Should "Star Trek IV" have introduced a different NCC-1701-A?

Woopie shit. It still doesn't mean they would give Kirk Excelsior just because the novelization said so.

 

Not quite, because that cut scene in TWOK where Sulu's command of the Excelsior was mentioned had nothing to do with the Bill George-designed, "Great Experiment" transwarp prototype in STIII, since that idea didn't come until years later. The "Excelsior" mentioned in that scene and in the novel was just supposed to be a random ship that Sulu was going to get. Once STIII came along, they decided to use the name for the transwarp prototype, and in an ironic twist of fate, Sulu ended up commanding her.

 

I wasn't even talking about Kirk getting the Excelsior -- I was referring to Sulu's captaincy getting rescinded. For the record, there was nothing in the novels about Kirk ever even being considered for that job, either.

 

Seeing the 1701-A as a Constitution class refit was awesome in '86, albeit that was the moment when they should have introduced the 1701-A as then next class. Maybe, a class that was beyond the Excelsior that had so many problems in SFS.

 

For the umpteenth time, the Excelsior was NOT plagued with problems. Scotty sabotaged it. To this day, I still don't understand how the "Excelsior/transwarp is a failure because it broke down" story was adopted by fans, when the movie makes it crystal clear what happened.

 

Yeah, I made the same point a little earlier in this discussion too. Admittedly Starfleet might've had a public relations fiasco after Excelsior so spectacularly crapped itself just outside space dock, and maybe they had to pull back the Excelsior project for a bit to give the impression to the public that they were working to fix some problem which in reality didn't actually exist, but why some sections of the Star Trek fandom seem to have so readily accepted that Excelsior's transwarp drive was always doomed to failure anyway despite it being explicitly stated on-screen by Scotty himself that the transwarp drive only malfunctioned because Scotty screwed about with it is anyone's guess.

I mean, I think people only assume transwarp failed because (obviously) subsequent Star Trek ignored it. But even the 'conventional wisdom' that Sulu's Excelsior was fitted with a conventional warp drive is really not supported by anything on-screen. Maybe TNG's new warp scale *is* what the 23rd century engineers referred to as "transwarp", maybe the Enterprise-D and all other ships of her era are fitted with Excelsior style warp drives. They just don't call it transwarp.

 

Which would be awesome, except for the fact that warp speed is portrayed as many orders of magnitude faster in TOS and the classic movies than it usually is in the TNG era

 

^ Therein lies the rub (to paraphrase The Bard).

 

Reminds me of Jurassic Park. The catastrophe happened ONLY because the terrorist hacker sabotaged it, and NOT because of any of the stuff Ian Malcolm talked about.

 

I think the people stealing the Enterprise were the ones suffering a PR fiasco. All Starfleet would have to do is publicly accuse Scotty of exactly what he did to gain sympathy. But, that being said, they could have taken advantage of the moment to "fix" things, as you suggest (maybe the Federation threw more quatloos their way to toughen up "security").

 

Well, the hacker thing is kind of in keeping with his expectations, because this kind of thing just happens. Human nature is enough to mean the system is going to screw up or be screwed up by interference.

By virtue of the system being so automated and not needing human monitoring at all points, it pretty much BEGS to be hacked ... but you could say that about any system, I guess.

The Newmann guy from SEINFELD is the monkey in the wrench like Bruce Willis in DIE HARD, but it could have been a butterfly flapping its wings and knocking a fly into a moving part piece of equipment (a la BRAZIL) that led to a partial system failure. Nothing works right out of the gate and for forever anyway. Look at how the autopilot was going to put Armstrong & Aldrin down in a crater on 7/20/69.

 

Anything can be destroyed with just enough criminal effort. Using this as an general argument against something (as Malcolm did), is wrong. We didn't abandon airplanes and skyscrapers after 9/11, we did increase security efforts. And believe me, it is going to happen again.

There is absolutely no reasonable connection between "hacker shut down security systems" and "cloning dinosaurs is a bad thing".

 

Blame TNG.

Up until then, the story that was adopted by fans was that transwarp drive was going to be incorporated throughout the Starfleet, with even the Enterprise-A getting transwarp engines. But when TNG premiered with no mention of transwarp drive and a warp scale that might as well have been indistinguishable from that in TOS, the idea began to circulate that "the Great Experiment" didn't quite work out. The TNG Technical Manual cemented this for many with a line that this was indeed the case, but with lessons learned from it resulting in a redrawn warp scale for TNG-era ships.

 

When the Enterprise traveled to the center of the galaxy in days with its transwarp drive, everybody started bitching, called it worst movie ever and apocryphal. Blame the fans.

 

I don't recall anyone bitching about the Enterprise-A having or not having transwarp drive in STV. I recall them bitching about every other aspect of the movie though.

However, if they had bothered to explain in STIII that "transwarp drive" means "traveling to the center of the galaxy in days," then it would have made more sense. But they didn't, so no one knows what transwarp drive actually does.

 

Well, there are a few lines of dialogue to indicate its abilities:

Stiles: "... looking forward to breaking some of the Enterprise's speed records tomorrow..."

I believe there was also a line in the novelization to the effect of "We'll catch them on the way back," suggesting they'll simply blow by the big-E, irrespective of its speed.

The rest is left to the imagination.

 

I did not mean to discredit the Excelsior, I simply meant that in TVH they might have introduced the 1701-A as a yet unseen prototype class other than the Excelsior.

 

Don't worry, it's not you. You just hit a sore spot. I've always felt the Excelsior deserved much better than it received from the fans. Although I saw all the films first-run in the theatres, STIII was my first as a true fan. I fell in love with the Excelsior.

I can't really remember the fan reaction at the time, though. Was there not the fangasm over the NX-2000 like there was for the Vengeance?

I feel that final scene in STIV should have ended with the sense that they think they're getting the Excelsior, but instead the shot pans to the saucer and it reads "USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A" (as the OP suggested).

 

But if the Excelsior could make it to the center of the galaxy in a few minutes while the Enterprise would take about 50 years to do the same thing, saying "... looking forward to breaking some of the Enterprise's speed records tomorrow..." is an absurd statement, unless Styles was being sarcastic and really meant that he considered the Enterprise to be an antiquated piece of crap, which Scotty would have considered a slap in the face. While Styles certainly had a pompous attitude toward his new ship, I don't think he meant his statement that way. It sounds more like the Excelsior is simply a faster ship.

 

I think Stiles was totally full of himself, and the prowess of the Excelsior fed into that. His comment about the speed records wasn't one of "Gee, I hope we can hit warp 14.5, to break that 14.1 of theirs." It was definitely a "We are SOOOO going to smash that wrap 14.1 record into the stone age and redefine warp."

The calm poise that he had through the whole crisis emphasized that. He was completely unconcerned that they were escaping, let alone sped off at warp speed. He knew the Enterprise was effectively useless in the face of the Excelsior.

In fact, I envision the end result being quite similar to the Vengeance catching up to the Enterprise in STiD. Sort of a "Whoa there -- where do you think you're going at warp 8?"