All righty then
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.
And I contend that the notion of two ships of the same class meeting in space is nowhere as improbable as you think, regardless of how many there are.
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.
Here's the problem: You keep talking about the whole volume of space. Agreed, Space is big. Hell, space is INFINITE, but the whole volume of it is not a consideration in this particular conversation. If I'm in Starfleet Command, if I want two starships of the same class to rendezvous with each other, then my main consideration is the location of the ships relatiive to
each other. If the ensuing travel time is reasonable and one of the ships could use back-up, then there's absolutely no reason not to send the other ship to rendezous with it. The bigness of space is irrelevant. Having multiple Connies meet in space is not just probable or likely, there's canon evidence of Connies doing exactly that on screen. We all watched the same show, right?
(BTW, anybody who still entertains the fever dream that any of those Connies is a different class can just stop it. There were all Constitution class ships.)
Also, you're stuck on how many Connies there are supposed to be in the fleet. I addressed that in my initial post. Smart money is Starfleet doesn't deploy all twelve ships at the same time. The notion that no Connies can rendezvous because they're too far-flung and busy is the notion that doesn't make sense.
Because I'm curious to understand why so many of us are trying so hard to make what we've all seen with our own eyes something else.
Respect to Mr. Adams, I addressed space bigness above.
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.
And for storytelling purposes, nobody needs to know all that, and I addressed the rarity of Constitutions above.
But what we do know is what Kirk said in "Tomorrow is Yesterday":
And that's enough information for the audience.
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.
Yes, if you tried assign a starship to every single one of the systems, instead of assigning a patrol area, like normal commanders would.
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".
Yes, horrendous overthinking, another trait common to Trek fans.
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.
You obviously have no experience with classic cars. Old things can be pretty as models and hum like Swiss watches if you properly maintain it. Your inference is, indeed, an
inference, not a foregone conclusion.
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.
Okay first, I wouldn't watch STD or SNW with a gun to my head, so I have absolutely no problem with these shows not having a technological connection to TOS and TAS.
Second, I remind you again that "old looking" doesn't automatically translate to "doesn't work."
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.
There was no overt scorn, either. Kirk commanded the ship and it performed for him.
My position, too. We aren't smarter than the fictional characters when it comes to their fictional world.
Says the poster who thinks Starfleet operates decrepit antiques.
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.
Oh? Then explain the Wolfpack strategy.
As for what Starfleet wanted, the argument here isn't what Starfleet desired. My beef is with posters desperate to prove that such a meeting is impossible.
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?
It doesn't matter, because neither that particular shape nor a special patrol pattern is required for the meetings to be statisticaliy plausible.
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.
Asked and answered.
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 they didn't send Y, and Kirk didn't call home and beg for Y. He did he best he could with X, and X turned out to be enough.
But "if possible" is a convenient caveat, because the one thing all Star Trek remains consistent about is that Starfleet is short on ships.
And your solution is to scrap twelve of them because they require work?
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...
The only evidence of multiple Connies not coordinating is in "The Ultimate Computer," and that only because nobody in the aggressor force expected M-5 to play for keeps. The idea that they will always be that hapless while working togetrher is assumption, not established fact.
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.
Two assumptions. How do you know all the Connies are deployed in a scattershot fashion? How do you know Starfleet holds a low opinion of them no matter how they're deployed?
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
And now that Timo has had his fun...[/quote]
