Excelsior Technical Manual (Third Time's The Charm?)

[Praetor]

Thanks guys! I didn't realize until re-reading this that most of my ships are variants, with only the Melbourne a true refit. I may need to think about that some more, although I think the timing of the Melbourne was what kept the Excelsior class from "only" having a 70 year run.

I'm still a little torn about how clear I want to be about Ingram. I have a soft spot for that old fanon design, but I don't want to delve too deep into whether Starfleet had battleships in the 23rd century or not. (Giving the Federation class a shout-out or two is okay though. )

I must say I was (and still am) a bit torn about whether to include the kitbash "cousins" from DS9 at all or not. The Centaur type gave me numerous issues - whether it was "truly" an Excelsior cousin or should be scaled differently due to the conflicting design elements on it, for one. I also don't like the idea that it's a Centaur class ship. I picked Mediterranean because which of those we knew to exist from the Encyclopedia and MA seemed to fit.

I always liked the Shelley aside from the outsized Miranda nacelles, but the Medusa is one ugly-ass piece of junk. Thankfully it never actually appeared on screen.

Totally agree on Medusa... although I didn't realize it didn't actually appear on screen. I think someone - maybe Reverend? - had previously come up with the notion that the weird back was partly to support a train of cargo units, like those from FJ's Ptolemy class. I am going to revise my text accordingly. I am also unsure whether I want to call it Medusa or Trident class... I've seen both. Perhaps I'll change Trident to be the official name and Medusa to be one of the ships.

I wasn't aware of this before. Would a "battle bridge" in the TNG vein make much sense on a ship that only has impulse engines on the saucer?

Come to think of it, this was the problem with the Sovereign separation which was in Eaves' concepts.

It's kind of the opposite problem to the Ambassador, whose lack of saucer impulse engines makes it a pretty useless lifeboat! No wonder the Enterprise-C was lost with all hands (except Yar).

OTOH maybe it's just the E-B equivalent of auxiliary control, or a CIC kind of thing.

You make some good points here.. and I've actually never thought about Enterprise-C saucer separation being so pointless. Actually, something I've been thinking about with regard to warp core placement is what role exactly saucer separation plays over the course of Trek history.

I feel fairly certain that we "know" that in TOS it was a desperation maneuver, per Kirk's lines in "The Apple" and even the unused storyboards from TMP. The saucer essentially "abandoning" the engineering section to escape critical damage seems likely. But, by the time of TNG we see something that is apparently a design feature on at least the Galaxy class that both ships should be fairly autonomous - and I think Riker's lines in "Farpoint" suggest he has done it before (perhaps on the Hood?) One could debate whether the Galaxy saucer was all that valuable without warp drive... or for that matter whether it may've actually had warp drive.

I have had the TNG Movies Sketchbook for some time and the justification for the extra impulse engines always felt... I dunno, weird to me, and this is part of why I fished around for the prototype driver coil explanation. Perhaps I should re-evaluate this original explanation, though. In my existing notion of the Enterprise-B as a "deep space variant" perhaps this makes more sense than I've realized. Generally I don't think that the two halves of the Excelsior were meant to be autonomous vessels, and perhaps saucer separation was meant to still be a last-ditch maneuver... but maybe it was also easier for this class ship to re-couple the two main sections after such a maneuver. Therefore, it could be something that Riker had practiced on the Hood and help explain the extra impulse engines.

Something else I also didn't make clear was how I envision impulse engines working. I think there have been primitive driver coils since the NX-01, but that around the time of the TMP refit the deflection crystal starting playing a role in this. I'm not entirely sure how yet, but I imagine that it's related to the crystals modulating the field generated by the coils and is somehow related to the ability to channel warp power into the impulse engines... an ability that seems to disappear by the TNG era along with the deflection crystal. It's my thought that by this time the "modern" driver coils pioneered by the Excelsior variant are in place, and later Excelsior refits grant these to all members of the class, though they retain the deflection crystal perhaps due to inefficiencies of the smaller engine design.

There must, after all, be reasons the entire class wasn't built to Enteprise-B spec, no matter what else I say about it.

 

[Tomalak]

Good points. I think it's implied that the routine aspect of the Galaxy separation is a new thing unique to that class - previously being a desperate emergency manoeuvre to get the crew as far away from an exploding warp assembly as possible.

My interpretation of Picard ordering Riker to do a manual docking is that he knows he's never done it before because no other ships can do it. He was testing Riker's preparedness. It's the kind of dick move early Picard would pull.

So I don't think the presence of a 'battle bridge' on the Enterprise-B needs to mean there is an independent battle section, and I don't think saucer separation alone can explain the extra impulse drives.

I like your idea about a breakthrough in smaller, more powerful coils rendering them obsolete almost as soon as the ship was built.

The hull pontoons are a bit more difficult. You'd have thought extra sensors or lab space or whatever they were for would have been useful for all Excelsiors, but perhaps the trade-offs in less efficient warp performance meant it wasn't worth the bother after that initial production block. Cloak detection makes sense, as presumably the Klingons will have simply evolved a workaround, rendering the Starfleet breakthrough redundant.

I favour the idea of a handful of ships built around the same time, which is why I like to think the Lakota is an older ship which was mothballed and later recommissioned. It's not like the Miranda variants which more obviously play different roles.

 

[ProwlAlpha]

The Excelsior NCC-2000 cannot be in service well into the mid to late 2300s due to an Excelsior NCC-21445 in service from 2365 to 2370. I would say that the Excelsior was retired in the 2310s due to the excessive transwarp stress on her hull or lost in the line of service from the The Lost Era novel, One Constant Star.

Secondly, the USS Nebula (in my head canon), was the true successor to the Ambassador-class and the ship was introduced in the early 2350s. The Galaxy Class was the flagship class designed during the turbulent years of the Cardassian Wars, Galen Border Conflicts, Tzenkethi War, and Tholian attacks (2340s to 2350s).

 

[Tomalak]

The Excelsior NCC-2000 cannot be in service well into the mid to late 2300s due to an Excelsior NCC-21445 in service from 2365 to 2370.

You're right, I didn't realise the TNG Excelsior had a canon registry number. It's no big deal, it's just a replacement Excelsior class ship commissioned around the 2330s I guess.

Sounds like @Praetor might have to adjust the narrative somewhat, unless you've already decided to discount this for some reason?

 

[Timo]

Regarding the impulse engine boxes on the saucer, we must deduce (in part because of the E-B herself) that the red-glowing things are not rocket nozzles and do not provide a "flame" pointing in any particular direction (because there's no direction in which such a thing could point, especially with the E-B). Rather, the red things are what is likened to a "tailpipe" by Uhura: they exhaust wastes in a nonpropulsive fashion. And they appear to do so whenever the engine is running, not exclusively when the engine is making the ship move.

So, big additional boxes with tailpipes, not directly connected to the state of motion of the ship - perhaps not engines at all? Quite possibly just additional power boxes, for firing up some all-new onboard system (new shields, new guns, new fabricators?).

In my own desk drawer writing, I assign those boxes to ships that house more than the usual starship hardware for whatever reason. They are a readily available optional extra whenever Starfleet needs to turn a generic starship into, say, a command ship (with special high-power communications systems aboard), or a testbed for systems that will later be miniaturized or then installed aboard entirely different ship types where they make no external impact.

The cheek fairings are easy: they're just generic extra space, to be used as best befits the application. The modified nacelle bows can have any random explanation; an experiment that did not pan out is always an option, but why would Starfleet repeat the mistake with the Lakota? Might be this is what the nacelles need for protection (or for properly operating the ramscoops) whenever facing the fumes from the power boxes?

So each batch of Excelsiors would be entitled to a couple of E-B types, with the boxes, with the cheeks, with the nacelle mods, or all three. We just happen to spot two ships that have all three. And perhaps for the same reason: both would be introducing all-new systems and their power needs.

Perhaps certain other ship classes (especially mass-produced workhorses) feature such options as well, and we just don't happen to see much of them?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tomalak]

Yes, it's tempting to see the red impulse exhausts as propelling the ship, but they obviously don't do that, not least because we've seen ships reverse at impulse power plenty of times. Spock says ships at impulse expel waste ionised gas out of these tail pipes.

It still seems to be tied to impulse propulsion rather than any other kind of power generation, which goes back to the question of why the E-B would need 'more' impulse power.

Though if it does just point to increased power demands, there is that cloaking device rumour.

 

[Praetor]

Good points. I think it's implied that the routine aspect of the Galaxy separation is a new thing unique to that class - previously being a desperate emergency manoeuvre to get the crew as far away from an exploding warp assembly as possible.

My interpretation of Picard ordering Riker to do a manual docking is that he knows he's never done it before because no other ships can do it. He was testing Riker's preparedness. It's the kind of dick move early Picard would pull.

So I don't think the presence of a 'battle bridge' on the Enterprise-B needs to mean there is an independent battle section, and I don't think saucer separation alone can explain the extra impulse drives.

You're right; I'll have to re-watch the episode but First Season Picard would have totally done that.

Maybe Excelsior class ships still could reintegrate more easily, but that doesn't mean this was something that Riker would have trained for either.

The hull pontoons are a bit more difficult. You'd have thought extra sensors or lab space or whatever they were for would have been useful for all Excelsiors, but perhaps the trade-offs in less efficient warp performance meant it wasn't worth the bother after that initial production block. Cloak detection makes sense, as presumably the Klingons will have simply evolved a workaround, rendering the Starfleet breakthrough redundant.

I favour the idea of a handful of ships built around the same time, which is why I like to think the Lakota is an older ship which was mothballed and later recommissioned. It's not like the Miranda variants which more obviously play different roles.

I actually have an "out" worked in for this and didn't even realize it. Basically due to Klingon treaties, for each block of ships built, I have 1/3 being partially built and put into Ordinary Reserve. Then, when the threat of war with Cardassia looms, Starfleet pulls these partial builds and finishes them.

This was partially my way of trying to explain why so many Excelsiors we saw onscreen had registries in the NCC-40000 range, even after one would have supposed that production had long sense run. It could be that one early block was entirely of this variant variety and one or two of them sat unfinished. It happens to be nicely convenient that the Lakota has a registry in the NCC-40000 range, eh?

The Excelsior NCC-2000 cannot be in service well into the mid to late 2300s due to an Excelsior NCC-21445 in service from 2365 to 2370. I would say that the Excelsior was retired in the 2310s due to the excessive transwarp stress on her hull or lost in the line of service from the The Lost Era novel, One Constant Star.

Well so much for my damn narrative. But seriously, thanks for pointing this out.

I started writing this before the advent of Remastered TNG and before that book was written. Just how clear is it that the ship is actually destroyed? Is it possibly just abandoned and lost, or nah? (I'm going to have to read it.)

Unfortunately, while I'm okay with ignoring the Okudagram, I've committed myself to trying to not stray from the books whenever possible, especially The Lost Era series which I have so much respect for. I guess I'll have to introduce NCC-21145 at some point, and she'll be the ship that goes into the Fleet Museum. I guess at the point currently where Sulu finally leaves her and she gets refit, the NCC-21145 can enter service instead.

I'll flesh some drama for the narrative out of this, rest assured. And around 60 years of service for a starship is still pretty damn good. Not sure what this will do to my afterword where Admiral Demora Sulu is remembering her father on the bridge of his ship, though...

Secondly, the USS Nebula (in my head canon), was the true successor to the Ambassador-class and the ship was introduced in the early 2350s. The Galaxy Class was the flagship class designed during the turbulent years of the Cardassian Wars, Galen Border Conflicts, Tzenkethi War, and Tholian attacks (2340s to 2350s).

I guess the Horatio was called a heavy cruiser in "Conspiracy" so you're probably right; the Ambassador and Nebula probably go more together. I will explore this a little more. This actually helps my argument that the Ambassador was basically a failed Explorer, relegated to taking some of the heavier duties from the Excelsior fleet.

Timo (so nice to see you drop by) and Tomalak, I think you're onto something about the extra impulse engines. Maybe they were added more for extra power than for propulsion. The idea of these being simple "bolt-ons" that one might see on any ship is a good one. I will figure out how to incorporate this too, and also find some more justification for the 'pontoons.' Some extra sensor equipment and science labs was what I always had in my head for those.

 

[David cgc]

I started writing this before the advent of Remastered TNG and before that book was written. Just how clear is it that the ship is actually destroyed? Is it possibly just abandoned and lost, or nah? (I'm going to have to read it.)

The NCC-2000 Excelsior is very much destroyed in OCS, explicitly and on-screen, so to speak.

Unfortunately, while I'm okay with ignoring the Okudagram, I've committed myself to trying to not stray from the books whenever possible, especially The Lost Era series which I have so much respect for. I guess I'll have to introduce NCC-21145 at some point, and she'll be the ship that goes into the Fleet Museum. I guess at the point currently where Sulu finally leaves her and she gets refit, the NCC-21145 can enter service instead.

I'll flesh some drama for the narrative out of this, rest assured. And around 60 years of service for a starship is still pretty damn good. Not sure what this will do to my afterword where Admiral Demora Sulu is remembering her father on the bridge of his ship, though...

Well...

Spoiler: A thing you probably won't think the novel would have the stones to do, anyway, but there is some dramatic tension involved

I walked away with the impression at the end that Hikaru was certainly in a position to take command of the other Excelsior mentioned in TNG. Though, as MB notes, he'd have to be assigned to the ship about thirty seconds after returning to civilization to be consistent with another novel. You'll have to decide if 2319 is the right time for a 21000-block starship to be commissioned.

 

[Timo]

The TNG registries could in theory follow a simplistic pattern where 10,000 launches the new century "from a clean slate" and every new decade rachets the numbers up another 10k (regardless of how many numbers were actually used that past decade).

Thus, 57,000 is frontline-fit for Setlik III in 2347, and 71,000 goes for Galaxies launched in the early 2360s.

This'd make the 21,000 range Mirandas contemporary with Tomed; perhaps an Excelsior, still among the larger designs, would take a bit more effort to be completed and would be delayed?

The 42,000 batch of Excelsiors still being "routinely" built around 2332 wouldn't appear too objectionable IMHO. It'd be a sort of last hurrah for the type, with two or three special command ships following a decade later for the needs of the Border Wars and being the only ones constructed "out of spares" for this non-frontline-combatant role. Building ships of that design family would not yet conflict with the lowest registries of the new "Galaxy generation", the New Orleans and Cheyenne ones.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Yes, it's tempting to see the red impulse exhausts as propelling the ship, but they obviously don't do that, not least because we've seen ships reverse at impulse power plenty of times. Spock says ships at impulse expel waste ionised gas out of these tail pipes.

It still seems to be tied to impulse propulsion rather than any other kind of power generation, which goes back to the question of why the E-B would need 'more' impulse power.

Though if it does just point to increased power demands, there is that cloaking device rumour.

It's not just tempting, it's implied: a rocket operating under Newton's laws.

Anyway, I don't know where this idea originated, because it was related to me orally by another fan back in the 1970s, but deflectors should be able to redirect the exhaust ejected from the impulse drive in any direction, thereby allowing the drive to apply full thrust in any direction. In particular, "reverse" would have the exhaust sent around and ejected in front of the starship at one or more points. Because of the way Newton's laws of motion are formulated, the final or asymptotic direction of the exhaust is what would determine the direction of force applied to the starship.

 

[Timo]

Dialogue from the literal Day One specifies that "rockets" are something quite different from the ship's normal drive...

Yet no dialogue suggests that the stuff coming out of the impulse engines would play a propulsive role. It's coming out even when Chang's BoP floats motionless in space. it's glowing regardless of the ship's state of motion. There's no plot concern about an impulse "flame", no event in which such a thing would affect objects in its Newtonian path.

Add to this that Newton would be quite powerless to explain how starships hop from planet to planet without the required propellant mass aboard, in defiance of the rocket equation (unless their "flames" indeed are powerful jets moving at near-lightspeed and yet somehow not making holes in space stations or planets or the structures of the ship herself).

Jet deflection would of course work. But why make it deliberately difficult? Why not install the glowing things at the thrust line, with a free line of sight towards the rear? Arguably, the first-ever Trek starship had those qualities (with certain assumptions about mass distribution, at any rate). The second-ever already lacked them, though. And after that, there was no turning back.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tomalak]

Aren't the thrusters basically rockets?

I always thought impulse was something different.

 

[Timo]

Thrusters at least have flames/jets coming out of them on occasion. Although this is because flames are expensive to draw, these may be rare occasion for in-universe reasons as well.

Picard's ship sprouts flames when the ship flies on nothing but thrusters. The flames may be the result of running the machinery beyond its intended specs, then, essentially the sign of impending failure. Or then merely what happens at the unusual 100% power setting whilst the normal 10% is invisible.

Ships from newer shows (nevertheless depicting earlier Trek eras) have flaming rockets on the undersides of the saucers, for fighting gravity. We see those on the ancient Franklin, the modernish JJ Enterprise (where their fuel-burning nature is explicated), and the sorta-in-between Shenzhou and Discovery. The latter sometimes fires up the rockets, sometimes not; in the most recent instance of flying low, she uses "stabilizing beams" instead.

This all can be taken to either be consistent with Picard's jets, or then be specific to ancient gravity-fighting machinery that is more traditional than practical (like sails on steam warships, beyond a certain point).

Blending it all into a unified sublight propulsion system that also includes impulse doesn't seem necessary or desirable, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

"In Federation starships, the impulse drive was essentially an augmented fusion rocket, usually consisting of one or more fusion reactors, a driver coil assembly, and a vectored thrust nozzle to direct the plasma exhaust."

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Impulse_drive

 

[Timo]

Ah, Memory "Often Wrong" Alpha...

It's not as if this has any basis in onscreen material, other than the naming of "reactors" in certain diagrams.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Praetor]

The NCC-2000 Excelsior is very much destroyed in OCS, explicitly and on-screen, so to speak.

Well...

Spoiler: A thing you probably won't think the novel would have the stones to do, anyway, but there is some dramatic tension involved

I walked away with the impression at the end that Hikaru was certainly in a position to take command of the other Excelsior mentioned in TNG. Though, as MB notes, he'd have to be assigned to the ship about thirty seconds after returning to civilization to be consistent with another novel. You'll have to decide if 2319 is the right time for a 21000-block starship to be commissioned.

Thanks for that info. I ordered my copy of the book yesterday, which I'm actually looking forward to reading, and I took a stab at rewriting the timeline and some other events which I'll share later. I need to also figure out if the ship got out a distress call, or was lost without a trace. So far, I'm assuming the latter.

The 21000 block issue is a good one, though...

The TNG registries could in theory follow a simplistic pattern where 10,000 launches the new century "from a clean slate" and every new decade rachets the numbers up another 10k (regardless of how many numbers were actually used that past decade).

Thus, 57,000 is frontline-fit for Setlik III in 2347, and 71,000 goes for Galaxies launched in the early 2360s.

This'd make the 21,000 range Mirandas contemporary with Tomed; perhaps an Excelsior, still among the larger designs, would take a bit more effort to be completed and would be delayed?

The 42,000 batch of Excelsiors still being "routinely" built around 2332 wouldn't appear too objectionable IMHO. It'd be a sort of last hurrah for the type, with two or three special command ships following a decade later for the needs of the Border Wars and being the only ones constructed "out of spares" for this non-frontline-combatant role. Building ships of that design family would not yet conflict with the lowest registries of the new "Galaxy generation", the New Orleans and Cheyenne ones.

Timo Saloniemi

This is all good stuff, and I think I'm going to take a look again at the graph I came up with for Starfleet registries. I will share it when I do. It's by no means perfect, but I tried to give myself a benchmark for fairly "known" registries to try to fill in the blanks. I actually rather like your registry timeline better than what I've come up with, not partially because it helps with the second Excleisior registry... and maybe I can make the graph fit it within reason. Throw in some production leaps and delays here and there, and I think most of it explains away.

Another thing I think likely is that prototype registries are picked when the prototype is approved, sometimes even reserved specially due to numerical significance. So, say, maybe NX-2000 should have "really" been launched in the 2250s but was held over for The Great Experiment. Similar things were probably true of the Ambassador and the Galaxy and their numbers, and perhaps more, but I don't know that this is always the case. The Defiant and Intrepid are the two that don't seem to have been reserved earlier and saved, rather seeming pretty contemporary... and the Ambassador's registry, if it was indeed NX-10521, doesn't seem all that special at all. Perhaps to confound enemy agents?

Another thought I had is that Starfleet may order ships and registries up to ten years in advance, and that they may sometimes wait up to ten years to order a replacement for a ship that's lost without a trace. If the timeline doesn't work out for the second Excelsior, perhaps I can say there was already a new Excelsior on the list for ten years out, and with the production schedule as-is, it had a higher number and was slated for several years later. Then, when Sulu was miraculously found, they swapped its name and number with an in-progress one to give it to him. This might also serve to explain some of the other registry issues we've seen, although it would also tend to render registries uselessly non-chronological. Perhaps that's for the best anyway.

For the impulse debate, my guess is that all Starfleet ships had some form of primitive driver coil all along, and as time passed the driver coil became more and more potent and the reactants became less and less important as a propulsive force. I think the disappearance of the deflection crystal probably plays some role in impulse power and mass reduction, and may be reflective of this. Without some form of driver coils, how else does reverse work? Perhaps even in the TOS days, reverse impulse was crap because it was only really contingent on the driver coils and didn't have the exhaust to aid it. I would tend to agree that thrusters are some kind of reactant-based propulsion only. This would help explain why they seem to work when nothing else does.

 

[Praetor]

Sorry for the apparent lack of activity. Rest assured, I didn't abandon ship again.

I received my copy of One Constant Star today and am looking forward to reading it before making further timeline adjustments. Meanwhile, I'm working on an improved version of the schematics I shared earlier, which in turn I will use to begin anew the cutaway and deck plans.

The overall design of the sheets, if you haven't picked up on it, is going to echo Scotty's "placemat" Enterprise-A schematic from "TUC," from the scene where he discovers the uniforms in the air duct.

There are several little details about the original filming model over the years that seem to get overlooked that I am trying to make sure to get right, such as the taper around the deflection crystal area, curve on the back of the interconnecting dorsal, and the "lip" on the front and back of the nacelle support dome. Once I get the various views done, before I detail them I'd like to share them for peer review, to make sure they feel right to everyone else. I'm doing all this in such a way in Illustrator that it will hopefully make my life easier when I actually start the deck plans. I'm going to play around with the stroke a bit before I get there. At this size, it's a little chunky.

And before anyone notices, the deflector cutaway is still missing and the impulse deck isn't right yet. Also, she won't have torpedoes til Tuesday.

 

[Mytran]

Great to have this thread back!
My own 2 cents on Impulse propulsion is that earlier engines made extensive use of the nacelles mass-lightening capabilities in order to maximise the (comparatively) tiny amounts of fuel carried by a typical starship. It also meant that a saucer separation (in Kirk's time) was a truly last-ditch manoeuvre, since the saucer would be limited to newtonian propulsion and essentially trapped in whatever star system it happened to be in.

This old but reliable tech was continued even when Impulse Engine subspace driver coils became more widespread in the early 24th century, which is why we continued to see what appeared to be warp nacelles on sub-light shuttlecraft.

 

[Praetor]

Hi Mytran! Good seeing you. I think some version of that makes sense.

Not a ton of progress report today, as work has kicked my butt this past week. I am continuing to enjoy reading my way through One Constant Star as I've had time, and today have made a few refinements to the starboard and dorsal views of the ship. I'm simultaneously working on the ventral, as well; I more or less started over from the first versions of these I shared although I was able to adjust and keep some of the dorsal/ventral elements.

I need to work on the shape of the dorsal/ventral engineering hull a bit more, as right now it tapers too much towards the impulse engines. Overall I am continuing to verify detail placement against each other and the various reference resources I have at hand. Soon, I should be ready to rough in the fore/aft views, after which time I will begin refreshing the cutaway. I am contemplating trying to lay out the available area for each deck before pinning down the location of the bulkheads in the cutaway, so as to not box myself in.

It's still a WIP, but please feel free to point any details you may find questionable.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Great to have this thread back!
My own 2 cents on Impulse propulsion is that earlier engines made extensive use of the nacelles mass-lightening capabilities in order to maximise the (comparatively) tiny amounts of fuel carried by a typical starship. It also meant that a saucer separation (in Kirk's time) was a truly last-ditch manoeuvre, since the saucer would be limited to newtonian propulsion and essentially trapped in whatever star system it happened to be in.

This old but reliable tech was continued even when Impulse Engine subspace driver coils became more widespread in the early 24th century, which is why we continued to see what appeared to be warp nacelles on sub-light shuttlecraft.

That's all reasonable, except that shuttlecraft such as those that appeared on TOS were warp capable, though I'm not sure whether you're saying otherwise.