Greater than the Sum official description
- Thread starter JD
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Actually the Luna was not "almost completely destroyed." It suffered an explosion that killed a dozen people in engineering during its shakedown phase. A tragic setback, to be sure, but there's no reason to believe the Luna isn't in active service.
As for the Rhea, the only thing the cover blurb actually says is that the ship is attacked and members of its crew are assimilated.
Which some interpret to mean "twelve including the Enterprise" and others interpret to mean "twelve in addition to the Enterprise."
Mea culpa, my understanding from the way it was phrased in the book is that the Luna was not in active service.
With the Borg the way they are, destroying everything in their path, I honestly can't see the Rhea surviving this. But I'll have to read on and see won't I?
I go with the former interpretation, that there are only twelve. This makes sense if they are pioneering vessels, as the Lunas are a century and a half later.
But neither interpretation means "only twelve have ever been built." If the Enterprise was commissioned about twenty years before TOS, who's to say how many Connies have been destroyed and replaced in that time, and then after that?
Starfleet wasn't so big then and there were other Starship classes around. The Connies were the big exploration push, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and all that. There may have been another production run, but as you said, there is no canonical evidence either way to suggest more weren't made. But since the Lunas are the 24th century equivalent of the Connies, I surmise that there are only 12.
^^What evidence is there that the Luna Class and Constitution Class are in any way "equivalent"? If you're not willing to accept the other postulate without evidence, why is this one different?
Christopher, what I meant by equivalent is that both classes were intended purely for exploration of the unknown. I'm not saying I won't accept that there were more than 12 Connies built, I only said that my canon interpretation was that only 12 were built. My exact words were that "I surmise that there are only 12." This is an opinion based solely ona single canonical line. Has any mention been made in any of the books over the last 40 odd years that there is a 13th or 14th or 20th Connie? I don't know because I haven't read them all yet. Actually, I can answer that question and throw out my previous argument. There is a thirteenth, the Enterprise-A. So it's possible, probable even, that Starfleet built other Connies to replace destroyed ones and refitted the existing ones.
No, they weren't. The Constitution Class was a multipurpose vessel tasked with patrol and defense, colony support and relief, and diplomatic missions as well as exploratory missions.
Memory Alpha lists 11 Constitution-class ships plus the E-A, and I'm sure there have been a number of additional Connies mentioned in various works of fiction.
Anyway, 12, 13, I don't see what the big deal is.
Exactly. It's more the equivalent of the Galaxy-class or Sovereign-class.
Well, to start off with, we know that there's the Archer-class scout from the Vanguard novels. Those novels also established that the Miranda class existed during the TOS timeframe, too (presumably having undergone a similar refit to the Enterprise's during the 2370s).
2270s actually.
So how many classes of ship? We obviously know of three; the Oberths appear to have been in service canonically in the 2280s but one can assume an earlier appearance since no mention was made of them being "new." Looking at Memory Alpha, there's the Soyuz-class, retired by the 2280s (perhaps the Mirandas replaced them, they look fairly similar); Also the Hermes-class and Bonaventura-class (TAS), also the Alka-Selsior-class (I dunno, some of the jokes here
).That's about it, how big was Starfleet in the C23 anyways?
2270s actually.
So how many classes of ship? We obviously know of three; the Oberths appear to have been in service canonically in the 2280s but one can assume an earlier appearance since no mention was made of them being "new." Looking at Memory Alpha, there's the Soyuz-class, retired by the 2280s (perhaps the Mirandas replaced them, they look fairly similar); Also the Hermes-class and Bonaventura-class (TAS), also the Alka-Selsior-class (I dunno, some of the jokes here
That's about it, how big was Starfleet in the C23 anyways?
We don't know. There's never been as much exploration of the 23rd Century as of the 24th Century; we have no clue how large or small Starfleet is. Though TOS-R has introduced a number of new classes of Starlfeet ships, and the USS Lovell, a Daedalus-class ship, was in service during the 2260s.
That's the impression that I always had as well, but then references to the incident in Sword of Damocles stated pretty clearly that the ship was destroyed, IIRC. I wish I had my copy handy at the moment to provide a specific citation, but I'm confident I'm remembering that right.
I can't find any such reference in skimming through SoD. The references to the Luna disaster are rather nonspecific. However, there are references to the possibility that the apparent destruction of Titan would affect Dr. Ra-Havreii the same way that "what happened to the Luna" affected him, so maybe you're reading into that.
We don't really know how many worlds are in the Federation during the 23rd Century.
As for the 24th there could be ship classes we haven't seen yet. The same could apply to the 23rd I suppose.
Actually the Luna is still in service and is listed as having had an encounter with Q in Q&A.
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No, that's an incorrect entry on Memory Beta. Q & A refers to Q being encountered "on Luna," not "on Luna." Luna, unitalicized, means the Earth's moon, the one the starship was named after.
^That should be fixed. What entry is it in?