The long-hull modification was applied mid-stream in 1943 amid concerns over increasing AA armament. Long-hulls Hancock, Ticonderoga and Randolph were in action in WW2 and I believe all took kamikaze hits.
Constitution Class Ships Seem To Be Everywhere
- Thread starter There Be Whales Here
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The long-hull modification was applied mid-stream in 1943 amid concerns over increasing AA armament. Long-hulls Hancock, Ticonderoga and Randolph were in action in WW2 and I believe all took kamikaze hits.
I think Starship class means the overall swan configuration.
Ford’s Panther frame could be a Crown Vic/LTD.Mercury Marquis/Marauder, or Lincoln Town Car.
You know. I've finally realized something.
After reading through the thread again, I finally realized that I made a mistake in my original post. Instead of trying to offer a reasonable explanation for the situations the OP described, I should have responded by asking the OP this question:
What exactly is your problem with seeing more than one ship of the class in the same area at the same time? Seriously. Starfleet builds, owns and operates the ships. If they have no problem with a bunch of them in one spot, why do you?
By the way, I invite everyone in the thread to answer this question, because most responders have engaged in high impact mental gymnastics like trying to redefine the concept of "class" or trying to prove a ship is a different class depending on whether some widget is mounted on the right or on the left on ships that look exactly the fucking same. Why? What grievous sin has Starfleet committed by deploying more than one Constitution class ship to a single area of operation?
Why did they send a Constitution class to aid other Constitution classes? Are you kidding? Who better to send to render assistance than a crew that's intimately familiar with the design of the ship in distress? Why send several of their "elite" ships to one battle or training area? Well, if one "Elite" ship is awesome, then two "elite" ships are twice as awesome, and four "elite" ships is twice as awesome as two, and about six or seven "elite" ships would be fucking bad-ass. Why not send as many as you can spare? Maybe one of them would get damaged? Isn't the whole point of "safety in numbers" the idea that it lessens the chance that any one unit will be damaged beyond repair?
The only thing I can figure is that OP and others are sufffering from TV Producers Disease, a psychological ailment that makes them feel like they've failed if they don't provide something new to see every episode. It's a disease common to fanfic writers who can't think of beginning a story withour creating a whole new class of super starship out of whole cloth. In this instance, the disease makes viewers lament the "limitations" of effects technology when TOS was produced. In fact, those limitations make TOS more realistic, because they show ships the way they're procured in real life - in batches to save cost and resources - as opposed to TNG, whose producers would kitbash and improvise designs to death just produce ship designs you'd maybe see once, just 'cause they were new.
Somebody help me understand. We're supposed to be treating this discussion in universe, so tell me in universe how the deployment of Connies is somehow detrimental to the Federation.
After reading through the thread again, I finally realized that I made a mistake in my original post. Instead of trying to offer a reasonable explanation for the situations the OP described, I should have responded by asking the OP this question:
What exactly is your problem with seeing more than one ship of the class in the same area at the same time? Seriously. Starfleet builds, owns and operates the ships. If they have no problem with a bunch of them in one spot, why do you?
By the way, I invite everyone in the thread to answer this question, because most responders have engaged in high impact mental gymnastics like trying to redefine the concept of "class" or trying to prove a ship is a different class depending on whether some widget is mounted on the right or on the left on ships that look exactly the fucking same. Why? What grievous sin has Starfleet committed by deploying more than one Constitution class ship to a single area of operation?
Why did they send a Constitution class to aid other Constitution classes? Are you kidding? Who better to send to render assistance than a crew that's intimately familiar with the design of the ship in distress? Why send several of their "elite" ships to one battle or training area? Well, if one "Elite" ship is awesome, then two "elite" ships are twice as awesome, and four "elite" ships is twice as awesome as two, and about six or seven "elite" ships would be fucking bad-ass. Why not send as many as you can spare? Maybe one of them would get damaged? Isn't the whole point of "safety in numbers" the idea that it lessens the chance that any one unit will be damaged beyond repair?
The only thing I can figure is that OP and others are sufffering from TV Producers Disease, a psychological ailment that makes them feel like they've failed if they don't provide something new to see every episode. It's a disease common to fanfic writers who can't think of beginning a story withour creating a whole new class of super starship out of whole cloth. In this instance, the disease makes viewers lament the "limitations" of effects technology when TOS was produced. In fact, those limitations make TOS more realistic, because they show ships the way they're procured in real life - in batches to save cost and resources - as opposed to TNG, whose producers would kitbash and improvise designs to death just produce ship designs you'd maybe see once, just 'cause they were new.
Somebody help me understand. We're supposed to be treating this discussion in universe, so tell me in universe how the deployment of Connies is somehow detrimental to the Federation.
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Mostly because they copied it from Memory-Alpha :P
Which already had 2245 written down because of dialogue in TOS and TAS apparently leads to it if you do math.
It's very simple. To quote the late great Douglas Adams: Space is big. And there are only 12 Constitution class ships during the time of TOS. So the statistical probability that all 12 ships would be around the same area of space for the Enterprise to run into is extremely small. Episodes like "The Ultimate Computer" can possibly get a pass because one could argue that the nature of the wargames necessitated other Connies to be part of it. But every other instance of either seeing a Connie (the Constellation, Exeter, Defiant) or official publications mentioning the other unseen ships as Connies (the Farragut, Intrepid, Republic, Yorktown, etc.) just stretches credibility to the extreme. And the chart of ten ships in Commodore Stone's office at Starbase 11 which Greg Jein assumed were all Connies? I'm not buying that either.
Space is big, but the amount of it that Starfleet has covered by the time of TOS is relatively tiny...and the ships they covered it with travel faster than light. "Space is BIG" is a romantic trope in a setting where the hero vehicle traverses astronomical distances in about a week, which means it wouldn't preclude more than one Connie from grouping together in a particular parsec. Nice try.
Also All areas in UFP are not visited/patrolled at the same intervals.
No need to be smarmy. I’m pointing out real world reasons why it’s highly improbable for the same
class of ship to be in the same place, especially when there’s only 12 of them. Even known space is thousands of light years across. It just doesn’t make logical sense. I’m not talking about the fake universe of Star Trek where a ship can get to the center of the Galaxy under its own power in a few hours but 70 years later it takes half a century.
Yea the current 'meta' is that somehow, the Constitution class are old, if not junkers. But this is due to the damn disparity we've seen over the last two decades - the Akiraprise, a show which even *showed a Constitution Class as being utterly superior to everything else from the era in a apology to the fans* - somehow means that the Constitution had to have 'lesser' technology than the NX. The apparent Connie model in the movies (the bIddleford 0718 or whatever), and a connie in the books. It's shoving the Constitution Class from 2245 to the 2220s if not earlier, and bleh. The Rise of the Federation even tries to unite the NX and Connie with having Trip Tucker add to the Connie design???
There's this damn official retraction of the Connie because 'it looks so old!' and 'It has colorful buttons!' and all that claptrap. It doesn't have holograms or fancy interiors, so thus, it must be old, so so old. Everything is so dingy now, too, dark, but there are big windows on everything...its all a mishmash.
The old-Connie is beautiful as she is, at least on the outside. I only really think angled nacelles and what, actually working screens is what's needed for the thing. It's timeless and works, but the official stuff won't accept that.
The "old fashioned" Enterprise has a sweep and majesty about it that no later Star Trek ship has equaled:
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x05hd/isthereintruthnobeautyhd0001.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd1281.jpg
It has enough complication to fascinate, but there's also a great sense of purity to it. And it captivates whether it's coming or going:
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd0547.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd0501.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd0445.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd1028.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x19/Tomorrow_is_Yesterday_048.JPG
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x05hd/isthereintruthnobeautyhd0001.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd1281.jpg
It has enough complication to fascinate, but there's also a great sense of purity to it. And it captivates whether it's coming or going:
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd0547.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd0501.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd0445.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x18hd/theimmunitysyndromehd1028.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x19/Tomorrow_is_Yesterday_048.JPG
Why?
Because space is really big. As Douglas Addams says:
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/douglas_adams_164151
And ships like the Enterprise are rare. Nobody knows how many Starfleet starships there are. Nobody knows how many Constitution class starships there are. Nobody knows how many ships there are that look a lot like the pliot or pruduction versions of the Enterprise from the outside and from a distance.
But what we do know is what Kirk said in "Tomorrow is Yesterday":
And if the Federation has maybe a hundred main member star systems, and claims hundreds or thousands of other star systems, and is exploring a volumeof space that includes many thousands or millions of star systems (which owuld still be a tiny and insignificent proprtion of the MIlky Way Galaxy), having only 12 or 13 top of the line ships is a bit of a problem.
So maybe each of the possibly dozens of main member star systems in the Federation has a mighty system defense system, and the home world of every member species in each such system has a mighty planetary defense system even stronger than the defense system for the entire star system.
I suppose that in science ficioin an ideal planetary defense system would be like that of the planet Onlo or Trallis IX in E.E. Smith's Second Stage Lensman. One galactic government sends its fleet of millions of space battleships to invade another galaxy, and the second galaxy sends a fleet of millions of space battleships to stop them. After a tremendous space battle, the defending fleet is destroyed and the invading fleet continues their invasion. But despite their fleet being powerful enough to defeat millions of space battleships, the invading fleet doesn't even try to attack Onlo, and its commanders can't think of any method to attack it.
Fortunately space fleets in Star Trek only have tens, hundreds, or at most thousands of space warships, and they are much less powerful than the space batleships in the Lensman series. So a planetary defense system for a major planet in Star Trek can get by with only a tiny fraction of one percent of the total power of the best planetary defense systems in the Lensman series.
But there are many colony planets, mining planets, scientific outposts, etc. in the Federation without the massive defense systems of the main planets. Presumably the vast majority of systems in Federation space need mobile protection by Federation space warships from enemy space warships.
So maybe the exploring scout ships and survey vessels and science vessels and starships are only a minority of the ships in Starfleet. Pehrps they are outnumbered many times by the dedicated warships which are kept in various war fleets in strategic locations in Federation space, ready to respond to attacks and invasions.
The size of the Federation, and the size of the area where starships explore, is not known. But it seems very probable that the "12 like it" that Kirk mentioned should be scattered amoung tens, hundreds, or thousands of star systems each, with the nearest other one of the 12 being many light years away, probably days, weeks, or months of travel away.
But if Starfleet has many times as many major exploring ships on the frontier as Kirk's 12, those major ships would be more common and it would be more common for such ships to meet each other. But it would be rare for both of the meeting ships to belong to the minority "12 like it". So that is a good reason to assume that most ships met by the Enterprise, even large starships, are not of the same class and are not included in Kirk's "12 like it".
So possibly the Federation is shaped like a sphereoid, and there are 10 or 20 equal sections on its frontier surface, and there are 10 or 20 volumes of space extending out from each section of the Federation border. And maybe each of the 10 or 20 volumes has a set of about a dozen powerful starships exploring that volume. So maybe one section has the Constitution class starships, and another section as the Xantynol class starships, and another section has the Hr'afnoth class starships, and so on.
Or possibly there are about 100 constitution class starships, but "there are only 12 like it in the fleet", meaning the fleet of constitution class starships assigned to exploring that particular volume of space, and not meaning the entire Federation Starfleet.
Or possibly there are only 12 starships in Starfleet, and they all explore the same narrow region of space at the same time. And when they have explored a set distance beyond the frontier in that direction, they are all reassigned to explore another comparatively small region of space at the same time
And that would explain why the Enterrprise travels to stars that are in several widely different directions from Earth, and visits different starbases, and why KIrk is subordinate to different superior officers, during TOS. The Enterrprise is sometimes reassigneed to different regions of space. And possibly all the other ships in "the 12 like it" are also reassigned to those same volumes of space at the same time as the Enterprise. That would make encountering them somewhat more statistically probable.
And that is the kind of speculation which is necessary to make sense out of the Enterrprise meeting several other ships which look similar to it on the outside, and which might possibly - though not certainly - belong to the same class of ships, and which might possibly - though not certainly - be among the few, the very few, "12 like it" that Kirk mentioned.
So I hope that now you understand why some Star Trek fans are unwilling to accept the idea that all the ships that look a lot like the Enterprise actually belong to the same class of ships or actually are amoung the "12 like it".
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What do you mean? I mean, the backstage assumption always was that Winter, Pike and ultimately Kirk would be commanding a ship with plenty of history, even though this was never verbalized much. But what is there on air to contradict that backstage assumption?
Which is what I'm saying: the incessant refitting is pretty good proof that she is old.
That she'd also be decrepit (which simply is usual with old things) is an additional step we can infer or then not. Both choices have their dramatic appeal, and both can be used to explain away some of the mysteries of how these things are treated in the assorted shows and spinoffs.
The only interesting thing there is that Pike/Kirk doesn't have the newest stuff, but instead has something decidedly old-looking. Sure, Starfleet sometimes goes retro, but generally we might want to see a continuum from old to new in the design language, and NCC-1701 isn't the latter thing as of TOS, TAS, DIS or presumably SNW. Although that latter show is the one in the position to tell us something quite different.
Hard to tell. In-universe, there was never direct praise for the ship, only for the guys and gals flying her and holding her together with all that bale wire. But admittedly Kirk was stingy with praise for the latter, too.
My position, too. We aren't smarter than the fictional characters when it comes to their fictional world. And OTOH this vast alien world is necessarily so ill-defined that there is always room for an explanation that makes fictional sense, quite regardless of who comes up with that explanation, or whether one does.
That said, might be Starfleet never wanted two Constitutions at the same spot. The Kriegsmarine hated the idea of two U-boats ending up at the same spot in the Atlantic, thus wasting these assets and letting a spot in the ocean go unchecked and perhaps an Allied ship unsunk. Yet Das Boot somewhat realistically describes just such a chance meeting, inherent in the setup where commanding individual subs from afar was hellishly difficult.
Twice Kirk runs into a fellow Constitution by chance and against expectation: he was unaware of the location and exact current mission specs of either the Constellation or the Exeter, and was not actively looking for either one despite this lack of knowledge. The Defiant was swiftly and actively tracked down using her last reported position, though. We're at a liberty to decide here: are there simply so many ships of that shape that the statistics become plausible, or is there a deployment pattern favoring this shape of ship?
If the former, our 12 "ships like NCC-1701" won't cut it, and there better be at least 500 ships of that shape out there, only 12 of them have some special aspect Kirk feels proud of. If the latter, perhaps the camera focuses on a region of space Starfleet has currently declared a Constitution Zone, for reasons as simple as support logistics? Move just two lightyears to the right, and you cross to the Miranda Zone where a dozen ships of that model buzz around in a rather random pattern; a couple of hundred lightyears widdershins and you hit the Inflexible Zone, and a thousand deosil and all you see are McBoatface class starships.
That didn't appear to be a factor in any of the cases in practice, though. And if X failed in solving the crisis of the week, it would appear logical to try Y instead if possible. Especially if Y>X in some positive sense.
But "if possible" is a convenient caveat, because the one thing all Star Trek remains consistent about is that Starfleet is short on ships.
This really makes it look like kung-fu movies: a dozen experts are packed in the area, but they attack one by one and are defeated in detail because they never learned to coordinate...
Navies always worry about defeat in detail. Navies of yore that couldn't communicate beyond the horizon, the most of all. Starfleet apparently can't communicate beyond the horizon. So concentration of firepower or other excellence has to happen rather concretely, with formation flying and the like. The scattershot deployment of Constitutions might suggest assets of low rather than high importance, then.
Or then there's a fictional rationale that isn't immediately obvious. Perhaps Starfleet best deploy "double-blind" because the universe is so unpredictable and absurd, and having super-units on occasion randomly combine forces but also on occasion randomly maintain a safe separation is the absolute best way to police an area of space?
The obvious thing here is that those ships are explicit crap - Starfleet in TOS loses them at a rate that would make both the DIS take of 7,000 active ships in the 2250s and the fan take of just a few hundred in the 2280s be plausible in the same universe... Anything would be better than these glass-jawed slackers! It then just becomes a matter of choosing between two completely opposite interpretations: "Starfleet doesn't have anything better" and "We only observed the interesting aspects of Starfleet life, namely those involving rusty fifth-rate tubs that keep on dying in innovative ways".
Timo Saloniemi
Despite TOS's "very special type of ship" and "only 12 like her comments", Trek has spent half a century showing us that all the ships in Trek are pretty much interchangeable. What can the 1701 do that the NX-01 couldn't? Or the USS Discovery? Even the dedicated warship USS Defiant sprouted sickbays, shuttlebays and science labs whenever the plot demanded.
You can either take TOS as it's own, seperate thing and make the Enterprise super special, or it's just one of the differently shaped but functionally identically-equipped crowd of 7,000 ships in the 23rd century Starfleet.
You can either take TOS as it's own, seperate thing and make the Enterprise super special, or it's just one of the differently shaped but functionally identically-equipped crowd of 7,000 ships in the 23rd century Starfleet.
What is there on air to support it? AFAIK, the only age-related info the show states about the Enterprise is that it's at least 12 years old by the time of "The Menagerie." Even Marvick, who was one of the ship's actual designers, didn't look older than 40.
Which episodes state that the Enterprise is being refitted? And of those, which ones state that the refit was because the ship was old?
We mention air-craft carriers being "identical" to the untrained eye and perhaps several of the "Starships" we saw on screen were of similar design but not the same class.
Same thing happened during the heyday of the cold-war nuclear submarine programs. We had a few boats built to the Thresher/Permit slash Sturgon class basic-design specs then modded for special use. Tubilee, Narwhal, Lipscomb.
In the modern era we build ships in blocks, block one ships have feature set A, block two has feature set B... and so on. I have no problem with the Connies being a subset of the overall Starship class, perhaps a block B or block C design. Significantly different than the older ships but not nearly as capable as the newer ones.
It wasn't until the ship was stripped to basic components and reassembled that we got a glimpse at a "modern" Starfleet design... basically a rebuilt/overhaulled 40-50 year old ship put back in service to keep numbers up while tensions with the Klingons peaked.
By the time of TSFS, the ship was indeed past it's prime, too damaged to be rebuilt again. It was more economically to build a new hull than it was to rebuild the Enterprise once more.
Witness what happened to the Miami and the Poor Richard in recent times.
Same thing happened during the heyday of the cold-war nuclear submarine programs. We had a few boats built to the Thresher/Permit slash Sturgon class basic-design specs then modded for special use. Tubilee, Narwhal, Lipscomb.
In the modern era we build ships in blocks, block one ships have feature set A, block two has feature set B... and so on. I have no problem with the Connies being a subset of the overall Starship class, perhaps a block B or block C design. Significantly different than the older ships but not nearly as capable as the newer ones.
It wasn't until the ship was stripped to basic components and reassembled that we got a glimpse at a "modern" Starfleet design... basically a rebuilt/overhaulled 40-50 year old ship put back in service to keep numbers up while tensions with the Klingons peaked.
By the time of TSFS, the ship was indeed past it's prime, too damaged to be rebuilt again. It was more economically to build a new hull than it was to rebuild the Enterprise once more.
Witness what happened to the Miami and the Poor Richard in recent times.
I don't recall refits being mentioned in dialog in the series. But it could be inferred from the exterior and interior design differences that we see, e.g. from pilots to regular production episodes.
Kor
Well, I asked first...
But non-intent tidbits making Kirk's ship old are basically limited to the "IaMD" graphic so far. Since we soon get a whole spinoff dedicated to the ship, though, I am holding my breath.
All the ones where she's different. Unless we want to argue that this is the same as a character's face changing every time the actor does - but apparently this is not so at all, because the difference between the TOS and TMP ships is explicated in an onscreen art display that exists for the purpose of showing change (TMP), while onscreen photos of characters with different faces are shown in a context where the idea is to ignore the change (ST:B)
Constant refitting is not in question in the slightest. It even sets NCC-1701 apart from all the rest of Starfleet - few other ships come close (zero refits is the norm), and of those, one is named Enterprise, too.
Why should this be of any interest? We can argue that she's old (intent, and those graphics that say 2245), and we can use many things to further support this (refits, number of commanders in a Starfleet where people stick to ships forever and then some, and then the design cues). Or then we can do something else. I choose to argue the above, and I choose to mention this eligible proof. It's not supposed to be conclusive or anything - basically nothing in this piece of fiction is. It's just that using this existing evidence to support the opposite proposition doesn't appear possible...
Timo Saloniemi
So the burden of providing proof is on you.
That's not what I asked. I asked for concrete proof in a specific episode that the ship was being refitted. You can't use the conceit that 'she's different' because that's only because of the reuse of stock footage.
And on top of that, balls on the ends of nacelles, spikes on the front, and a different sized bridge dome is no evidence of a 'refit.'
Yes, it in fact is.
You tell me. You're the one making the argument.
No, the burden of answering my question is on you. I already stated my case and my (lack of) proof in the context of the question.
Why? It's an utterly stupid thing to ask for.
In the above reply, I already gave the logic of how to read the non-concrete proof. That's the full extent of it.
Says you. Why? Because those come and go. So you are reading the evidence instead if being concrete about it. And that's how it works.
Reading refits into the fact that the ship changes can be done. Not reading it into that takes quite a bit of effort (see ship photos vs. crew photos). Reading age into refits is just a matter of making the evidence fit. You can make it fit other types of claims, but you can't use it to support those claims. So there's inherent benefit to going for age, even if slight. And again, that's the extent of it. Asking stupid questions about nonexistent things won't help nor hinder.
Timo Saloniemi
Updating ships does not mean they are old. Wouldn't you be able to use a ship longer with periodic upgrades.
