I have a set of the Avenger class starship blueprints and I'd like to know what is different between the 2 classes?
Avenger and Miranda class starships
- Thread starter James Wright
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The name. "Avenger" was the old fandom name dating back to the 80's, until the more benign "Miranda" was used in the official Star Trek Encyclopedia in 1994.
Yep. On a purely personal level, I like the idea that they're essentially very close cousins with little specific differences except for a bit of hardware and mission profile. Starfleet would likely want to build and reuse as many existing hulls as possible, so that you could have several classes that could be converted and refitted.
Are the specifications for the 2 ships the same?
I've always hated the name Miranda for a starship. I've been crossing my fingers hoping someday some incarnation of 'Star Trek' canonizes another name. I seem to recall those ships were only ever referred to as 'Miranda' in background info and a few blurry dedication plaques.
Knight Templar
Commodore
Lots of starship names and ship class names from TNG and onward are simply horrendous.
Looking at the canon and fandom registries for the things, I have always liked to think that the gap between the continuous registries for fandom Constitutions (NCC-1832 is the highest Tikopai variant, NCC-1843 is the lowest Enterprise II variant) is where the Miranda class exists, with the canonical NCC-1837 being one of the original ten vessels of that class.
Since USS Miranda would then be NCC-1833 and USS Surya (the lowest fandom number for an Avenger relative) is NCC-1850, plus USS Avenger herself is NCC-1860, it would then be easy to argue that the Miranda and Surya classes were built almost simultaneously, but the Miranda won by a narrow margin - and when all of these subclasses underwent various refits and ended up becoming both more uniform (all look like the Reliant miniature) and more diverse (we have seen all sorts of modifications to that miniature), the simplest common name for the whole mess was that of the very oldest variant, that spearheaded by NCC-1833.
I believe there are two distinct sets of blueprints for the two classes from the very creators of your set, which I presume to be Mike Rupprecht and Alex Rosenzweig, right? I don't have the Miranda light cruiser set, though, so I can only speculate that it portrays a more TNG-style interior to create contrast with the TOS movie era innards of the Avenger heavy frigate.
I'm sure that "in-universe", the specs of the two ships are different somehow if they warrant different class names.
Why? Lexington sounds way sillier - a village with lots of lexers living in it? Or Saratoga - a fusion of classic Indian and Greek clothing floating in space? And what's with this Enterprise - are her sister ships supposed to be Business, Scheme and Attempt?
Timo Saloniemi
I admit it's a somewhat arbitrary personal preference.
Lexington and Saratoga were also important places during the birth of America, whose Constitution and Bill of Rights do seem to have influenced the development of the United Federation of Planets. There have also been several naval vessels with those names that have had distinguished service records.
As for 'Enterprise', now days we equate the word with companies and corporations but back when the British first started using it to name their vessels it traditionally refereed to a grand undertaking or venture. It is also the name of several naval vessels that have had distinguished careers.
Miranda, I assume is named after the character from 'the Tempest' which of course is a classic work.
I just don't like it.
Any more than I would like an Oliver Twist class starship, or a Scarlet O'Hara Class starship, or a Jar Jar Binx Class Starship.
Though once I admit, it's arbitrary.
If I recall correctly? Star Trek Communicator or Star Trek Magazine did a oracle about this in the late nineties or early 2000s. They said that there were two models. One was the Avenger and the other was the Reliant. The Avenger itself was a upside down version of a Miranda class. But I can't remember what they said happen to the Avenger. But I'm assuming that they said that they turn the Avenger over and relabel it as the Reliant and took the Reliant model and relabel it as the Saratoga.
That's correct. The name "Miranda" (and "Oberth" for that matter) was never uttered by a single person in all of broadcast Trek. The name was created for the U.S.S. Brattain's dedication plaque in TNG's "Night Terrors."
(Although in early TNG there seemed to be a disconnect between the art department and the visual effects people...i.e. Okuda made the plaque thinking that the "Miranda" class was going to be a different type of ship than the re-use of the Reliant from STII. But because there was no budget to build a new model, the VFX guys just randomly relabeled the Reliant model; hence the "Miranda Class" now referred to that type of ship. I'm sure Okuda can correct me if my assumption is wrong....)
You are not recalling it correctly. Harve Bennett was given diagrams of the Reliant before construction began on the model. These diagrams showed the ship with nacelles on top. Somehow between his approval and the finished product, the model was build with the nacelles underneath instead. There was no "Avenger" model built.
I would also suggest that not all names necessarily have a singular meaning in the here-and-now.
There's still history to be written between now and the 23rd century. Assume there will be legendary names in ST that have yet to be created (TNG's "Gorkon", for example).
Miranda could be the name of some famed explorer from the 2170s and had a class of ships in his/her namesake (even though, yeah, the intention was Shakespeare's Tempest character).
And there might be multiple namesakes which are never explained. Captain Maxwell's Nebula-class Phoenix--is it named in honor of the mythological creature, or Cochrane's warp rocket, or the USN cruiser, or the city, or some other Phoenix?
There's still history to be written between now and the 23rd century. Assume there will be legendary names in ST that have yet to be created (TNG's "Gorkon", for example).
Miranda could be the name of some famed explorer from the 2170s and had a class of ships in his/her namesake (even though, yeah, the intention was Shakespeare's Tempest character).
And there might be multiple namesakes which are never explained. Captain Maxwell's Nebula-class Phoenix--is it named in honor of the mythological creature, or Cochrane's warp rocket, or the USN cruiser, or the city, or some other Phoenix?
Well you're probably right. It been 10 years or more since I've read either magazine and I don't have either of them any more to tell if I'm right or not. Oh yeah, it wasn't Star Trek Magazine I had, it was Star Trek The Magazine.
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People you're not exactly helping me here, I once had the dimensions for the Miranda written down but have since lost the paper they were written on, I believe the given length for the Miranda was 234.9meters, can anyone confirm this?
Sort of. The version I've heard is that when Harve received the concept sketch of the Reliant, he opened them upside down (so that the nacelles, which were indeed dorsal or top mounted) were on the bottom, and that stuck. Personally I think it looks good that way, though it's hard to say how the alternative would look.
Here is a link that talk about the Reliant. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Miranda_class_model But I've haven't seen any mention about the Reliant being the Avenger. They have the year wrong. The Wrath of Khan was in theaters in 1982.
Or it could be the last name of a leader of the Revolutionary wars against spain in the early 19th century
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Miranda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Miranda
Yeah, I've heard that story too, and unless there's irrefutable evidence to the contrary, I'm kinda viewing it as apocryphal as I don't believe that Harve Bennett would be that stupid to not know which way the diagrams were supposed to go.
