Kirk's previous ship before Enterprise

Well, then I guess you don't take BOBW II as canon either, since there's a one-nacelle vessel there.

 

That's not right, he was in charge of negotiationg with the Capellans and the Halkans.

Doesn't matter, his command authority thought he would.

No, but three frigates for a ship of the line is not necessarily a sensible trade.

The intent and what's on the screen seem consistent to me: Enterprise is a cruiser in the early-to-mid-20th century sense. It's a ship with significant fighting power that can be sent on missions of national importance, the command of which is a pinnacle position for an officer in command of a single vessel.

 

I grew up reading the FJ stuff religiously so I confess I still love it. And , while buckaroo another in jokes may be on the okuda-grams, it was never meant to be seen. The FJ ships, by contrast m were intended to be seen as the computer files were scanned.

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it

 

Masao's Starfleet Museum has him commanding a Predator class.

I don't believe the site allows hot linking so follow the link to take a look.

 

...My preference would be for something that really is "little" - say, the Texas class from Starfleet Battles - and might even be later regarded as a mere destroyer. The jump from that tin can to the Enterprise seems to impress the bejezus out of Kirk himself, so the difference must be significant.

Or, more accurately, the Miranda class has never been a light cruiser. Not in canon anyway. Fandom has used the term "heavy frigate", which is basically the very same thing as "light cruiser", only from the sailing ship era; this is also a nod to the United States (Continental) Navy, which was the foremost proponent of heavy frigates (mostly because it couldn't afford "proper" ships-of-the-line) and achieved significant nautical exploits with those.

DS9 has thrown about the term "destroyer" in some space battle dialogue, without attributing it to any specific class or design. The Miranda, along with the Saber, represents the smallest ship type in those battles after the Defiant escorts, and might therefore be "it".

However, back in Kirk's time, the Miranda would have been identical in size and seeming capabilities to the Constitution, and thus unlikely to be below Kirk's TOS ship in prestige or Starfleet designation hierarchy or whatnot.

But perhaps size isn't everything (or anything) in Starfleet, and large but weak ships may be early commands for those slated for large but strong ones? Or ships with milk run missions look identical to ships with demanding frontier assignments (or indeed are identical through and through), and the career ladder moves from the former to the latter - Lieutenant Pike and his small crew might command a ship that is to be handed over to Commander Kirk and his large crew, the former doing milk runs to Rigel, the latter performing a five-year mission into the unknown.

Her saucer is supposed to be a tad bigger than that of the Constitution, and yes, the designation from Spaceflight Chronology is "cruiser", the same as for the Constitution in that book.

Then again, ships of that configuration have also been designated "frigate" - the New Orleans class is one, even if the connection is a fuzzy one and not really canonical. She's again Constitution-sized, but from an era where ships of that size would be very small, relatively speaking. Perhaps small enough to be frigates in the 20th century sense (smaller than destroyers), or then at least in the early 19th century sense (the same thing as cruisers in late 19th or 20th century).

Okay, granted. But the former really was in the "baubles for gold mines" category and would not put Kirk above the commander of a sloop in happier times.

Only as part of a trio of starships. Whether that's "very impressive" in the sense of Starfleet going for overkill, or "very impressive" in the sense that three starships are almost the match of one juggernaut or whatnot, is at the heart of the question.

Timo Saloniemi

 

They were meant to be glimpsed in passing, just enough to get a general sense of "Yep, that looks like Starfleet technology." They were used because these were low-budget movies and it was cheaper and quicker than creating new artwork. They certainly weren't meant to be taken absolutely literally, as proven by the fact that the FJ blueprints of the series-style Constitution-class vessel were used to represent deck plans of the refit Enterprise in TSFS. They were just meant to create the general impression on a quick glance, because they didn't have DVDs with freeze frame at the time and didn't expect fans to spend hours poring over every niggling detail. Movies are not made with frame-by-frame analysis in mind, they're made to be experienced in real time, and the details exist only to serve the broad first impressions that the viewers get in the theater.

So no, they weren't inserted with the intent "Okay, this will prove to the fans that these ship classes actually exist in-universe," because no filmmaker thinks that way, and most filmgoers don't think that way either. They were inserted with the intent "Okay, we need something to stick on this viewer that we can pass off as Starfleet technical plans for a five-second shot, anyone got something that'll be close enough to work?" The priorities are to get the shot, to meet the deadline, to come in at or under budget. How the fans analyze the long-term continuity ramifications is for the fans to decide.

I mean, good grief, TWOK had some stock-footage insert shots of hands operating computer equipment that looked nothing like anything that actually existed on the Enterprise sets. They were meant to be seen, yes, but they were just meant to convey a rough impression for a few seconds, not to be taken literally in every last tiny detail. Movies are, so to speak, about the big picture.

 

As a response to a challenge in the Art Forum a few months ago, I built my own take on Kirk's first command....









I made it to be something that could have been built as set-dressing during the run of the original show. It's a kitbash out of model kits that would have been available in the 60's. (that third pic is prior to decals)

But I like it.

 

So you're basically taking the principle behind the Stargazer and projecting it backward in time. Interesting. And it's an unusual approach, kind of a "warp sled" at the base of the pylon.

 

That is a cute little ship, Albertese. Small, sleek and maneuverable as hell, plus well armed. The phrase "got a tiger by the tail" comes to mind.

 

I envision Kirk's first command looking something like Masao's Predator or Avenger-class: http://www.starfleet-museum.org/avenger-predator.htm

or perhaps this.

 

For for the first half of the 20th century that would be a battleship, not a cruiser.

Then it was a aircraft carrier, not a cruiser.

 

Save that battleships are usually kept in port (harbor queens) and carriers tend to not go anyplace alone.

Cruises were the ships that could operate alone and be used for showing the flag time missions, gunboat diplomacy, and any number of other missions.

Today there are very few cruisers, as a cruiser and a destroyer are almost the same thing these days. Cruisers tend to have flag officer facilities now where destroyers do not. But otherwise they are mostly the same thing since the 1980s.

The days of the heavy and light cruisers are long gone.

 

Not within the US Navy, which is why I wrote "a pinnacle" rather than "the pinnacle." There were not enough battleships for captains, who generally had only one command at sea, and carrier command was limited to those who had earned wings, which let out most naval officers. Cruiser command was not considered a lower-status assignment, was actually more desirable for some officers because of its often more varied overseas duty, and did not affect chances of promotion to flag rank. As an example, of WW2 four star admirals, Leahy, Spruance, Ingram and Edwards had commanded battleships, Nimitz, Ingersoll, Kinkaid, Hewitt and Turner cruisers, and King, Halsey and Horne carriers.

Quite so, though a CG is generally a captain's command, and a DDG a commander's.

 

I like this.

This just looks like a kitbash with nothing setting it apart from the Constitution class other than no secondary hull.

 

^^ Except that it fleshes out FJ's design (which so many accept) more credibly and doesn't look as awkward (I always thought that dangling nav dish looked stupid).

And in all candor most fan derived designs look like kitbashes. The trick is managing to make it look believable. The Reliant from TWOK also looks like a kitbash, but in a way that works. TNG and later Treks also had a lot of designs that looked like kitbashes, and a lot of them didn't look as good as some of the fan made efforts.

That said I still prefer Masao's Predator-class design as Kirk's first command.

 

I like the overall concept of this.

 

(Responding to the modified FJ destroyer images posted by Warped9) I dunno, sticking the deflector dish back on the dorsal strut like that seems like a poor idea, because the deflector beam has to be able to spread out conically ahead of the ship to provide full protection, and it looks like a lot of the top portion of the beam would be blocked by the underside of the saucer. I mean, good grief, in that front view you can even see the lower sensor dome cutting off the top edge of the dish. That just doesn't make sense. Ideally it should be much further forward, say, right on the forward edge of the saucer like NX-01's deflector dish.

And I don't think it's credible to try to cram Connie-type components like the rear hangar onto the FJ-style design, and it somewhat underlines the implausibility of that design in the first place. If a ship were designed to have only a saucer and no secondary hull, then it stands to reason that the saucer would be designed differently in the first place and have its own distinct style of deflector dish and hangar bays, as we've seen in the NX class with its wide, flat deflector dish and drop bays, or in the Miranda class with its enlarged aft section and rectangular hangar doors (though what the Miranda uses for a navigational deflector is an enduring mystery).

 

This is probably why they added a secondary hull when making the Kelvin so they could avoid all these issues.

 

The Reliant didn't even have a deflector dish. And the conical shaped beam would likely start out a lot more narrow than you're assuming anyway. Furthermore the placement of the nav deflector was originally Masao's idea which I thought looked much better than FJ's awkward concept. The hangar area I added might look familiar, but it's designed from scratch and doesn't share any parts with the original. Even the nacelle is actually larger in diameter although the rest of its components are the same.

Whatever. I just posted an idea. I don't need to defend it. I even suggested someone else's design as something more likely.

 

^ It's definitely more "gainly" looking than the FJ hanging dish, I like it. I like the P-61 kitbash, too; I've praised it in an earlier thread.