• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Definitive list of models used in "Unification"

Dukhat

Dukhat

Admiral
Admiral
First, I realize that "Unification" was broadcast almost two decades ago, so I'm sure people's memories about this may be vague or even nonexistent. I also know that only a few people (Misters Okuda and Sternbach, primarily) may be able to answer this question.

Anyway, I'm compiling an essay of all the models used in TNG (just for personal/fun reasons), and I'm trying to be as thorough as possible. For Unification, the list is pretty big, but what I really want to focus on is the extreme background stuff. I once read something, somewhere, that stated that ubiquitous things were used as background ships such as Enterprise models that didn't come out of the mold right, some models originally built by Robert McCall, and some other models not specifically made for a Star Trek production. Here's what I have so far:

1. Klingon battlecruiser
2. Planet of the Titans Enterprise study model
3. U.S.S. Princeton (BoBW stock footage)
4. U.S.S. Melbourne (BoBW stock footage)
5. U.S.S. Buran (BoBW stock footage)
6. U.S.S. Chekov (BoBW stock footage)
7. STIII Spacedock study model #1
8. STIII Spacedock study model #2 (seen twice)
9. Talarian warship w/out wings
10. Talarian observation ship w/out wings
11. STIII Excelsior study model #1
12. STIII Excelsior study model #2
13. STIII Excelsior study model #3 (seen twice)
14. Mothership from "V" miniseries
15. Miranda class starship (seen at least 4 times)
16. Talarian freighter (seen at least 3 times in different colors)
17. Soliton waverider/Mars defense perimeter drone (seen twice)
 
Last edited:
Let's not forget the soliton waverider / Mars Defense Perimeter craft.

I guess we can conclude that spoils of the Talarian conflict went to Qualor II - but whether this was because the depot was close to Talaria, or far from it (and thus safe from repossession attempts), we don't know. Also, given the proximity of Romulan space, the battle cruiser might be a Romulan one rather than Klingon. Or then Klingon, and put there exactly because Klingons would stay away from the Romulan-infested area.

Timo Saloniemi
 
IIRC the Melbourne was never seen on-screen until DS9's "the emissary", and in a different form (Excelsior class), unless you're talking about the modified Nebula desk model. Are there any really good pics of all these miniatures that they used? I'd love to see them...
 
Timo said:
Let's not forget the soliton waverider / Mars Defense Perimeter craft.
Click to expand...

You know, that ship was on the list I wrote down on paper. I guess it didn't make it to the BBS list for some reason. My bad. I've edited the list to include it.

I guess we can conclude that spoils of the Talarian conflict went to Qualor II - but whether this was because the depot was close to Talaria, or far from it (and thus safe from repossession attempts), we don't know. Also, given the proximity of Romulan space, the battle cruiser might be a Romulan one rather than Klingon. Or then Klingon, and put there exactly because Klingons would stay away from the Romulan-infested area.
Click to expand...

Yes, I have no problem with the idea that old captured enemy ships could be stored there too, once their tech had been scoured over with a fine-toothed comb.

137th Gebirg said:
IIRC the Melbourne was never seen on-screen until DS9's "the emissary", and in a different form (Excelsior class), unless you're talking about the modified Nebula desk model. Are there any really good pics of all these miniatures that they used? I'd love to see them...
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm referring to the Nebula study model from BoBW, not the Excelsior from Emissary.

kkozoriz1 said:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/wolf359.htm

Wolf 359 - Overview
Click to expand...

I, along with Timo, actually helped out with that page (although the link to my email address is long since out of date).

I guess in lieu of getting any definitive answers, my next step is to ask if anyone knows where I can find good screencaps of the depot. Almost every site I've been to (including Ex-Astris-Scientia) has only really blurry caps. I did find one site long ago that had good caps, but I've since forgotten it.
 
Last edited:
One of the novelizations/short stories (I'd had to look up which one) had a good suggestion regarding the Melbourne issue. The Nebula model was built first by Ed Miarecki and was only used as one of the background wreck ships, while the choice was made to use the Excelsior model for "Emissary" because it was more detailed. The suggestion by the author is that both ships were present at the battle, and the Excelsior class ship was the one in active service at the time. The Nebula class vessel was under construction and intended to replace the Excelsior class Melbourne, and this ship is the one that Admiral Hanson recommends for Riker in BOBW. But due to the Borg invasion, the Nebula class Melbourne was hastily finished and rushed to the battle, where it got blown up alongside its older counterpart.

Seems like a good explanation to me. :D The Nebula model does reappear in "Emissary," but is not on fire then and is seen from a different angle.
 
The Nebula class vessel was under construction and intended to replace the Excelsior class Melbourne, and this ship is the one that Admiral Hanson recommends for Riker in BOBW. But due to the Borg invasion, the Nebula class Melbourne was hastily finished and rushed to the battle, where it got blown up alongside its older counterpart.
Click to expand...

The thing is, though, the only reason we have to believe that one of the Nebula wrecks was named Melbourne is that in reality, the model did bear that name. But if we choose to accept the name despite the fact that it could not be discerned on screen, we also have to accept the registry, right? And that's where we get problems, because both of those models, Nebula and Excelsior alike, carried the same registry number.

We might be better off saying that the Nebula class ship was named something completely different and carried some completely different registry number, then. Although that still leaves us wondering why the Excelsior class ship had a registry in the 64000 range, when few other ships of that class reached past 50000, and most were around 14000.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Timo said:
The thing is, though, the only reason we have to believe that one of the Nebula wrecks was named Melbourne is that in reality, the model did bear that name. But if we choose to accept the name despite the fact that it could not be discerned on screen, we also have to accept the registry, right? And that's where we get problems, because both of those models, Nebula and Excelsior alike, carried the same registry number.

We might be better off saying that the Nebula class ship was named something completely different and carried some completely different registry number, then. Although that still leaves us wondering why the Excelsior class ship had a registry in the 64000 range, when few other ships of that class reached past 50000, and most were around 14000.
Click to expand...

This is what always bugged me about Emissary. I understand the desire to use an Excelsior so that the name "Melbourne" could be seen more clearly. But did they have to reuse the same reigstry as the Nebula study model, which wasn't even seen all that well? If anything, they could have made the registry NCC-6204 or NCC-2043. It would have been far more logical.

A side note: Only the Melbourne and the Crazy Horse have registries of 6XXXX and 5XXXX, respectively, and those were only because of discrepancies. The Melbourne issue stated above, and the Encyclopedia entry for the Crazy Horse listed it as a Cheyenne-class vessel with the 5XXXX registry. Only later when the Crazy Horse was depicted on screen with the usual Excelsior stock footage did it become a problem. Perhaps in a future edition of the Encyclopedia will this mistake be corrected, or, dare I say it, in TNG-Remastered;)

Also, most Excelsior registries are 4XXXX, which IMHO is still ridiculously high, considering the more advanced Ambassador class only had registries of 2XXXX. (Trust me, I know what I'm talking about...I wrote a whole essay about this nuttiness.)
 
That's why I prefer the solution I mentioned above. It's the most practical version for having both ships present at the battle with the same name and registry.
 
But that still doesn't explain why the registries are the same, or why the Excelsior's is so high. The only ship in service that has the same registry number consistently assigned to it is the Enterprise, and with the addendum of a letter after the number. The only way this would work is if the Excelsior ship had a lower number than the Nebula ship.

Honestly, the prevailing thinking on this matter is that the Melbourne is, and has always been, the Excelsior we see in Emissary, and that the Nebula study model in BoBW has now been "superseded" and is now just a random wrecked ship regardless of what name or registry was originally printed on it. It's like the Buckner/Centaur: the model had the name "Buckner" printed on it when filmed, but the dialog referred to the ship as the "Centaur." Ergo, it's the Centaur, not the Buckner.
 
* shrugs *

When it comes to registries, it's hard to trust what appeared onscreen. A lot of the TNG-era numbers were pulled out of a hat and make no sense whatsoever, if we're to assume they're meant to be a production order for the vessels in that class. The Enterprise's registry being kept and apparently being a unique case was ultimately due to Gene Roddenberry's insistence that the ship in TMP was still the ship from TOS, even if it looked modified in a way that didn't seem consistent with a simple refit/upgrade. The reason the TMP version is often referred to as "Enterprise" class in unofficial work is that it was the original planned working name for the upgraded design, with the USS Enterprise being the first ship refitted. It was only Gene's insistence that has kept the "Constitution class" name for the TMP era design.

The "Buckner" name is printed in very small letters on the model to honor its designer, Adam Buckner. But it's too small to make out on screen the way it's filmed, and since they used another canonical name for the ship I don't have that much of a problem with it. The Buckner name might just be intended more as an in-joke, the way the USS Curry and the USS Raging Queen have very similar models with a few differences and the former was named for effects supervisor Dan Curry.
 
If the registries are pennant numbers which are reassigned over time, the system still makes sense, IIRC. That interpretation would suggest that Starfleet has roughly 76000 pennants by the beginning of the Dominion War (not all of which would necessarily be in commission), including large numbers of runabouts, scout ships (like Data's in Insurrection), etc., but provides only a vague upper limit on how many ships Starfleet might have commissioned in total.

A progressive registry system produces many headaches that a pennant system does not.
 
Cicero said:
If the registries are pennant numbers which are reassigned over time, the system still makes sense, IIRC. That interpretation would suggest that Starfleet has roughly 76000 pennants by the beginning of the Dominion War (not all of which would necessarily be in commission), including large numbers of runabouts, scout ships (like Data's in Insurrection), etc., but provides only a vague upper limit on how many ships Starfleet might have commissioned in total.

A progressive registry system produces many headaches that a pennant system does not.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, there's no evidence at all that registry numbers are reassigned over time. As a matter of fact, the reverse is true: Registry numbers seem to just get higher and higher over time, from four digits during the TOS and movie era, to five digits during the TNG era, to six digits or more (Relativity) in the far future.

The only instance I know (besides the Melbourne) where there were two ships with exactly the same registry was the Defiant and the Sao Paolo once it was rechristened the 2nd Defiant, but that was more a matter of reusing stock footage than anything else. I consider it just a VFX mistake. Plus, they were not operating at the same time.
 
^ There is some circumstantial evidence. The Grissom has a registry of NCC-638 despite the Oberth-class's seemingly Excelsior-era design and generally much higher registries. The low registries of many Constitution-class ships also suggest that some form of non-linear registration occurrs. The Constellation (NCC-1017), Intrepid (NCC-1631), Excalibur (NCC-1664), and Exeter (NCC-1672) were definitely Constitution-class ships registered lower than the Constitution, and the Eagle (NCC-956), Farragut (NCC-1647), and Scovil (NCC-1598) may also have been.

I think a case could be made for either system, but that a pennant-based registry system would allow for the fewest problems.
 
Has the Constitution ever been established as NCC-1700? Perhaps Constitution is actually NCC-1000.

I just assumed that Grissom was a refit of an older design, much like the Enterprise was.
 
kkozoriz1 said:
Has the Constitution ever been established as NCC-1700?
Click to expand...

Nope. There was only a diagram in season 1 of TNG that shows the top view of a TMP-era Constitution class ship with the registry of NCC-1700, but there was no name printed on it.

Perhaps Constitution is actually NCC-1000.
Click to expand...

That would make a hell of a lot more sense. The Eagle wouldn't work chronologically, but it's also never been proven that the Eagle was a Connie either.

I just assumed that Grissom was a refit of an older design, much like the Enterprise was.
Click to expand...

Actually, I think the VFX people at the time of Star Trek III just wanted the Grissom to have a small registry number because it was a small ship (just like the big bad Excelsior had NCC-2000). The starship construction timeline I wrote up pretty much shows that almost all Oberth class ships from the TMP era through the TNG era have registries that are smaller than they should be for their production dates.
 
How about this.
Constitution - 1000 (Mark 0/prototype)
Constellation - 1017 (Mark I Constitution. Was second ship completed. 1001-1016 were modified before construction. Numbers reassigned. Constitution modified to Constellation specs).
Something similar for the others culminating in Enterprise and other higher numbered ships. Eagle NCC-956 could have been older/modified to near Constitution but didn't quite stand up to all the refitting. Similar but smaller. less capable.
 
There should IMHO be an effort to minimize the number of Constitution class starships in Star Trek in general, and in TOS in particular. Otherwise, Kirk's "a dozen like her" limits would be met too soon...

Is the Constellation a Constitution class starship? In the original episode, she looks somewhat different from one, due to being built of inaccurate scale model parts.

We could be looking at something like Starfleet's equivalent to the Italian battleship class Conte di Cavour instead: a design from the early 1910s, extensively refitted for WWII so that she looked almost identical to the late 1930s Vittorio Veneto class. Only the main armament was different enough to be told apart by a layman after a moment's study. It's a nice real-world example of old, indeed ancient ships being converted in such a fashion that they closely resemble modern vessels in shape and detail, not just in performance; essentially, the Italians "standardized" their battleship fleet for WWII...

I'd keep Constitution at 1700 to suggest that ships of that class were given sequential numbers between 1700 and, say, 1720 (with 12-13 ships remaining in strength during TOS), while another, older class spanned something like 1000-1030. Fandom has that latter class as "Horizon class".

Timo Saloniemi
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top