUC was, I think, the best bridge set ever constructed for any incarnation of Trek.

The idea that "NCC" stands for Naval Construction Contract goes back to the '70's at least. It might even come from The Making of Star Trek (I can't find any of my 3 copies at the moment to confirm that.)

I don't remember it in The Making of Star Trek (although that doesn't mean a lot). Actually, the first reference I remember to "Naval Construction Contract" was from Diane Carey's Final Frontier (although I'm very sure it pre-dates that book).
 
Somewhere, I don't know where, I've heard "Navigational Contact Code". That makes a little more sense to me then "Naval Construction Contract" ever did.

The arrowhead/delta thing has been reverse-continuity debunked by the prime-universe USS Kelvin. The old Tech Manual (which infulenced the design of the Kelvin and Spacedock, so someone read it) said the arrowhead was for the Star Fleet Armed Forces, and the other logos for other branches of the fleet that the various connies were assigned to. I think that story might still hold up, pre-TWOK.
 
The arrowhead/delta thing has been reverse-continuity debunked by the prime-universe USS Kelvin.

If you mean the idea that it wasn't adopted fleetwide until after the 5-year mission to "honor" the Enterprise, heck, that was debunked by "Court-martial," which has the arrowhead insignia in use by a number of non-Enterprise personnel. And it was further debunked in Voyager's "Friendship One," which showed a sideways version of the arrowhead symbol on the UESPA space probe of that name from the 2060s.
 
How about the next Vesta-class starship is named USS Raging Queen named for NCC-42284 shown in the DS9 episode "A Time to Stand"? From the Charles Dickins classic novel Miles Cowperthwaite.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78rcowperthwaite.phtml

Nice tribute, an outdated
I agree with Christopher, name alone should be the tribute. Possibly the NCC-1701-A is referred to the original hull number for book keeping purposes. So the Enterprise NCC-1701-D is actually NCC-71811.

Why would the Enterprise be both NCC-1701-D and NCC-71811? Matt Jefferies based the NCC number on aircraft registration under the Convention on International Civil Aviation not hull numbers on naval ships. The NCC is a license plate number.

The idea that NCC stands for Naval Construction Code and is based on naval hull numbers is the invention of fanon. Specifically, the invention of a man who writes under the pseudonym Aridas Sofia. He co-wrote Ships of the Star Fleet with Todd Guenther.

I was going on the premise that the NCC code was actually the hull registration that was assigned out of the Starfleet equivalent of the Naval Vessel Register where the hull code was assigned when the vessel was authorized to be built and the name came later. So NCC-71811 was authorized by Starfleet and the name Enterprise was assigned to the ship with a special discompensation was awarded to honor the crew of the NCC-1701-C for the honor register of NCC-1701-D, but 71811 was the one used in official Starfleet Registers logs.
 
Wasn't the bridge set used in TVH actually the set they built for the Star Trek Experience (or whatever it was called) at Universal Studios back in the day?
No, it was the same bridge set from the previous three movies, but painted white, and only the parts that we saw. The rest of the bridge set was the gunmetal grey seen in the previous films.
 
How about the next Vesta-class starship is named USS Raging Queen named for NCC-42284 shown in the DS9 episode "A Time to Stand"? From the Charles Dickins classic novel Miles Cowperthwaite.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78rcowperthwaite.phtml

Nice tribute, an outdated
I agree with Christopher, name alone should be the tribute. Possibly the NCC-1701-A is referred to the original hull number for book keeping purposes. So the Enterprise NCC-1701-D is actually NCC-71811.

Why would the Enterprise be both NCC-1701-D and NCC-71811? Matt Jefferies based the NCC number on aircraft registration under the Convention on International Civil Aviation not hull numbers on naval ships. The NCC is a license plate number.

The idea that NCC stands for Naval Construction Code and is based on naval hull numbers is the invention of fanon. Specifically, the invention of a man who writes under the pseudonym Aridas Sofia. He co-wrote Ships of the Star Fleet with Todd Guenther.

I was going on the premise that the NCC code was actually the hull registration that was assigned out of the Starfleet equivalent of the Naval Vessel Register where the hull code was assigned when the vessel was authorized to be built and the name came later. So NCC-71811 was authorized by Starfleet and the name Enterprise was assigned to the ship with a special discompensation was awarded to honor the crew of the NCC-1701-C for the honor register of NCC-1701-D, but 71811 was the one used in official Starfleet Registers logs.

I understand the premise that you were working from. The point I was trying to make was that Jefferies originally based the NCC on aircraft registration numbers and not ship hull numbers. In the case of aircraft, the number is assigned when it has already been manufactured like a license plate number for an automobile. The manufacturer's serial number used during manufacture is different than the registration number that has been assigned by the FAA.

In the case of ships, the hull number is assigned when a ship is authorized for manufacture before the hull is actually laid down.

If you mean the idea that it wasn't adopted fleetwide until after the 5-year mission to "honor" the Enterprise, heck, that was debunked by "Court-martial," which has the arrowhead insignia in use by a number of non-Enterprise personnel. And it was further debunked in Voyager's "Friendship One," which showed a sideways version of the arrowhead symbol on the UESPA space probe of that name from the 2060s.

How do you explain the ship-specific insignia shown in Star Trek? Was the depiction in "Court-martial" a production mistake or production limitation?

The Starfleet-wide adoption of the Enterprise arrow was used to explain why the crew of the Reliant did not have ship-specific insignia.
 
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I would be inclined to presume that a number of different Starfleet crews used the insignia seen on the Enterprise (which itself was also used on the U.S.S. Kelvin in 2233), and that other insignias were also shared amongst some crews.
 
^I'm partial to the idea that each insignia is for a particular "fleet" within the overall Starfleet -- a subdivision of ships within a given region or under a given command base. Maybe Starbase 11 was the command base for the fleet that used the arrowhead insignia, which is why all the starship personnel at the Starbase 11 bar in "Court-martial" had that insignia.
 
Different logos for different branches of the fleet - pretty much what the old Tech Manual said (although FJ's 'SF Armed Forces' sounds a bit to millitarisitc IMO).
Maybe the branch of Starfleet the Enterprise is assigned, and SB11, with the arrowhead logo, is the UESPA?
 
No, I'm thinking of a different type of subdivision. You know how in DS9 they had references to the Seventh Fleet and the Ninth Fleet and the like? Typically a navy is divided into smaller fleets like that, each one assigned to a particular region and under the overall command of a particular admiral. So maybe the arrowhead represented the fleet commanded by Admiral Komack, and ships like the Constellation and the Defiant and so on belonged to different fleets commanded by different admirals. Maybe each fleet had only one or two Constitution-Class ships in it, along with a greater number of ships of smaller classes. This would be why every Connie we saw had a different insignia on its crew's uniforms.
 
Understood, but that wouldn't explain why the cadets at SFA in STXI all had it - unless it was adopted fleet-wide as part of the George Kirk love-in that included memorial shipyards and commemrative salt-shakers.
 
Understood, but that wouldn't explain why the cadets at SFA in STXI all had it - unless it was adopted fleet-wide as part of the George Kirk love-in that included memorial shipyards and commemrative salt-shakers.
In STXI there is only mention of one fleet, meeting in the Laurentian system. This is the fleet with the arrowhead insignia...conceivably the Kelvin was also in this fleet 20+ years earlier.
 
Understood, but that wouldn't explain why the cadets at SFA in STXI all had it - unless it was adopted fleet-wide as part of the George Kirk love-in that included memorial shipyards and commemrative salt-shakers.

I was only offering an explanation for the usage of insignias in the 2260s. There's no reason why that usage couldn't have been a temporary practice specific to that decade. After all, consider how often the uniform and insignia styles have changed and how short-lived they've sometimes been. The miniskirts were only in use for five years or so, and the TMP uniforms and insignias were similarly short-lived. So maybe the use of different insignias for different fleets was a practice that was introduced in the 2260s (at least in the Prime timeline), but Starfleet decided to go back to its old, single-insignia system by the 2270s.
 
The fact that were different insignia's for different ships always kind of bothered me when watching TOS, but this idea of different fleets in the grander Starfleet having symbols assigned fleet-specific is great. Good call all :techman:.
 
^Your scheme works Christopher. The idea that each starship or starbase has its own assignment patch is another example of false canon. Since we saw different patches on the crew of the Antares, USS Exeter, USS Constellation, and Starbase 11, derivative works presumed that a unique design existed for each starship and starbase. Commodore Wesley wears the Starbase 11 insignia while commanding USS Lexington in "The Ultimate Computer." We would presume that Wesley would have worn the unique insignia patch of USS Lexington while he was in command if a unique patch existed for each starship and starbase within Starfleet.

The crew of SS Huron wears yet another insignia in TAS "The Pirates of Orion". This patch could be for Starfleet Auxiliary.

It's interesting that they felt it was necessary to create an assignment patch for Defiant in "In a Mirror Darkly Part II".

The idea that it is a division or fleet insignia works to explain why the crew of Epsilon IX wear a different insignia patch than the other Starfleet personnel shown in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. If a unique patch existed for each starbase, then the crew of the space office complex would be wearing a specific insignia patch instead of the Enterprise arrow.

I believe that there is a line in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual that states that in 2277 ship specific insignia were replaced and the Enterprise arrowhead insignia was adopted fleetwide.
 
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The fact that were different insignia's for different ships always kind of bothered me when watching TOS, but this idea of different fleets in the grander Starfleet having symbols assigned fleet-specific is great. Good call all :techman:.

why? US Navy vessels have their own patches and so do air squadrons in navies and air forces and armies all over the world.

NASA use mission-specific patches for each flight.

how is a starship having a set patch any different?
 
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