Excelsior class in the alternate reality

When was Excelsior called the great explorer? In TSFS, Kirk called it "the great experiment," but I don't remember it being described as "the great explorer" in the movies.

Kor

 

Yeah, I remember the "Experiment" not "The explorer." In fact, it was pretty much posted to standard missions by TUC so I don't see much that would distinguish it from the Enterprise at that point.

 

Three years cataloging gaseous anomalies doesn’t sound like a mission worthy of Starfleet’s most state of the art exploration vehicle…

 

Someone else once brought up the possibility that "cataloguing gaseous anomalies" might have been a euphemism for "scanning Klingon space," that is, spying.

Kor

 

It seems to be another one of the famed Meyerisms, direct references to real-world phenomena that might feel slightly out of place in Trek at first. Just like there would be No Smoking signs and fire extinguishers around, and Bosun's Whistles and the like, we get a number of direct Cold War callbacks: the whole Chernobyl setup of the movie, the "Don't wait for the translation!" thing at the trial - and here a reference to the International Year of Geophysics in 1957-58, an excuse for the two superpowers to boast on their technology and prowess and to wield it to global military ends in space and on and in the oceans. "Mapping of oceans" was conducted to support submarine warfare; "conquest of space" was a test of intercontinental nuclear missiles; "study of the Arctic and the Antarctic" was an unabashed resources hunt.

It makes good sense in the Trek context, really. The Klingons have the upper hand in cloaking technology, so the Feds would want to deploy and test new scanning technologies and techniques, an imbalance similar to that of the earliest SLBM or SLCM era. While there is "no peace as long as Kirk lives", i.e. Stalin is not yet dead, there's an impasse and thus possibly also a detente, in the aftermath of the events of the previous movie, and thus an excuse for both sides to make insincere gestures of cooperation. And using the mighty Excelsior to seemingly pursue a squeaky-clean Federation agenda of survey and study, while rubbing it in the bumpy Klingon faces right next to their sensitive border, is very much akin to deploying the powerful "survey" fleets in the wild waters important to the superpowers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I saw Into Darkness at the theater with my younger brother, who is, while not a trekkie, still a pretty big Star Trek fan. When the Vengeance first appeared, he turned to me and asked, "Is that the Excelsior?"

I have to say, considering the ways that things differ in the Kelvinverse range from "mildly altered" to "wildly different", I can definitely see the Vengeance as being the ship that was gonna be the Excelsior before Marcus and his team got hold of it. Different timeline, different mission objective, different design.

 

I would like I just sorta point out that someone did do a redesign of Uss Vengeance into a regular star trek federation ship, using the idea that perhaps the federation salvaged her. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-uss-ascendant-a-rebirth-of-the-vengeance.293022/ and this thread is where the original artist chimed in https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/my-starship-design-concept-the-u-s-s-ascendant.281992/ with a little bit of lore for the little redesigns he did this quote is directedly from calamity_si

 

Lovely

 

I just looked up the Vengeance... she was a big bastard wasn't she?

I think she's too 'angular' to be equivalent to the Excelsior. Like a Brutalist Architect got let loose in a shipyard.

 

STID is both the smartest and dumbest of the Kelvin movies.

 

STID is both the strongest written and weakest written of the Kelvin movies.

 

That has been my theory as well. That Marcus took the Excelsior project and modified after Nero's attack due to his increased paranoia around a Klingon attack and the Federation being underprepared for such an event, at least from his point of view. @MadMan1701A has his own version that he did, call the Venture Star, which was treated as the Excelsior in a fan project. But, the description matches what I imagine as part of the early efforts of an Excelsior project turned Vengeance.

Source.