Did all 12 starships have 5 year missions?
- Thread starter jayrath
- Start date
A great question. Never canonically addressed, to the best of my knowledge. It seems to make sense to me that at least some, and possibly most, ships would NOT be on a 5 year mission. I would assume that many would be needed for non-exploration missions, i.e. supporting colonization, patroling borders, available for military or humanitarian crises, etc.
I don't recall ever getting any word of what kind of mission other ships were on. We have to guess from how we saw them that the other ships were on missions pretty near what the Enterprise was doing -- the Enterprise immediately picked up Constellation's mission of investigating broken-up planets, or Intrepid's investigation of the Zone of Silence, for example.
I've always assumed that the 12 Connies were all built with similar intent and thus, on similar missions.
As for non-exploration missions, not everything the Enterprise did was exploration. In fact, very few of the episodes were. The vast majority fall into the very non-exploration type missions you describe.
And this is the only answer. The rest is masturbation.
^ 
:thumbsup:
:thumbsup:
One of the things I liked best about TOS was the impression that space was vast. Many of those non-explorative missions came as a result of the Enterprise being the closest available StarFleet vessel.
You certainly know how to make your opinion known beaker, I'll give you that.
All we know is that one starship had one five-year mission, roughly three years of which were depicted in TOS. I see no reason to assume that this single example represents a standard. Mission lengths would logically be contingent upon the mission, rather than being contingent on the class of ship or based on some arbitrary chronological benchmark.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
Present-day space vehicles are invariably designed to undertake a particular mission, whether it be landing a man on the moon, ferrying astronauts and supplies to a LEO space station, facilitating global telecommunications or sampling the atmosphere of Titan. Why would it be all that different three hundred years hence? Indeed, on the assumption that the economic, technological and human(oid) resources of the 23rd century UFP are finite, one can quite easily imagine Starfleet operations planners calculating the optimum period of time a particular starship class can undertake its intended mission before an inevitably steepening curve of diminishing returns due to anticipated wear on both machinery and crew force a return to starbase for refit and crew replacement. In the case of the Constitution Class the bottom line thus derived is five years.
TGT
In GR's novelization of STMP, he noted that Kirk was the first (IIRC) captain to bring back a ship intact from such a five year mission, thus his near legendary status in Star Fleet and his rapid rise to Chief of Star Fleet Operations.
I infer that to mean that the five year mission had been tried, but not "successfully" (ship and captain and core crew returning intact). I don't recall any other direct references to other such missions.
I infer that to mean that the five year mission had been tried, but not "successfully" (ship and captain and core crew returning intact). I don't recall any other direct references to other such missions.
TheLonelySquire
Vice Admiral
A beaker full of death said:
^
Beaker you rock! Of course when I disagree with you, you will suck! For now you rock though!
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
"...relatively intact..."
That Gene Roddenberry also explicitly gave the NCC-1701 (Refit) yet another 5YM for Phase II further suggests that five years is the optimal time envelope for the Constitution Class, at least during their intended frontline interstellar exploration and combat missions.TGT
Because current designs are held back by budgetary and engineering constraints? It would be so much better if a Mars explorer could be designed to flexibly move from charting the equator to landing on the pole to blasting a few samples from the moons, then perhaps rerouted to do similar stuff on Ganymede. At least if said explorer enjoyed the hyper-flexible means of propulsion and the relative longevity of Starfleet starships.
Seagoing warships, the great inspiration for USS Enterprise, are extremely seldom designed for a particular mission. Exotic examples like monitors aside, even the designs slotted for a particular position in a fleet after a careful cost-benefit analysis tend to migrate to other duties during their careers, without the benefit of massive refits.
Put short, I see very little reason for Starfleet to design limiting hardware and adopt 5-year missions as the result. I fully acknowledge that ships may receive some special gear and other tinkering for specific missions, though.
Since Kirk's witnessed mission was so incredibly varied to begin with, I'm all the more hesistant to consider practical limitations of any sort as the driving force of 5-year missions. Five years might be completely arbitrary, or then driven by psychological or financial factors of less than rigorous nature.
As for how unique the mission was, Kirk seems to consider himself pretty unique for the feat. Surely other Starfleet officers of command rank would have been equally suited to take over the ship during the V'Ger crisis - especially officers who weren't paper-pushing Rear Admirals. But "five years out there, dealing with unknowns like this" was something Kirk put on the very top of his resumé. Perhaps others had been out there for five years, but not dealing with unknowns like this. Or perhaps no other captain had yet performed a five-year mission of exploration at that point!
...Of course, it may be that skippers of yore actually did ten- or twenty-year missions. But those of Kirk's time and age probably did shorter stints, from the way Kirk presents his case.
Timo Saloniemi
I think, given Roddenberry's "Hornblower In Space" inspiration, the Big E must have similarly shared some inspirational roots with the sail frigates of the early 19th century. Those ships were very much go-anywhere do-anything workhorses, suitable for a much wider variety of missions than other types (both smaller and larger).
That being the case, I can easily imagine other Constititions engaged in similar 5-year missions. But they would also be well-suited to other duties in a pinch.
Something to consider: though it's never been nailed down irrefutably, the Republic seems to generally be accepted as having been a Constitution class ship. And she was used as a training vessel. So that'd be at least one not on a 5-year mission.
That being the case, I can easily imagine other Constititions engaged in similar 5-year missions. But they would also be well-suited to other duties in a pinch.
Something to consider: though it's never been nailed down irrefutably, the Republic seems to generally be accepted as having been a Constitution class ship. And she was used as a training vessel. So that'd be at least one not on a 5-year mission.
Here's another way to look at it, that I don't think has been considered much. What if "five-year mission" just refers to an assignment to the Enterprise for a duration of five years. That sorta blurs the meaning of "mission," but the term is already blurred anyway, since it's obvious that the Enterprise is not undertaking one single, unified mission, not if you count all the Starfleet-ordered sidebars along the way. So many it's possible that a "five-year mission" means that a Captain is assigned to be the Captain of a certain ship for a five year period, and he chooses crew, who will all serve for that same period (unless they specifically request a transfer), so that the captain and his crew will be able to "gel" as a unified body as they mostly explore the unknown (or wherever else they're assigned), confident in the knowledge that half his crew won't be ripped out from under him, ruining the chemistry, next time he docks at a Starbase.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
Just as they very likely will be three hundred years hence in the TOSverse?
I strongly suspect that it would still be cheaper and easier to build specialized vehicles and payloads for each mission, irrespective of the available propulsion options.
So why the need for vessels as diverse as aircraft carriers, guided missile cruisers, amphibious assault ships, minesweepers, fast attack submarines, missile submarines, DSRVs - to say nothing of these things - for the well-equipped 21st century navy?
Constitution Class starships are very likely assigned to 5YMs for the same reason you are obliged to take your car in for servicing every x-thousand kilometers.
Well, yes, I suppose it is conceivable that the Enterprise could have continued on an open-ended galactic exploration mission as a scorched, dented primary hull puttering from star system to star system on maneuvering thrusters with most of her crew dead, digested or completely insane. One is, however, forced to question the long-term scientific, military and PR value of such a strategy.
Undoubtedly, but that would have more or less defeated the purpose of a film intended to reunite the original cast.
I prefer GR's admittedly non-ca[n+1]on reasoning in the ST:TMP novelization.
...until Starfleet realized that five years was a more realistic interval from the perspective of both spacecraft engineering and human(oid) factors?
I perceived no such subtext.
TGT
Sure, if "they" are the cutting edge in high tech. I just don't think "they" are. The starships we see are the Mack trucks or M60 tanks of the 23rd century, dependable technology harnessed for the dull and repetitive task of (yawn) going where nobody has bothered to go before and making sure that Federation interests are served there, too. The big money goes to the true high tech of the century, such as Genesis devices and transwarp drives.
But how? A "mission" in deep space is pretty much like an exploratory-exploitatory voyage of half a millenium ago: you need a ship prepared for everything. Sure, you can customize a bit: square sail for certain winds, lateen for others; more cannon today, more water barrels tomorrow. But there's little point in customizing the hull or the masts at the construction stage. A sturdy collier can take you to a scientific expedition to the Pacific or the Antarctic alike; a dependable little naö from a bit earlier on would have been good enough for everything.
It's not as if Starfleet knows it's sending Kirk to study the upper layers of Jupiter's atmosphere or anything. Moreover, it's not sending Pioneer-sized robots out there: it's sending things as big as aircraft carriers, things that are supposed to be used for decades and perhaps centuries after the initial mission is over. It would be an insane investment to build such a thing for a narrow range of missions only.
Today's aircraft carriers aren't mission-specific, either. They can be pressed to sub-hunt, to assist in humanitarian crises or evacuations, or to support surprise raids or sustained bombardment or establishing of air superiority. Plans for specialized carriers of lesser size and cost for narrower mission types have been repeatedly shelved; "special" flattops only exist by virtue of the existence of the separate USMC that in essence is a second navy for the nation, with NIH attitudes towards the first.
Modern destroyers (including those they call cruisers) are similarly multimissionalized, compromising on everything so that they can hunt the classic three opponents (subs, aircraft, surface ships) equally well, bombard the shores, stop and search commercial shipping, act as floating command centers and intelligence pickets... Specialized designs were affordable immediately post-WWII because there were "free" hulls floating around with nothing much to do. Specialized designs were necessary during the war because they sometimes still were high tech for their day, money was short, yet expected lifetimes shorter still. Cold war ships were built on a very different mentality... And I'd expect Kirk's "peacetime" ship to be built so as well.
I dunno. Kirk hit the pit stop several times during his documented mission; Picard steered his vessel to overhauls quite often within the first year already, despite an "ongoing" mission and a supposed endurance of three years. And we never quite witnessed the putative obligatory major overhaul that would have followed Kirk's five years; instead, we saw a complete rebuilding, which need not have been related to the five-year mission in any direct way. By looking at some Miranda class ships, we can see that such massive revamping certainly isn't mandatory every five years.
...Until Starfleet built ships fast enough, and starbases numerous enough, to perform shorter missions. Slower ships would have to spend a longer time to reach unexplored space, and would have fewer ports of call before Kirk's time than after it.
2260s ships apparently suffered from no such limitations. It's not as if Kirk's crew would have been confined aboard his ship for five years, really, considering Kirk had shore leave or visited Federation installations every tenth episode. Perhaps it's time to swap captains every five years if possible, but this brings us to Rookiebatman's definition of "mission": it's the assignment length of certain key people that defines it, not the endurance of the ship or the crew.
Timo Saloniemi
I'm not even sure about that one five year mission. Has it ever been addressed on screen, apart from the voiceover in the opening credits? I don't recall anyone ever mentioning a five year mission.
Similar threads
