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

[Timo]

Regarding those cool little shuttles, they don't seem to be that good a fit into the lower stern doodad. I mean, I love them to bits for being there. But the implication would seem to be that the adapter can accept two of those in addition to whatever it was actually built for - perhaps a much larger barge in the center well?

A generic "barge well" with those tiny cranes for manipulating and loading/offloading all sorts of outsize auxiliaries sounds like a good idea here. Perhaps not affecting the auxiliary loadup of the class directly, as there could still exist a standard fit that is independent of the endless possibilities opened up by the barge well. Just a further motivation to give a range of options for the shuttle complement, instead of just that single loadup...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Praetor]

Timo, I think that's a great idea. Thank you.

I think I will plan for there to be two Hoods... one that was lost or decommissioned in the first quarter of the 24th century with registry 2541, and a later one which was Riker's. I was actually going to have another ship become the Enterprise-A... the last ship off the line kind of thing, an experiment with Excelsior tech that was never meant for long term deployment. However, the Constitution class Yorktown could easily be retired around the same time.

I'm not at all done with this, but here is a graph I have been tinkering with:

A few initial thoughts:

• The trending curve feels kinda right, although I think it might spike and level off too quickly
• The launch date for Ambassador feels about right
• The launch date for the replacement Excelsior feels a little too late... but I can easily cheat with this and have the registry swapped with an earlier ship as I noted upthread
• I don't entirely like how late the 40000 "modern" Excelsiors fall, but perhaps it does coincide with the height of Cardassian hostilities and therefore works out

To be clear, I'm not going to try to solve Starfleet registries once and for all. I just want to use this to get a ballpark going that feels right. Eventually I will append known and speculated Excelsior class ships to it and try to map out production blocks accordingly.

 

[DEWLine]

Sounds good.

 

[Lakenheath 72]

Praetor,

There are ships in the 80000s range. They are mentioned in the episode "Conspiracy" (2364), with the highest registry going to the Ticonderoga (NCC-87270).

Stardates are lousy for deriving a year. As an example, the stardate 38774. A good assumption would be that it was from the 24th century. It would be wrong. It is a stardate of the year 2264 - it is the stardate on which Tuvok was born. There have been four digit stardates in use in the 24th century, like the ones associated with the character Keith Rocha. (Aquiel)

 

[Timo]

I don't see the problem with that particular aspect of stardates, especially not as regards those particular examples. Quite the contrary, in fact: we know that four digits only cover about a year, so there has to be more to stardates than those four digits. It would be difficult to argue for anything else but the model where five digits cover decades, and six cover centuries.

So there are at least two stardates 38774 in the history of the UFP: the one from the 24th century, and the one from the 23rd. It seems obvious to assume Tuvok was born on SD 138774 while the E-D was launched close to SD 238774. (Or, to be exact, on SD 2440759.5...)

It's just that people do not tend to span centuries in their mundane affairs. Or even decades. Today, we readily drop the millennium and century digits when saying "Back in seventy-four". The stardate format merely makes it convenient to drop the decade digit when desired, too.

When I say there's little problem associated with stardates, I'm not claiming they make for excellent reference material. I just say they can be ignored for their compatibility, not for their incompatibility. And they seem to work just fine for the purposes of the registry game in that sense...

Now, whether the varying number of digits in registries is equally problem-free... The TNG Okudagram reference material includes 80k numbers and then NCC-42. But that doesn't disprove a chronological basis for the registries: the USN still retains one of its original six ships in registry despite having accumulated thousands since.

(The specific problems posed by the Okudagrams are well-known, chiefly concerning the Excalibur and Saratoga with two different numbers provided for each. Other ships can readily be considered predecessors to the ones by that name that we later meet.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lakenheath 72]

How do you account for stardate 0141.7 in 2155?

If you are referring to the Constitution, she was re-classified to IX-21 (from 1921-1975) and then re-classified as 'None' in 1975.

The worst offender is the Yamato with four registries: NCC-1305-E, NCC-24383, NCC-71806, and NCC-71807.

 

[Timo]

How do you account for stardate 0141.7 in 2155?

(Where is that from?)

Retroactively, of course. I assume the TNG style of stardating came to being at some point before TOS/DSC, so the stardates quoted in TOS/DSC are of that system, only with the forward digits dropped. But the style wasn't in use in 2155 yet, as contemporary accounts reveal.

But the AD system of timekeeping wasn't in use in AD 141 yet, either. Doesn't stop us from saying "AD 141", retroactively.

Any four-digit stardate is pretty much a non-issue in terms of fitting into a timeline. The final three digits are more or less meaningless, merely specifying the time of year; the first one specifies the year within the decade. Whether a zero is fine for "the fives" is just a thing to be haggled over; apparently, a three or a four means "the sixties" in any given century, the stardate decades and the AD decades not being in sync, so a stardate zero for an AD fiver is perfectly acceptable, too.

If you referring to the Constitution, she was re-classified to IX-21 (from 1921-1975) and then re-classified as 'None' in 1975. She carries no hull code.

Starfleet apparently is more systematic, retaining NCC-42 across two centuries. The analogy still stands: old ships may remain in the registry and appear on assorted charts (say, "ships docked at Boston") despite not being in the exact same operational category as newer vessels.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lakenheath 72]

SD 0141.7 is from Star Trek: Discovery. This number was presumably applied retroactively as they were using a different system then.

I am struggling with understanding what you are saying in this paragraph.

Any four-digit stardate is pretty much a non-issue in terms of fitting into a timeline. The final three digits are more or less meaningless, merely specifying the time of year; the first one specifies the year within the decade. Whether a zero is fine for "the fives" is just a thing to be haggled over; apparently, a three or a four means "the sixties" in any given century, the stardate decades and the AD decades not being in sync, so a stardate zero for an AD fiver is perfectly acceptable, too.

 

[Timo]

What I mean is that

a) four-digit stardates can be off the supposed AD date by at most four years in a direction, really; across the two centuries involved, there may be that much drift if a stardate year isn't an Earth year exactly, so any final digit in an AD date is correct for any fourth-from-the-mark digit in a stardate; and
2) since a stardate decade doesn't have the zeroes roll in sync with an AD decade (they flip mid-AD-decade in TNG at least), we have no a priori reason to assume the zeroes for an individual AD year would be in any sort of sync with the zeroes of an individual stardate year, either, and a 0XXX stardate can match an AD date ending at 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 equally plausibly.

As for DSC stardates, they obviously follow the TOS format of four digits, a dot and a bonus digit. Are they part of the same system, though? Hard to tell yet. What DSC is infamous for is the first-ever confirmed case of stardates of that format growing smaller as time passes. This never really happened in the episodic TOS, where there was no telling which story preceded or followed which one in-universe. This may or may not have happened in TAS, which contains its share of 1XXX stardates while coming after TOS but can be argued to feature adventures from the next stardate decade (that is, something like 41XXX rather than the early TOS 31XXX dates). This did happen to five-digit stardates in the first season of TNG, but never thereafter, and didn't involve the year digit, merely the three time-of-year digits.

But in DSC, it assuredly happens: the first episode has SD 1207 (May 11, 2256, a Sunday, for those who need to know), and the eighth has SD 1308 half a year later, but the seventh with Mudd's return had SD 2137 and must come before the eighth in this linear storytelling format of DSC.

In fact, the Mudd stardate would be more or less fine, implying nine or ten months of fighting in the 1000 sd = 1 yr format and fitting the story facts. But the penultimate episode has Admiral Cornwell rattle off fateful dates from the war, all in the 4XXX range, mere nine months after those events...

Still, as said, peanuts - we're talking about individual years, off by at most four either way, while the suggested evolution of starship registries deals in decades and centuries.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Praetor]

Praetor,
There are ships in the 80000s range. They are mentioned in the episode "Conspiracy" (2364), with the highest registry going to the Ticonderoga (NCC-87270).

Darn it, you're right. I don't think this throws things off significantly. I guess I'm going to have to figure out registries a little more than I wanted to. Basically I see it as an evolving system that later grew to be a semi-chronological kludge.

I don't see the problem with that particular aspect of stardates, especially not as regards those particular examples. Quite the contrary, in fact: we know that four digits only cover about a year, so there has to be more to stardates than those four digits. It would be difficult to argue for anything else but the model where five digits cover decades, and six cover centuries.

So there are at least two stardates 38774 in the history of the UFP: the one from the 24th century, and the one from the 23rd. It seems obvious to assume Tuvok was born on SD 138774 while the E-D was launched close to SD 238774. (Or, to be exact, on SD 2440759.5...)

It's just that people do not tend to span centuries in their mundane affairs. Or even decades. Today, we readily drop the millennium and century digits when saying "Back in seventy-four". The stardate format merely makes it convenient to drop the decade digit when desired, too.

When I say there's little problem associated with stardates, I'm not claiming they make for excellent reference material. I just say they can be ignored for their compatibility, not for their incompatibility. And they seem to work just fine for the purposes of the registry game in that sense...

Now, whether the varying number of digits in registries is equally problem-free... The TNG Okudagram reference material includes 80k numbers and then NCC-42. But that doesn't disprove a chronological basis for the registries: the USN still retains one of its original six ships in registry despite having accumulated thousands since.

(The specific problems posed by the Okudagrams are well-known, chiefly concerning the Excalibur and Saratoga with two different numbers provided for each. Other ships can readily be considered predecessors to the ones by that name that we later meet.)

Timo Saloniemi

I tend to agree both with your assessment of stardates, and with your assessment of the registries and the background info.

I seem to have fallen into the pattern of graphs and research during the week and illustration on the weekend. Oh well. Continuing the trend, here's a list so far of "notable" (meaning ones that we've seen or heard of) Excelsior class ships.

And in turn, here's how I'm thinking of organizing the production blocks:

Generally I am thinking a batch of 12-15 will take around 10 years to be complete by a single shipyard. Half of the ships in the batch are probably launched by the halfway mark.

None of this is written in stone yet. As noted previously, each block has a few ships that are partially completed and put in Ordinary as part of the Khitomer Accords. After the treaty is eased and conflict with the Cardassians escalates, these ships are pulled and finished, giving us most of our NCC-40000 range ships. So, all Excelsior class ships were "actually" built before 2335, it's just that some of them weren't completed and launched until later.

 

[Albertese]

My personal stardate theory is that one stardate (say, from SD 2130.0 to SD 2131.0) lasts for eight hours on Earth. Therefore, 1000 stardates equals 333 1/3 days; almost eleven months. Why eight Earth hours? That's where Starfleet Headquarters is and the point of stardates is to coordinate fleet actions and record keeping. One stardate is a single duty shift on Earth. The passage of time on a ship will be faster or slower than at Earth thanks to their speed in the galaxy and the time dilation that entails.

This allows a thousand stardates and a season of the show to roughly match up. And it does allow TOS (and TAS) to fit within a given five year period.

 

[Timo]

...How does one multi-like a post? Like, say, eight times? Or 333 and 1/3?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

My personal stardate theory is that one stardate (say, from SD 2130.0 to SD 2131.0) lasts for eight hours on Earth. Therefore, 1000 stardates equals 333 1/3 days; almost eleven months. Why eight Earth hours? That's where Starfleet Headquarters is and the point of stardates is to coordinate fleet actions and record keeping. One stardate is a single duty shift on Earth. The passage of time on a ship will be faster or slower than at Earth thanks to their speed in the galaxy and the time dilation that entails.

This allows a thousand stardates and a season of the show to roughly match up. And it does allow TOS (and TAS) to fit within a given five year period.

That's so clever, I might just have to nab it!

 

[Praetor]

I wholeheartedly agree. Brilliant, Albertese.

 

[Albertese]

Thanks, guys! I'm currently working on a self contained TOS/TAS timeline based on this theory. I'm surprised at how well it does hold up.

--Alex

 

[Tenacity]

Therefore, 1000 stardates equals 333 1/3 days; almost eleven months.

Why not 8 hours and 46 minutes? A 1000 stardates would equal a full Earth year.

A single stardate would be a 8 hour work shift, plus a 30 minute lunch and a couple of breaks.

 

[Albertese]

Why not 8 hours and 46 minutes? A 1000 stardates would equal a full Earth year.

A single stardate would be a 8 hour work shift, plus a 30 minute lunch and a couple of breaks.

I thought about that. I rejected the idea for two reasons:

1) Eight hours divides neatly into the 24 hour day that would exist at Starfleet Command in San Francisco on Earth.
2) Having 1000 stardates arbitrarily conform to an Earth year seems overly Earth-centric, which I think would have unfortunate political implications. Given how much humans seem to infest the galaxy, I imagine that there could be a persistent sentiment that the UFP is functionally an Earth Empire* and in such a case, Federation politicians would not want to make choices that would reinforce this idea.

So, really, I think the 333 1/3 Earth days per 1000 stardates just makes better sense.

--Alex

__________
*In Star Trek VI Azetbur accuses the Federation of being a homo sapiens only club. Which is a logical sentiment if you think it through. And our heroes don't offer any real objection to her jab. Rather, they awkwardly hang their heads as if they realize how her point is taken.

 

[STR]

I'm not at all done with this, but here is a graph I have been tinkering with:

I like this. You got your axis reversed though. Year should be on the X (horz) and hull # on the Y (vert), as years are not a function of the number of starships completed.

 

[Timo]

The 333 1/3 vs. 365 days choice also gives us leeway with the exactness of dates. Stardates usually cover much less than a century, so stardate years being just 91.3 % the length of an Earth year merely smooth out wrinkles. Comparing the stardates of the DSC/TOS/TAS era against those of the TNG/DS9/VOY era results in an eightish-year discrepancy vs. the "exact" model, but that's only welcome in most cases... Esp. the TOS movies.

Ogling at the pretty pictures of the Melbourne'ized model and her ventral shuttlebay, I wonder whether those three round holes above the bay are likely to be torpedo tubes or not. They're at the exact right place for the E-B MSD launchers...

Doesn't mean there wouldn't be more tubes at the extreme fantail, where the greeblies offer at least three alternatives of different calibers. Did we ever see a stern launch in the DS9 battles?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[danellis]

I thought about that. I rejected the idea for two reasons:

1) Eight hours divides neatly into the 24 hour day that would exist at Starfleet Command in San Francisco on Earth.
2) Having 1000 stardates arbitrarily conform to an Earth year seems overly Earth-centric, which I think would have unfortunate political implications. Given how much humans seem to infest the galaxy, I imagine that there could be a persistent sentiment that the UFP is functionally an Earth Empire* and in such a case, Federation politicians would not want to make choices that would reinforce this idea.

So, really, I think the 333 1/3 Earth days per 1000 stardates just makes better sense.

--Alex
.

Eight-hour days on Earth are just as earth-centric as basing them on earth years!!

TBH I think that the founders (UFP founders, not Odo's people The Founders!) either didn't care or didn't register how earth-centric everything UFP-based is. From StarTrek Enterprise, I think it's probably that everything IS earth-centric because the people who created/established all of these things were from Earth so used their natural "language" to do so, so they became earth-centric by default.

dJE