In that "Class" versus "Mark" model, I think that's very likely. The problem is that there's just no way to know for sure. The primary reason that I started this thread in the first place was the thought that if we can establish that the one registry on the chart is 1864, we can definitively answer one question with no doubt: are all of the registries on the chart Constitutions? It's the only question, given the data we have, that I think we could answer definitively. Everything else is informed conjecture at best.
I am also inclined to argue that there may have been more than one Constitution-class ship named Constitution over the decades.
Could Matt Decker's previous command be 1017? When he got promoted to a Constitution class ship, Starfleet redesignated it NCC-1017?
We've never seen canon evidence of this before. Every newer ship that's been given the name of an older ship has been given a completely different registry, other than the Enterprises. *EDIT* There is one instance: The Sao Paulo's registry was changed to the Defiant's old registry after the previous Defiant was destroyed and the Sao Paulo renamed. However, the only reason that was done was so that they could reuse all the stock footage of the original Defiant in battle for the final episode. I really don't think the actual intention was to change the Sao Paulo's registry to the Defiant's original registry though, as they probably thought that no one would notice. But it's kind of hard not to when they blatantly reuse stock footage from an episode that took place only a few episodes before the finale.
What if certain registry ranges are assigned to specialized properties regardless of class (crew composition? list of departments?) The Constellation would’ve served a function similar to that of Discovery and Glenn. It would be somewhat like a D7 can be the original battlecruiser, the movie redesign (VGR) as well as the DSC S1 design.
I suspect that Matt Decker's Constellation and the Glenn and Discovery were all launched and commissioned within days of each other.
It need not have anything to do with launch dates. “NCC-10… oh, that’s a long-range explorer specializing in bio-research with only the occasional patrol mission.” The advantage here is that the viewer wouldn’t know the details, allowing productions to come up with numbers more or less arbitrarily.
I will say that, while I frequently disagree with some of Timo's conclusions, his arguments are some of the better thought-out that I've encountered.
Me too. He can dance around items and arrive at strange new places, but his posts are occasionally brilliant. I always enjoy reading them even if I don't agree with his conclusions. --Alex
Starships of the same class have random registries rather than sequential ones for easier identification by sight. After all that's why the AMT model's registry was rearranged to 1017 instead of 1710. To make it easier to identify as a ship other than the Enterprise. I've always found this a silly idea to try and rationalize why Constellation isn't NCC-17something. Different scale physical models of the same object are never 100% identical to each other. They bought an off the shelf model and blow torched it because they didn't want to mess up their hero models.
The belief that the Constellation is a different older class because of the differences in the AMT model kit usually comes from your more obsessive-compulsive Trek fans who can't rationalize that the registry number had zero thought put into it other than 'don't make it look similar to the Enterprise's.' If the registry number was 1710 they wouldn't even bat an eye about the differences.
I see what you're getting at, but ultimately I don't like where it leads. The real point of addressing an issue like this is to confirm that a fiction is "worthy" of suspension of disbelief. Debates about canonicity have a similar goal. Yes, all of it can be taken to an "extreme" level, but sometimes there's a valid reason for doing so, when the answers to questions can raise the fiction about the level of, say Lost in Space or Commander Cody. Some folks approach such issues extra-diegetically, outside of the fiction. They will say that issues are due to budget restrictions, time restrictions, lack of concern, etc, during the original production. They are correct, but in a diegetic (inside the world of the fiction) sense these answers serve no purpose. On top of that, there are people (myself included) who enjoy addressing the issues, trying to determine how what we see onscreen could possibly be true, even when it seems to make zero sense :-)
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to rationalize things as fans. I’m saying that there’s no reason to assume that the Constellation was a different and older class than the Enterprise just because they used an inaccurate model kit and rearranged the registry to a random number that was meant to be different than the Enterprise’s. It’s crystal clear that the person who built this model meant for it to be the exact same class as the Enterprise, and the registry was an afterthought, since they probably had no idea about Jefferies’ intentions for the numbers. So the Constellation is a Constitution class starship with a registry of 1017. It’s not problematic at all since nothing was shown on screen to contradict that there was any problem with the number. I tend to notice that the more obsessive fans come up with convoluted rationalizations for things, when there’s really no need for it. This is one example.
Agreed. I think there are several reasons for that, though. Part of it is that some of the problems are difficult to explain without a convoluted rationalization. The easy rationalizations are the extra-diegetic solutions. I'd liken it to sub-atomic physics, where some models have all sorts of fudge factors added to get the model to conform to observable reality.