A thought about the Kelvin's registry

[Amaris]

It's a more logical and real life registry style. Some people just want to bitch. The number makes perfect sense and is the proper form a registry number should have.

So...why aren't there more leading zeroes, then? is JJ Abrams implying that there will be no registries in the post-TNG era from which Spock has traveled? Where's the other leading zero(es) if it's so intelligent?

You sound snarky. Did you type this post with your hands on your hips and your neck jerking back and forth?

On a more serious note, regarding the zeros on the ship registry, it's just not a legitimate issue. For the record, though, there are U.S. naval ships with zero placeholders. Are they canon or did J.J. somehow convince the U.S. Navy to adopt them before he was born?

J.

 

[Vance]

And then you have the Constellation which throws a wrench into that.

Some of the fun is figuring out the WHY, though.

But, really, everyone knows the real reason the Constellation had the registry that it did. (And, oddly enough, the Lexington gets to clearly share that registry in one shot.) We accept it as a 'neccessary evil' from the rushed production at the time of a very VFX heavy episode.

 

[Praetor]

Well, Matt Jefferies posited originally that 1701 meant 17th heavy cruiser design, ship number 01 (presumably after the prototype) and then you could go up to 1799.

And then you have the Constellation which throws a wrench into that.

And that's the problem with not talking to your PD when you're writing an episode and building a new model isn't it? Would 1710 really have killed them?

I've always chosen to believe that 1017 was another class to start and was rebuilt into a Constitution. Alternatively, you could say there was a special reason she was given the older number, in honor of a previously destroyed ship?

And we thought Valiant was a cursed name...

 

[trekkerguy]

It's a more logical and real life registry style. Some people just want to bitch. The number makes perfect sense and is the proper form a registry number should have.

So...why aren't there more leading zeroes, then? is JJ Abrams implying that there will be no registries in the post-TNG era from which Spock has traveled? Where's the other leading zero(es) if it's so intelligent?

Ahem... as I said, some people just want to bitch.

 

[NiteTrek]

Don't suppose it ever occurred to them to either 1) use 1710,

I brought that up before and the reason given for using 1017 instead of 1710 was that 1710 was "visually" too close to 1701 (on a small 1960's TV screen) and the audience may have been confused about which ship was actually damaged, so they made it 1017.

Not sure if I buy that explanation. Maybe it was just the production team's laziness, but one thing is for sure, they probably never anticipated that fans would be debating that issue 40+ years later.

or 2) assuming they were fixated on 1017, perhaps shift the model kit's parts around a bit - do some last minute kitbashing - to make it a different class?

That doesn't make sense. If it was too much effort to simply create a new decal, like "1702" or "1712" then kitbashing the model surely would have been out of the question.

 

[NiteTrek]

I've always chosen to believe that 1017 was another class to start and was rebuilt into a Constitution.

Could be. Imagine this: Take the 2 warp nacelles off the secondary hull and put a single warp nacelle on top of the saucer right over the secondary hull.

Would be ugly as hell (think "Kelvin") but would be fairly easy to modify into a Constitution class.

 

[TIN_MAN]

Then there's Aridas Sofia's idea, that the hull numbers are actually the "Navigational Contact Code" and as such may not have anything to do with the order the ships were built?

 

[Vance]

Then there's Aridas Sofia's idea, that the hull numbers are actually the "Navigational Contact Code" and as such may not have anything to do with the order the ships were built?

Well, registries only need to be unique, they don't need to be in order in the least. Indeed, even if we say that, during the TNG era, they're largely chronologically placed, we can also say that during TOS, they were grouped according to class, or grouped in planned acquisition blocks regardless of construction date. and we can further say that in Pike's time, they were struggling for unique registries to incorporate former planetary-fleets into the Federation Star Fleet, etc...

The office of the Star Fleet registrar can, really, do whatever the hell it wants, so long as the registry database is unique for each ship. In other words, there shouldn't be two NCC-514s running around (leading zero or not). If you really want, you can say that the wreckage of the USS Kelvin (NCC-0514) was rebuilt as a Saladin class acquisition into the USS Rahman somewhere around 2245, and that the new registrar officials simply dropped the '0' as part of the official nomenclature during that acquisition update.

 

[USS Excelsior]

But in TNG they have 5 digits and they didn't change the Enterprises registry to NCC-01701.

Ah yes and there's another onscreen reference to a 3 digit registry.

USS Essex NCC-173.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

or 2) assuming they were fixated on 1017, perhaps shift the model kit's parts around a bit - do some last minute kitbashing - to make it a different class?

That doesn't make sense. If it was too much effort to simply create a new decal, like "1702" or "1712" then kitbashing the model surely would have been out of the question.

The original Constellation wasn't a model as such. (Definitely not the kind of model that was used for the Enterprise.) AFAIK, it was basically a cheap plastic toy. Something like that could be quite easily kitbashed, especially since they never ended up using it again.

 

[Vance]

The original Constellation wasn't a model as such. (Definitely not the kind of model that was used for the Enterprise.) AFAIK, it was basically a cheap plastic toy. Something like that could be quite easily kitbashed, especially since they never ended up using it again.

Erm, no, it was an AMT Enterprise model, hurridedly damaged and redressed to be the Constellation in the week's time they had to get the VFX for the episode filmed. It was a cheap model, yes, but it was not a toy by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[Praetor]

Here's another thought: maybe 0's are added to the registry of Earth UESPA ships that were absorbed into the UFP Starfleet? The 0 itself would have no meaning other than to distinguish it as a former ship of the Earth forces.

 

[Captain Fine]

Honestly the Constellation business bothers me a whole heck of a lot more than the Kelvin's leading 0.

Constellation should be 1710 or anything that starts with 17. And when they remastered the episode, they kept 1017 didn't they? That bothered me even more that the kept the mistake.

 

[starburst]

Just shows that its a tv show, its not infalible and they make mistakes...1017 doesnt make sence but how many people would have screamed 'canon violation' i Constellation had become 1711 in TOSR?

 

[Praetor]

I sure as hell wouldn't have. In my happy place, it does say 1710. I remember the first time I realized why it was 1017 and why it didn't make sense and staring at a the leftover decals from my copy of the same model kit and just thinking 'Why??' No matter what NCC stands for, almost all of the subsequent ones have been sequential.

I think (although of course I'm not sure and we can't exactly ask) that it was Matt Jefferies's intention also that different types of ships would have different prefixes for their registries. Since he said that 1701 meant 17th cruiser I think it stands to reason that there could also be a 17th destroyer serial number 01 (NDC-1701), 17th scout serial number 01 (NSC-1701), etc. Those letter prefixes are just speculative, since the NCC itself he pulled off of his airplane number and added the second C for international flavor. Of course Reliant shot that whole system to hell unless the 18th cruiser design was that much of a departure from its predecessors? Either way, by the TNG era I don't think that system is at all workable given the variety of ships we've seen with NCC registry numbers.

That said, let me play devil's advocate for a minute. It's entirely possible under that original system that NCC would have been all cruisers, light, medium, and heavy. Constellation could have been from a superficially similar but actually quite different Cruiser Class #10 that was followed in quick succession (I'm talking like 5-10 years) by 11-17. Stretching it a bit, 11 series could have been a light cruiser, 12 a medium, 13 a new type of heavy cruiser, 14 another light, 15 another medium, and 16 and 17 both heavy cruisers... which actually fits surprisingly well with the numbers of heavy cruiser Republic (NCC-1371) and Potemkin (NCC-1657). Why should we assume they build 1000-1099 anyway? The shuttle Galileo was numbered 7 but while it infers other shuttles, that doesn't mean there's a 1-6.

So maybe they only built a baker's dozen of each heavy cruiser, twenty mediums, twenty-five lights, and the numbers are partly sequential, partly random, partly based off of a previous ship's registry of significance... maybe there was a famous U.S.S. Constellation NCC-0517 at some point, hence her NCC-1017? By 2267, the 1017 has been upgraded to series 17 specs, and so appears even less distinct from her later descendants. And it just so happens that series 18 is a new medium cruiser class - the Miranda class. Series 19 is presumably the new long-range heavy cruiser, Constellation class, series 20 is reserved for the new Great Experiment, Excelsior. Franz Joseph's numbers don't seem to directly conflict with the numbering system, but they do conflict with the idea of NDC, NSC, etc, but like I said TNG pretty well took care of that.

Holy crap, is it just me or does that make more sense than it should?

 

[Timo]

In my happy place, the Constellation would have been NCC-1017. She just wouldn't have looked anything like Kirk's ship. We have far too few starships designs in TOS even after the recent redoing of visual effects...

FWIW, the leading zeroes are not universally used in the real world. The United States Navy doesn't believe in them: even when it knows that it may end up building more than nine guided missile frigates, it starts off with FFG-1, not FFG-01 let alone FFG-001.

And if Starfleet in the era of Kirk's captaincy has ship registries that only go up to 1,800 or so, it's far from said that Starfleet in the era when the Kelvin was built would have guessed they would be building more than 999 ships...

I mean, it's perfectly logical for the ENT era folks to think that there will be more than 9 ships, hence NX-01. But NX-001 would be too wild a concept at the time - if building even one starship is that much effort, how many centuries would it take to get hundreds of them built? It's debatable whether people in the early 23rd century, or whenever Robau's ship was built, would have believed in a multi-thousand-ship fleet...

Of course, we can decide that it's not NCC-0514, but NCC-O514. That would be perfectly consistent with TAS precedent.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[M'Sharak]

[...]

Of course, we can decide that it's not NCC-0514, but NCC-O514. That would be perfectly consistent with TAS precedent.

It does raise a question of how to easily distinguish between a zero and a capital 'O' in registry numbers as they'd be painted on the ship's hull. Often, where either an alphabetic or a numeric character might be used, the zero would differ in shape from the 'O' or feature a diagonal slash.

 

[Trekker4747]

[...]

Of course, we can decide that it's not NCC-0514, but NCC-O514. That would be perfectly consistent with TAS precedent.

It does raise a question of how to easily distinguish between a zero and a capital 'O' in registry numbers as they'd be painted on the ship's hull. Often, where either an alphabetic or a numeric character might be used, the zero would differ in shape from the 'O' or feature a diagonal slash.

Looking at a picture just now of the Excelsior's reigstry number and name badge the "O" and the "0" are identical.

 

[M'Sharak]

[...]

Of course, we can decide that it's not NCC-0514, but NCC-O514. That would be perfectly consistent with TAS precedent.

It does raise a question of how to easily distinguish between a zero and a capital 'O' in registry numbers as they'd be painted on the ship's hull. Often, where either an alphabetic or a numeric character might be used, the zero would differ in shape from the 'O' or feature a diagonal slash.

Looking at a picture just now of the Excelsior's reigstry number and name badge the "O" and the "0" are identical.

Which is about the same way I recalled the marking schemes used throughout Trek, in general. Granted, it would only be an issue where it comes to making visual ID and most IDs would have been made by reading the ship's transponder or by sensor readings taken long before coming within visual range, but it's a detail which nags.

 

[Jackson_Roykirk]

...FWIW, the leading zeroes are not universally used in the real world. The United States Navy doesn't believe in them: even when it knows that it may end up building more than nine guided missile frigates, it starts off with FFG-1, not FFG-01 let alone FFG-001....

The leading zeros may not be "universally used", nor are they used by the US Navy, but they ARE in fact used everday in the real world -- such as in check numbers, automobile license plates numbers, and (in my line of work) they are used to identify buildings and properties owned by one client (e.g., building number 0015).