Enterprise E. What made it different than Enterprise D?

It's in the movie. Riker asks why they're not sent to the battle and Picard says it's not the ship, it's its captain.

Comet-counting isn't banishment. It's what Starfleet does. New ship does only that til it can prove it can also fulfill their secondary mission. When the Borg show, the ship is kept away because of its captain.

They're the flagship crew. On the new flagship. It's only the Borg Starfleet is antsy trusting Picard on, with good reason given his actions in the movie.

Maybe because it was special enough to get the upgrades whereas no-one cares about an 80-year old Miranda serving cargo and transport duty (like the Excelsiors were) before desperate times made it cannon-fodder.

A more important mission for the moment.

Yes. Whatever their esthetic shortcomings, they're the latest and greatest out the dock. They're going to be used in crucial positions while more are being built. They were probably holding together whole systems (or sectors!) by themselves so that all the older ships therein could join the Galaxy fleets during the invasion of Cardassian space. Or maybe Admiral Ross was on one.

 

I imagine the Sovereign is different by being much smaller and limited in its abilities. It's the new flagship so it's going to do exploring, but not not the scale of the relatively still new Galaxys, that can be gone for decades, and be whole cities in space, with countless civilians and scientific communities on board. The Sovereign is more a classic Excelsior cruiser. Maybe it's taking over for the fleet of Ambassador Class ships I imagine were filling the cruiser role and not competing with the Galaxys for heavier stuff. Question becomes why is the new flagship a mid-size ship? It it the new weapons? All ships get new upgrades. Hell the Excelsior Class Lakota got those. Or...what? Would the new primary mission of the fleet be closer to home exploration and supporting the space the E-D just opened up over 7 years?

 

Except it's never said to be that.

Indeed, ships named Enterprise are particularly notorious for never being flagships. The two exceptions would appear to be the E-D (which never serves as a Starfleet flagship but is considered the Federation Flagship) and the Kelvinverse NCC-1701 (which is "the newest flagship" when launched in the 2009 movie).

So it's left as an exercise to the audience to decide why Picard is lying.

Okay, it's pretty clear why he's lying that the rest of the command crew is not at fault (because obviously they are, being yes-men to Picard). Picard doesn't want his crew to feel bad about it. But why does he worry about his ship feeling bad for being such a lemon?

That's what is in the movie - the ship is not accepted into the anti-Borg force, and indeed is never even considered for this, because she's deployed in deep space with a pariah crew that is forbidden from taking the ship to battle. Starfleet appears to have decided there's too much wrong with the ship well in advance, then, or else it wouldn't dedicate the vessel into quarantine duty for her entire career.

Since the E-E is not the flagship or even a flagship, we have all the more reason to think the heroes got demoted (even if sideways) for hanging around the suspected traitor.

Which would be an easily solved issue: remove Picard from the equation.

Which Starfleet does not do here, mind you, not in any practical sense. Picard still flies a ship that is perfectly capable of traitorously joining the battle (even if she doesn't achieve anything exceptional there). So what Starfleet is doing instead is trusting Picard to stay away in that ship of his. It's misplaced trust, but trust nevertheless. All the more reason, then, to choose to think that it's the ship that's worthless, or at least in sore need for an even longer shakedown.

Even this much we cannot say. The design shares elements with those old Steamrunners, say. Her engines are more like those of the Nova than of the potentially newer Intrepid.

At best, we can speculate. We don't see any particular shipbuilding style perpetuated after the TNG movie era, because we see little or nothing of the Trek universe after that era. The Sovereign might have been a dead end and the Inquiry is the way ahead. Or then the Sovereign was the harbinger of great things, and the Curiosity, only seen in suggestive silhouette, keeps up the good tradition.

At the time of the TNG movies, we know almost as little. Many of the ships in ST:FC are of previously unseen designs, and none are the class ships of the respective classes, so they could date back as far as we choose. That NCC-1701-E lacks a pseudo-chronological registry altogether makes the choosing even more ambiguous than normally...

Not if all of them require shakedowns of a full year and still aren't considered ready for action.

Here we have the saving grace that the Bajoran neighborhood was a strategically unimportant area for most of the war: either the wormhole was in enemy hands, or useless to both sides, and there was not going to be a final rush from Richmond to Washington or vice versa until the very end of the war. So the only time Starfleet would send top units to be seen in a DS9 episode would be in the retaking of the station when the minefield was going down - and that one was a hasty operation where Sisko had to beg for forces, and probably didn't get the best ships.

Or then the totally absent Sovereign just plain wasn't among "the best ships", either with the qualifier "yet", or then without it.

It's not to the detriment of our heroes even if they happen to be assigned a rust bucket. Indeed, Kirk and even Pike seemed to get mileage out of a ship that was decades out of date and not particularly large for her day; all the more glory to them. And now perhaps to Picard, who remains as untrustworthy as ever, but for the ultimate good of the Federation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm not even sure where to start with all this, Timo. I agree with most of what you say, and yet it comes across as trolling, or deliberately obtuse. You've taken what is essentially, not so much a plot hole as a silly plot necessity, and spun it into "facts", but have enough other true facts thrown in there to make it almost not debatable.

Picard needs to have lingering Borg issues, for the plot. The Enterprise needs to show up late and quasi-save the day, for the plot. The writers combine those plot necessities in character form, and voila: Picard is sidelined. Which, as your logic shows, implies the Enterprise was sidelined because Picard being sidelined when they could have just given the ship another command crew is indeed quite silly, even if that was not why that happened.

And yet: the clear BTS intent was that the Sovereign class was a successor in many ways to the Galaxy class (but meaner), and they consider it to be a success, not a lemon at all.

Indeed, Trek fandom is quite strange about wanting or presuming not only that all Enterprises be Flagships (and the various meanings they conjure for that title), but also that they be the biggest, newest, bestest ships around, which, as you point out is just fundamentally not the case. Except for the D, which at least some of those things are meant to be true about.

Going solely from onscreen evidence, you've got a solid argument, no matter how silly it may seem. But you're never going to convince the vast majority of folks on those sort of technicalities, especially when there is clear designer intent for them to point back to.

 

What @Spaceship Jo said.

Also:

RIKER: Captain, why are we out here chasing comets?
PICARD: Let's just say that Starfleet has every confidence in the Enterprise and her crew. They're just not sure about her Captain. They believe that a man who was once captured and assimilated by the Borg should not be put in a situation where he would face them again. To do so would introduce an unstable element to a critical situation.​

No, he wasn’t lying. That’s the copout fans use when they don’t like dialogue complicating their preconceived notions.

Also, as noted, however silly the idea of the Enterprise being the “flagship” is, it is. That Scotty doesn’t look directly into camera and state that every Enterprise, “including the original and bloody A, B, C, D, and E,” has been the flagship of its respective era, it is. It’s inferred from the onscreen dialogue, actions, and both fan and BTS thought.

 

Honestly, I don't think that the Enterprise E was that much better than the D.
When you think about it, all SF ships undergo regular maintenance and upgrades.
Sure, the E would have more up to date specs upon being fresh out of a shipyard, but, a Galaxy class or any other ship in the fleet scheduled for regular maintenance/upgrades would receive the same systems upgrades.

The 80 year old Excelsior class (USS Lakota) was upgraded to match the Defiant in tactical capability without having the benefit of ablative hull armor. O'Brien also speculated that the Lakota may have also had much faster engines than the Defiant.
If they can do that to an Excelsior class ship in the 24th century, I think it shows that SF's upgrading capabilities improved substantially at that time frame, probably due to transporters and replicators which can basically beam out old technology, convert it into energy, reshape it into state of the art piece of hw pattern and beam it where it needs to be inside the ship). Same can be done by reshaping the interior of older classes to accommodate new technology (or technology would be adapted to older designs - which isn't too difficult with AI or adaptive algorithms. Transporters, replicators and tractor beams (or antigravity), all of which would be fully automated would effectively do most of the heavy lifting in terms of manufacturing and assembly of individual components.

The Enterprise-D was only built about 8-10 years before the Sovereign class... so I'd say the Galaxy class would still be considered 'pretty new' and would therefore receive all modern upgrades regularly like any other ship.

Construction of NEW Galaxy class ships might not be happening after the first decade (or 15 years), as I would surmise that Starfleet puts any given ship design into production for the first 10-15 years since the design's first official construction... past that point, no new ships of that class will be built... existing ones (or those that survive in active service for long periods of time) will be upgraded of course with latest technologies during their scheduled upgrade cycles (or in the field by the crews and on-board automation).

Interstellar wars might be an exception and could extend construction timelines for a given design if it can be constructed with resource efficiency, or if SF deems they have a need for those designs just after the war.

So, any new systems the Sovereing class came with, the Galaxy class would get them too, either at the same time as the Sovereign is released, or a bit later.
Possibly just a bit after because I'm thinking that when SF designs a new starship class, each becomes a 'test-bed' of newest technologies.... but as I said, some technologies that newest designs get will probably ALREADY be integrated by crews in the field (which if you ask me should be done anyway - which would AVOID ships coming back for maintenance and upgrades because technically, each and every ship has more than enough technology and automation to do this in the field in a fraction of the time it takes to implement manually).

Technically speaking, the regenerative shields, enhanced phasers, quantum torpedoes, better/faster Warp and Impulse engines, etc. would all be integrated into Galaxy class as well shortly after the Sovereign gets them, or at the same time.

The primary difference between the designs would likely be mission profiles.
Sovereign class might be able to do almost everything a Galaxy class can do, but the Galaxy still has much larger internal volume and might be more suited for some deep-space exploration and possible delivery of medical supplies if they are needed.

 

I'm perfectly happy to be wrong about this, but I don't recall much that rises above the level of fanon (plus some references in DSC).

In TOS the Enterprise is special by virtue of being one of only 12 Starships. Or 13, depending on if Kirk was including the Enterprise in the phrase "12 like it".

So it's one of a select few, prestigious enough to carry diplomats (though that may not mean much, they seem to take any old junk ride often enough), and has firepower and capabilities that are extremely impressive to both folks they encounter and the television audience (though again, those are the capabilities of Starfleet in general or of her ship class in particular, not limited to the Enterprise itself).

There's been some BTS suggestion that the refit 1701 might have been the flagship, likewise the A, and same with the E, but really only insofar as it's the standard-bearer for the audience. Kirk and Picard are our leads, and audience identification characters, but In Universe, they're each one of many distinguished captains of their eras. There's perhaps a better argument to be made for the NX, by virtue of it basically being THE starship of it's time, but that's still just fanon.

Enterprises: legendary ships, absolutely! Only the D is considered a flagship, unless we are redefining that to mean Hero Ship of the Show or just Any Ship Named Enterprise even though the TOS Enterprise almost certainly wasn't.

Unless I'm wrong, which again, I'm happy to be.

 

Someone with more interest in this topic can go though the history, but I agree that the Enterprise was not the flagship from the start. When it used lithium crystals and lasers and answered to UESPA. And when its emblem was its alone and not that of the entire fleet.

 

To be fair, Starfleet had 7000 active ships in service by second season of Discovery (which is just under 10 years before TOS)... this was established in dialogue.

The Federation by the 23rd century has an unknown amount of members, but its probable it has more than 4 (Earth, Tellar, Andor and Vulcan).
Even if it had just 4, the Utopia Planitia facilities at Mars are HUGE (large number of shipyards)... and there are similar facilities in Earth's orbit (they are probably spread through the entire solar system).
I'd imagine the situation would be the same for every member planet part of the Federation (Vulcan, Tellar and Andor for example).
This is why I find SF constructing only 12 or 13 Constitution class ships (or even Galaxy class ships in the 24th century) to be nonsensical for an organization of that size and technical capability.

Each member species primary solar system (the one in which they originated) would be most industrialized and have most shipyard facilities... and I'd imagine that after joining the Federation, they would ALL have equal (or pretty similar) capacities.

Depending on how many construction docks are there per solar system (and it seems drydocks can construct ships too), I'd imagine dozens to hundreds of drydocks or shipbuilding capabilities per each species NATIVE solar system (not counting adjacent colonies).

So with this, the Federation could easily delegate say 10 drydocks or 'slots' to construct Constitution classes per solar system.
That would mean that with just 4 founding members, you get at least 40 Connies constructed at the same time and being churned out in such volumes for 5 to 10 years at least... and I wouldn't attribute more than a few months to starship construction (as automation would do this many times faster than manual labor would - manual labor would likely do some finishing touches, but probably nothing too overtly complex).

And the Federation definitely has MORE than 4 species as members in 23rd century... so from 2161 to say 2371, it would grow from 4 to OVER 150 member species.

Majority of this growth would have probably happened between 23rd and 24th century (as initially, membership would be slow due to range and speed of the ships, pre-discovered species, state of contact with those species, determining how many are warp capable and friendly enough for diplomatic relations and eventual memberships).

I wouldn't be surprised if 23rd century Federation had about 38 to 50, or 75 member species (similar to post Burn shrunk Federation of the 32nd century). And if ship speeds only doubled between 23rd and 24th century as Janeway said on Voy (which I find INCREDIBLT unrealistic and too unevolved for an organization like UFP)... we could speculate the Federation increased in size (members-wise) by double (or just over a double) as well.

So, definitely far more than 12 Connies would have been flying out there. Could easily be 400, or even more for all we know.

Similar thing would occur with Galaxy class ships.
It would likely be produced in large amounts during the first 10-15 years, with say 10 being constructed in each member species native star system.
That's at least 1500 Galaxy class ships being constructed in say a few months tops (I sincerely doubt construction of a single galaxy class ship would take more than a few months... if even THAT in the mid/late 24th century - anywhere between several weeks to a month MAYBE when you take into account how fast UFP manufacturing capabilities just are).

Its possible though that Starfleet builds that much per year (a set amount... once a year)... so in a 10 year period, you'd have 15 000 Galaxy class ships in total (less, after to the Dominion War - obviously, but those would be fairly difficult to bring down and it also depends on how many would have been lost to begin with and if Starfleet would extend construction of Galaxy class ships for AFTER the war).

And if SF had 7000 ships in 23rd century... having 74656 ships (same amount as the registry number on USS Voyager) by 2371 is not really far fetched given how HUGE the Federation is and just how many construction facilities per solar system there would be (not to mention that earlier colonies in other star systems wouldn't have much, but they WOULD have grown over time and established their construction facilities etc).

 

That's one heck of an April fools!

There's firm canon establishing the 12 (or 13) very special Starships. That's it. There's any amount of rationalizing we can do with that information, but there's no way around it, and certainly not by orders of magnitude.

Which once again, makes them all very special, but no Flagship status separating the 1701 from its sister ships.

(Not to mention if it's just one of hundreds, it's utterly dramatically uninteresting.)

 

How do you marry the two? 12 starships vs reality. The reality of how many ships an interstellar organization like the Federation could churn out. Or any of its war-happy enemies. Suspension-of-disbelief needs addressing.

 

Tastes differ. While I don't think the D is neither particularly beautiful nor ugly (although I think it does have a certain grace), I don't like the E- it looks too aggressive for my tastes.

I like to think that the D is the product of an optimistic era where Starfleet is confident that space is safe enough, their technology advanced enough to let a single ship do long term independent exploration with all the amenities of a city built-in, and that the E is more of a reaction to the sobering realization that there are tougher aggressive adversaries out there than thought previously (most notably the Borg and the Dominion). Even though in reality, ship classes are decades in the making (but perhaps this process can be sped up in the 24th century?).

 

Sorry if I come off as adversarial here, but I do feel it necessary to shoot down this "flagship" nonsense for good. It's such a profound misunderstanding of a dramatic concept that it's gonna bring all discussion down to the lowest common denominator.

At the time of ST:FC, there were three hero teams going: TNG, DS9, VGR. Did all of them fly a flagship?

No, and not just because Neelix never faced the camera and said "Oh, the Voyager isn't the Starfleet flagship!". There were dramatic reasons for those not being flagships. Sisko got a piece of junk that Starfleet had already buried, by pulling personal strings. Janeway got into a big adventure in a random small ship by accident. And Starfleet placed a man they didn't trust aboard a ship they didn't use. You don't give your flagship to a traitor.

Really, that's the one thing we should consider about the TNG movies: Picard there is the villain, the loose cannon, the one going against everything his bosses believe in. The writers revel in this bad-boy idea of the heroes knowing better. I say let them. There's no reason to think that them having an "inferior" starship would somehow detract from their heroism, not when the very point of the writing is to stack the odds against the heroes.

TNG the TV show was different, and IMHO a welcome blow of fresh space air. Picard didn't have to fire back, much less fire first, because his was the biggest gun in town - so his adventures could be more complex and interesting than mere Star Wars style pew-pew-we-kill-to-survive. But that's what changed with ST:GEN. That's what was left behind with the E-D.

TOS the TV show was something of its own thing, too. No, Kirk didn't fly the Flagship of the Federation there, either. People barely knew who Kirk was, save for a few close colleagues. Arguments between green and gold aside, Kirk was one of the bluecollars of Starfleet, facing the absurd with deadpans and clever professionalism yet with standard off-the-rack hardware, and triumphing over his closest peers (including when those went bad) despite flying or packing nothing better than they did.

And no, there weren't 12 starships in TOS (and nobody in-universe ever claims there would have been). There were at least hundreds, so that a random starbase could pack a dozen at a random moment. It's just that there were about a dozen like the Enterprise, just somewhat confusingly in a show that could not afford to show ships unlike the Enterprise. Again, this is not a slight against the heroes. Their heroism is not dependent on them flying a gold-plated starship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Special smeshial, and no, its no april fools.
Why would SF limit itself to building only 12 connies if they were demonstrated to be a successful design?
Its a huge organisation with massive shipbuilding facilities...
Are people REALLY that incapable of visualizing that an interstellar organization like the UFP would rely on automation and having the ability able to have 7000 ships in active service even though its been established on-screen?

Some of the things the writers put into Trek are just senseless and too 'unevolved' for such an organization and the level of technology it has.

12 Connies is just stupid... unless its an experimental design that was made in a limited fashion intentionally.
This would raise a question as to why would SF expend resources and build a brand new 1701-A (a fairly outdated design by that time) if it was 'special'?

 

It’s not about the franchise taking place on the flagship, that that necessarily is our window into Trek universe. The appeal of VOY is that it’s a much smaller ship lost from the fleet.

Traitor is your word, not Star Trek’s. He resumed command of the flagship right after Wolf 359. They trusted him plenty in that role. It’s only with the Borg that they were uneasy. Maybe because he then spared them all in “I, Borg” by not sending Geordi’s virus (if we want to try to make up a reason other than it’s a dumb popcorn movie).

The E certainly seems to have a smaller mission envelope than the Galaxy (smaller, fewer facilities, no civilians), but it remains the flagship also because it retains the flagship’s name, captain, and crew.

True. Berman wanted the E to be a “Porsche.” Verisimilitude be damned. It just needed to look cool and fire super quantum torpedoes.

To this day when it turns around it looks so rinky-dinky to me, and I want to smash its nacelles like when it’s winter and you smash newly formed icicles. But hey, stretched means fast, right? And honey and gaunt is sexy.

It was a more rough and tumble time, but he was captain of one of the (first) 12, by his own word. I don’t know that the Enterprise itself was the flagship then. Maybe its illustrious 5-year mission made it so. The name already was illustrious after the United Earth ship before it (NX or ringship, in alternate universes). The adoption of the ship’s emblem to the rest of the fleet hells that too.

 

And the appeal of the E-E is that it's not the E-D, I guess.

But that sort of fails on both the possible approaches to this. In the real world, there's no such thing as a "flagship name", and crew retention doesn't happen as a thing. In Star Trek, there's no "flagship name", either - certainly Enterprise isn't it, because no Enterprise previously was indicated to be a flagship. And retaining the crew as a team might well be read as banishment and quarantine, since it seemed to be that very thing back in the 2280s, and rewarding back then involved letting Chekov and Sulu do their own thing elsewhere.

But the TOS movies also introduced the concept of the famous skipper reassembling his old team (partially against their wishes). If Picard was so much in favor that he could command the E-D in her flagship role, perhaps he could pull a Kirk, despite not quite being Chief of Starfleet Operations with Rear Admiral braid and all?

Which is amusing, since q-torps as a rule seem to be much less badass than the regular brand. Tom Riker fires four of them to score mere disabling damage against Cardassians; Picard needs four to finish off a damaged and unshielded Borg Sphere.

Which is the bullshit part. There's nothing whatsoever to associate "first" with the Constitutions, and nothing in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" to associate the 12 Constitutions with the total number of starships in service. We know the Archon was a starship already; we see a list of Star Ships that's all across the registry range in SB11 alone; and Kirk himself never elevates himself or his ship to any special status, apart from the design being about a dozen hulls strong.

She was the hero ship. Why invent "flagship" on top of that when there's no need?

To the contrary, that mission appeared to have made her eligible for first turning into a dedicated schoolship and then for scrapping...

...Yet the UFP Starfleet never deemed it a good idea to apply that name until NCC-1701 came along, fairly late in the game.

A bit of a chicken-and-egg there. And the emblem was there in 2233 already, apparently...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Addressing some sidebar stuff, to say that I believe the following to be true...

1. Enterprise 1701 is one of a production block of 12 Constitution-class starships, said production block being considered by Kirk and many other officers in service during his career to be top of the "ships of the line" starship classes in service during those decades.
2. The Constitution-class ships started entering service about 20 years before Enterprise 1701 was commissioned into active service. (Per the notes Roddenberry-Whitfield) This will explain such ships with smaller registry numbers than our first hero ship (EG: Constellation 1017, Exeter 1672, etc..)
   
3. It's possible that there's been more than one Constitution-class ship actually named Constitution. The second might even have been part of the same production block as Enterprise 1701.

All of that sidebar stuff out of the way?

Okay. So...we're still trying to understand what the in-universe rationale for building the Sovereign class in the first place was, right?

 

Alas.

In the real world crews don’t stay together for years on end like they do in Trek either. Let alone on the same shift. With near the same ranks. But I digress.

Flagship is a thing in Star Trek. Some fancy PR thing maybe. Maybe that’s why there’s a hologram of maybe all the flagships above the main entrance to Starfleet Headquarters in PIC.

Or all things being equal, when the Enterprise shows to the scene, it can pull rank as the flagship.

The Enterprise-D was, as was the original Enterprise per the JJ-verse. Is that simply the alternate universe or is it just the latest Star Trek property trickling out more info about the Star Trek universe? Future Trek will likely go with the latter, but fans can update their head canon as they like.

No. Chekov and Sulu got to be first officer and captain of their own starships given that the roles were filled on the Enterprise. If they were banished or quarantined, they wouldn’t have been allowed to leave it. Helmsman o the Enterprise, even if it’s the flagship, is not preferable to captain of what is to be Starfleet’s next flagship class.

He assembled the team in TSFS by them being renegades and only managed to keep it together in TFF because they’d literally saved Earth in TVH.

Even so, we know the reason the crew stayed together: Star Trek.

Picard had already lost a man in FC (Worf) and Riker and Troi left the moment another command was offered in NEM. No one forcing anyone to be anywhere. They were together on the E because they were continuing their assignment on the flagship.

Preach. If you’re going to introduce a new tech (quantum torpedoes, transwarp, oscillating nacelle pylons, Batman shields) use them accordingly.

Per the dialogue, there were 12 Constitutions in service “like her.”Not 12 spaceships in the entire Starfleet. We say the first 12 Constitutions to allow for there being many more after Kirk’s line, for the sake of the realism of a much larger fleet.

Good question.

It was old by their standards. They were being smart about it.

Might have been a big PR win too. “Come to the Academy and train on the ship that just saved the world from V’Ger,” among others.

 

It has something to do with Porsches, I understand.