I agree with EliyahuQeoni.
Now, let me ask another question:
Why do we, as longtime viewers of STAR TREK, automatically assume that just because the Enterprise's sister-starships look the same (or similar) to the Enterprise, that they were all launched as Constitution-class starships? Maybe some of them were launched before the Constitution-class spec was completed or even drafted.
At the time I wrote my earlier piece (which caused the misunderstanding) I referred to
Aridas' "Star Ships" thread. At the time, I did not have the thread in front of me. I want to thank Aridas from posting a link.
For some reason, we look upon the Constitution-class and suppose that Constitution was the first starship to launch out of spacedock with that shape. We assume earlier starship classes were not as advanced, and so we expect them to be based on very different designs. (Witness the
Bonaventure from TAS, or the mysterious
Daedalus) Therefore
if we assume that NCC registries are sequential and if we therefore assume that the Constellation had to be refit/rebuilt from some earlier class in order to become a formidable, modern starship as one of the NCC-1701 Enterprise's contemporaries in "The Doomsday Machine", we're left with a little quandary. Daedalus is much too small and Bonventure is shaped far differently than the Constellation Kirk pilots into the mouth of the Planet Killer. How do you refit/rebuild such a radically different design to even remotely resemble a Constitution-class vessel?
Answer: it can't be done, and it wasn't done. When I looked at Aridas' ingenious drawings in his "Star Ships" thread, I realized that
if Constellation were launched long before the Constitution-class was even on the drawing board, the structure and shape of what would someday evolve into the Constitution may have possessed far greater similarity to the familiar TOS-era design than either Daedalus or Bonaventure.
As I said, I did not have Aridas' "Star Ships" thread in front of me when I posted my design-lineage hypothesis in this thread. I made up the class names (I kinda like "Magna Carta" of "Charter of Liberties", BTW) to make a point. Regardless of the specifics, I think it is reasonable to question
the design lineage of the shape we all recognize as the Constitution-class starship, particularly if it is accepted as reasonable to question whether NCC numbers as sequential or not.
Perhaps the Constitution class started with NCC-1700, perhaps not. Maybe ships such as the Intrepid and Exeter, whose NCCs are in the 1600s, were of an earlier class, and the Republic, whose NCC was 1371, was of an even earlier class than that. And 1017 Constellation would be of an even earlier class, perhaps predating Constitution by decades. What I saw in Aridas' thread suggested (to me) that Constellation could have launched as part of a much earlier class based on a design lineage that later evolved into the Constitution-class.
Shaw your doing some great work there Keep it up looking forward to what you have to show Us next (thumbsup)
Nice work. Just don't take too long with real world matters. I'm anxious to see this project finished.
