Life of the Enterprise-A

[JJohnson]

For the Enterprise A, I had just gone with the thought that a different Constitution-class vessel, maybe Yorktown, maybe Ti-Ho, had been renamed Enterprise. It would have been a newer ship, launched perhaps close to the V'Ger Incident, and possibly was in Spacedock for a refit to a newer bridge and computer system. That would explain the new touchscreen bridge that looks like the older Enterprise's Bridge. This ship would've been disabled during the Probe incident in Star Trek 4, and available for re-assignment as the new Enterprise for Kirk and crew. The ship hadn't undergone a shakedown with the new systems, explaining Scotty's trouble with the ship. The second bridge would have been available from some other Constitution-class vessel or at Spacedock, and put on the ship in hopes that this newer bridge would have sufficiently advanced control systems for the ship, though without a proper shakedown, the Enterprise would still experience the issues it found in Star Trek 5. By Star Trek 6, they had had one additional bridge, and the ship was running well, even though it was about 20 years old or so, leading to being decommissioned in favor of the Enterprise B. That worked for me.

 

[Nebusj]

Surely the Enterprise-A was decommissioned because they needed to rename a starship in honor of Captain Reza's USS Indefeasible, considering how her ship's valiant sacrifice rescued Andor from certain doom.

 

[Shik]

They did go out of their way to show the new Enterprise as being more advanced than it's predecessor. The bridge echoes the Excelsior NX-2000, the interfaces are all now touchscreens etc.
(which of course totally changes for VI, where buttons return, the lights are left off and the ship looks old and worn out... because Meyer)

Again going back to MSGttE, it said the Ent-A (formerly USS Ti-ho) was built from the ground up, putting the new technology developed for Excelsior into an Enterprise-class frame. Aside from the corridors and transporter (which were built for TMP and modified slightly for TNG), the ship definitely looks different inside.

This idea could go along with what SeerSBG was theorizing. You may recall that the TNG Tech Manual made mention of the additional six spaceframes for the Galaxy class. Perhaps, in this earlier time frame, there were enough spare parts to assemble the majority of one ship. These spares alone weren't enough for a single operational ship, yet they weren't going to be called for, as the build program for that class had come to an end. Rather than just scrap their stuff, Starfleet could have used the latest Connie-type technology and a bit of the newer Excelsior shiny stuff - both to field test it on more than just the Excelsior program and to see if any of it would be suitable to retrofit onto the older classes. The A might have been an interesting mix of the outgoing and the incoming.

Suddenly, the Probe appears, etc, etc. The "Plus One" (I hated that Ti-Ho name) experimental pseudo-Connie gets rebadged as the 1701-A.

(Maybe the bridge from TVH just wasn't a good control center for the ship, and they swapped it out.)

YOUR IDEAS ARE INTRIGUING AND I WISH TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER. No, really, I am enjoying the theory & find it much more plausible than any I've encountered before & duly intend to steal it for inclusion when I get to writing about this event.

Yeah, the new Enterprise bridge kind of prefigures the NCC-2000 bridge module of Excelsior, but certainly not the NX-2000 module, which looked radically different.

I like to think the bridge module that we see on the ENT-A in TFF and TUC was a prefab designed for the proposed upcoming fleet of Excelsior class Starships, but it was simply fitted to the NCC-1701-A to replace the old bridge module that it had already been using prior to being rechristened Enterprise. (alongside many other 'system updates'). Hence, the series of crippling incompatibilities that Mister Scott is running around trying to fix throughout TFF. The outdated Connie software is having trouble adapting to the modern Excelsior hardware, and Scotty keeps getting the Blue Screen Of Death every time he tries to beam someone down and then up again.

Honestly, I really liked the NX module & wished they'd kept it. Everything was so roomy & shiny-glassy. It was very much NOT Enterprise, which was the whole point & totally fit Bill George's "anime Enterprise" concept. Also, your theory might also explain the TARDIS-like positioning for the turbolifts in TFF & TUC. Might.

 

[publiusr]

There was this sci-fi magazine (not just starlog) that wanted artists to submit what Ent-A (before it was known as anything other than Enterprise II) would look like.

I'd like to see that restarted...

 

[F. King Daniel]

They did go out of their way to show the new Enterprise as being more advanced than it's predecessor. The bridge echoes the Excelsior NX-2000, the interfaces are all now touchscreens etc.

Not all of them. When she was originally launched as NX-2000, the Excelsior had a mix of both touchscreens, buttons, and possibly even levers on her bridge.
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tsfshd/tsfshd0660.jpg

I forgot about those. But I was referring mainly to the perimeter stations, which took the giant black touchscreen approach from STIII's Excelsior (and IIRC, were originally considered for TOS but the technology of the time wasn't up to the task)

 

[C.E. Evans]

They did go out of their way to show the new Enterprise as being more advanced than it's predecessor. The bridge echoes the Excelsior NX-2000, the interfaces are all now touchscreens etc.

Not all of them. When she was originally launched as NX-2000, the Excelsior had a mix of both touchscreens, buttons, and possibly even levers on her bridge.
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tsfshd/tsfshd0660.jpg

I forgot about those. But I was referring mainly to the perimeter stations, which took the giant black touchscreen approach from STIII's Excelsior (and IIRC, were originally considered for TOS but the technology of the time wasn't up to the task)

TOS had the technology at the time.
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x03hd/wherenomanhasgonebeforehd015.jpg

 

[F. King Daniel]

Not to do it on the scale they originally wanted - which was pretty much what we saw on the NX-2000 and in STV.

 

[C.E. Evans]

It's just a case of it being a natural progression that began pretty much from day one with Trek. From a directing perspective, it was more dramatic in TOS to have the actors pushing buttons, flipping switches, and sliding levers than the touchscreens and it's probably still true today (and IIRC, the reason why director Nick Meyer had some of them brought back for Star Trek VI).