Constitution Class retirement?

[Subcommander R.]

Do you "retire" a whole class? Or just stop building 'em and retire ship by ship?

This.

Just rewatched ST VI, and there's a few factors in play there we can learn from.

1. Relative size. You can see just how much bigger the Excelsior is compared to the Enterprise-A. And we all know how much bigger a Galaxy is than an Excelsior. So we can see the Connie was too small to be a heavy cruiser any more.
2. Retirement. They headed back to be decommissioned, but lets take a look at the level of damage they'd taken. There was a giant hole in the saucer section where a torpedo went in the bottom and out the top. Thats a huge deal to repair.

In light of all this it seems the Connie went from a heavy cruiser to a light cruiser, and the logical progression from there is destroyer, then frigate, then fleet support ship. Since the first Connie was 2240 (according to memory alpha), and the Connie refits showed up in the 2270s, that means they have about a hundred years of service if we assume they lived into TNG like the Miranda.

 

[danellis]

Do you "retire" a whole class? Or just stop building 'em and retire ship by ship?

I guess one would consider the class retired either when they stopped building new ships of that class or when the final ship of that class is retired or destroyed.

I agree that a class probably wouldn't be retired in terms of there being fifteen Panavia class ships in service one day and none the next.

dJE

 

[Sybok]

Starfleet has a really weird track record with how long starships stay in service. For example, the Ambassador class is newer than the Excelsior class, but we haven't seen an Ambassador since TNG's 5th season, while we continued to see Excelsiors up to Voyager's final season.

i have always envisioned starfleet mass produced excelsiors and mirandas at the height of the fed-klingon cold war (late 2380s) and there were such good quality they just kept on updating them as the decades wore on, like the b-52

during the dominion war my personal reasoning seeing so many mirandas and excelsiors is they put into service the mothballed fleet that was decommissioned after the khitomer accords... makes sense remember geordi telling scotty that his ship tat crashed on the dyson sphere could still be useful by 24th century standards

as for the connies, i figured phased out early 24th century and starfleet maybe got more bang for the buck with mirandas and excelsiors

with ambassadors, i imagine they were limited production projects with specefic purpose.. deep space exploration or something and cost a lot of resources

 

[David cgc]

I figure there were still Constitutions around for as long as there were Mirandas and Constellations. Yeah, we never saw them (except for maybes like BoBW and "The Sound of Her Voice"), even in the big DS9 Fleet battles but, then, we only ever saw, what, a half-dozen established classes in those scenes? Galaxies, Nebulas, Mirandas, Excelsiors, Akiras, Steamrunners and Sabers? Resources were limited, and only so many ships could be remade as computer models. There were probably plenty of Ambassadors, Norways, Intrepids, Sovereigns, Challengers, Cheyennes, Freedoms, New Orleanses, Niagras, Novas, Oberths, Springfields, and a dozen other types we never even saw buzzing around the Federation in the 2370s.

 

[Subcommander R.]

i have always envisioned starfleet mass produced excelsiors and mirandas at the height of the fed-klingon cold war (late 2380s) and there were such good quality they just kept on updating them as the decades wore on, like the b-52

during the dominion war my personal reasoning seeing so many mirandas and excelsiors is they put into service the mothballed fleet that was decommissioned after the khitomer accords... makes sense remember geordi telling scotty that his ship tat crashed on the dyson sphere could still be useful by 24th century standards

as for the connies, i figured phased out early 24th century and starfleet maybe got more bang for the buck with mirandas and excelsiors

with ambassadors, i imagine they were limited production projects with specefic purpose.. deep space exploration or something and cost a lot of resources

Mirandas, perhaps.

Remember the Excelsior was brand new in STIII. 'The Great Experiment,' they called it. Mass-producing such a new design doesn't seem likely when they have existing ones to fall back on.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I think by Star Trek VI, the Excelsior-class was in mass production as Excelsior's hull registry was changed from NX-2000 to NCC-2000. At the time of that movie, there might have been several other Excelsior-class ships in the Starfleet.

 

[sbk1234]

I remember hearing a theory that the new treaty with the Klingons in Star trek VI may have including ceasing production - or even mothballing the Connies.
A non-canon possibility, I suppose.

 

[BillJ]

I remember hearing a theory that the new treaty with the Klingons in Star trek VI may have including ceasing production - or even mothballing the Connies.
A non-canon possibility, I suppose.

Really doesn't make alot of sense. Why would the Klingons be worried about whether or not a starship class based on out of date tech was retired?

 

[sbk1234]

I didn't say it was my theory.

 

[Xerxes1979]

The Constitutions in my opinion where phased out by 2300. Their successors were the Constellation class which probably had better long range endurance.

If only 13 were built attrition would have pruned the number by the time their space frames were getting old. Several were destroyed or became plague ships. The Defiant left our universe and timeline all together.

One pristine example was needed for the fleet museum so that eliminates the Ent-A. There aren' that many left.

The Mirandas were smaller lighter ships just as the Excelsior were the new big gun boats. Only the Constellations were comparible in mass and thus direct competitors.

I doubt any from scratch Constitutions were built after the 2280s or whenever the U.S.S. Hathaway was launched.

 

[plynch]

Do you "retire" a whole class? Or just stop building 'em and retire ship by ship?

This.

That's the first "this" I've ever gotten.

2. As much as I love the soaring look to the Connies (my favorite, thought the Ent-E has "it" too), I like the squat Mirandas a lot. They seem so . . . logical.

 

[Colonel Midnight]

Interestingly enough, we (the U.S. Coast Guard) just decommissioned/retired a ship last Friday that was built in 1944 and in our service since 1946, the CGC Acushnet.

Not a bad life-span... 67 years.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Tomalak]

I remember hearing a theory that the new treaty with the Klingons in Star trek VI may have including ceasing production - or even mothballing the Connies.
A non-canon possibility, I suppose.

Really doesn't make alot of sense. Why would the Klingons be worried about whether or not a starship class based on out of date tech was retired?

Well Spock said the negotiations were about dismantling space stations and starbases along the neutral zone. I assumed it was something like the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited ship sizes and fleet numbers to prevent an arms race between the major powers, which was an expensive precursor to the First World War.

Decommissioning older ships means you can replace them with new, efficient, modern designs to comply with the treaty.

 

[BillJ]

I remember hearing a theory that the new treaty with the Klingons in Star trek VI may have including ceasing production - or even mothballing the Connies.
A non-canon possibility, I suppose.

Really doesn't make alot of sense. Why would the Klingons be worried about whether or not a starship class based on out of date tech was retired?

Well Spock said the negotiations were about dismantling space stations and starbases along the neutral zone. I assumed it was something like the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited ship sizes and fleet numbers to prevent an arms race between the major powers, which was an expensive precursor to the First World War.

Decommissioning older ships means you can replace them with new, efficient, modern designs to comply with the treaty.

Agreed.

The original post made it sound like the Klingons were wanting the Constitutions themselves retired. Like they were holding a grudge against that particular class.