Gotta wonder if they've abolished the abomination that is Daylight Savings Time by the 23rd/24th centuries.
I sure hope so.
I have a bit of progress to show. I spent way too much time on the after torpedo launchers today. Those little suckers are pretty detailed. It's my first adventure into rendering such tiny details on this particular set of drawings, so I wound up exploring some choices that I'm sure to refine with time. It was also one of the pieces still missing from the profile view that I needed to work on the cutaway, along with the fantail hangar doors... which are still missing.
The amount of time I spent on the aft torpedo launchers was admittedly overkill, but while I was drawing all three views together I wanted to get it done. I believe I need to next focus on some of the dorsal and ventral details, as well as a few random fore and aft details that overlap such as the torpedo launchers. Once this is done, I think I'll be ready to start mapping out decks properly and see how things feel.
I also finished
One Constant Star yesterday and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of this era. Without bringing out the spoiler tags, I felt it was very well done. If anything, it felt too short. It also supplied me with three new
Excelsior class ship names. More on that in a minute, though.
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.
Thank you! And quite right... I actually did reverse it and it's far more logical this way:
Generally I think I am happy with this overall flow as a guideline of where things should fall.. but since Starfleet seems to play with the registries a bit I am not going to feel overly beholden to force registries in-line with the others. I am mainly using this, combined with available facts, to ballpark when certain ships probably should have been launched.
I've refined my table of "notable"
Excelsior class ships a bit, after culling Memory Beta and gathering some more chronological data. By no means do I think it is yet complete, but I feel I now have a pretty good grasp of ships noted on screen, in official graphics and technical publications, and in the novels. There are a good few more that were from FASA that I have omitted here, mostly because of how screenshot unfriendly that list is, but I have worked hard to fit them into blocks so whether I ultimately choose to include or exclude the FASA ships the block schedule still works. ("LA" is "Last Appeared" by the way... if a ship's fate is unknown I started keeping track of when we last heard of it. And an orange date is uncertain but likely.)
If anyone spots anything they find questionable, feel free to bring it up. This list is only 45 ships long, while when I include FASA's ships it grows to around 100. Problematically, there are a few ships with no canonical registry that I wouldn't dare speculate at. (For the
Sarek and the
Alliance I felt comfortable fudging using Sarek and Saavik's birth years, respectively.)
I'm curious if anyone has any feelings about the schedule of launch or the quantity of ships, too. I think in the previous version of the text I had settled on there being around 375
Excelsior class ships that fought in the Dominion War, many of which presumably were hauled out of mothballs to do so. The way the math has worked out here feels pretty alright to me.
Also, despite saying I wasn't going to, I have taken a stab at explaining Starfleet registries, which I may or may not include somewhere in the technical portion of the text. If it's incoherent, blame Daylight Savings Time and my desire to walk a fine line between specific and vague.
Well past its bicentennial as of this writing, Starfleet has a rich history including as its fair share of historical oddities. Among the most confusing of these is Starfleet’s registry system. When studying any historical list of Starfleet vessels, one may struggle to understand the structure and evolution of Starfleet’s ship register.
The nomenclature currently in use dates back to the letter/letter-number/number system that was first employed by the Earth Starfleet. In this system, the starship class was designated by the letter prefix and the model number designated by the numbers. For example, Enterprise NX-01 was NX-class ship number one. Registry numbers were therefore unique to each class, with a potential registry of 01 to 99 for each class, which was more than adequate for the early Earth Starfleet’s small size. As time passed, use of the letter class naming fell out of favor, as personnel started to refer to the class either by the name of the first ship of the class or by the type of vessel. Increasing numbers of officers thought primarily of class names by one of these designations, regardless the official naming. This nearly eliminated the usefulness of the letters in the registry to distinguish the design, as very few people thought of the letter class name.
After the founding of the Federation in 2161, the newly reorganized Federation Starfleet revised its registry system both to reset it and to give the system more meaning by making it more strictly sequential. The amount of letter prefixes were abbreviated to simple few, based on the type of registry (Starfleet, scientific, merchant, civilian) instead of the ship’s class. All existing vessels were renumbered, with new ships following in sequence, and the numbering was soon extended to three digits. Starfleet would assign a list of names of several members of a class of starship, along with registry numbers comprising a block, to be produced at one of its shipyards.
Not long after this official revision, Starfleet planners began to employ an unofficial policy refinement in the system of their assignment of registries, wherein the last two digits of a registry would be the ship’s number in the series, and any additional digits to the left indicated the number of the design. For example, U.S.S. Enterprise was designated NCC-1701 to represent starship design 17, model 01. The class prototype, U.S.S. Constitution was likewise designated NCC-1700, starship design 17, model 00 (prototype). This was completely contingent on the way registries were assigned, however, and therefore inflexible. Maintaining it would ultimately prove impossible.
By the mid 2250s, Starfleet procurement orders and shipyard requisition orders began to grow complex and conflict. Initially, when Starfleet only had two shipyards it was easy to assign registries based on a block requisition for a certain quantity of ships of a given class. However, with additional facilities being opened, it became far more complicated to administrate the assignment of registries sequentially, particularly when ships were somewhat likely to be shuffled between shipyards if one fell behind and another needed work. The Admiralty determined the uniqueness of the registry its most valued attribute, rather than its ability to identify a ship by type or class. As such, by the late 2260s planners chose to begin assigning registry blocks to a shipyard without being attached to a class block requisition, except in certain special cases where registries were reserved for a specific ship as was done with NCC-2000 for Excelsior and in a few other instances. A requisition list for a block of a class of ships was then assigned to a shipyard, and as the class block was produced the shipyard would pull the next registry number from the list in sequence. As a result of this, two ships could have nearly the same registry, but be of entirely different classes and potentially even have been produced at entirely different shipyards. As an added complication, if one shipyard produced many small ships quickly it could go through its assigned registries and soon begin pulling from another, higher pool. Therefore one shipyard could be launching ships in the 2100s range while another is still launching ships in the 1800s range. Further, if one shipyard was producing a type of ship that used a different registry scheme, such as freighters, it might not use any of its starship registry numbers at all for months or even years before suddenly going back into starship production and launching ships in a much lower pool.
Many immediately agreed that this new system was no less confusing, but an unexpected benefit was soon discovered: it confused Threat spies trying to gather intelligence on Starfleet shipbuilding just as much. Starfleet began to use this to their advantage and increased the disorder with which they assigned registry blocks to shipyards. Entire registry ranges would be arbitrarily skipped and held to be used later, or not at all, and since the importance in the Admiralty’s mind was in the uniqueness of the registry code, nothing was lost besides an ability to tell at a glance whether Ship A preceded Ship B in construction.
