NCC-2541 is canonical
- Thread starter throwback
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Star Trek fans have been discussing registries ever since I joined the Internet community in the late 1990s. Now, that we can see some of the new registries, we can discuss some more. Now, that we have new registries, people are saying we shouldn't be discussing them. Well, the cat's out of the bag, so isn't it a bit late to put a cork on the whole shebang.
BTW, I think this thread has started getting mixed up with the other Measure of a Man shiplist thread.
Don't get me wrong; I'm totally fine discussing registries, and I look forward to actually seeing the list in HD or screencaps thereof so that I can take a stab at guessing what they say. All I'm saying is that it's not entirely necessary to create explanations for every single inconsistency we see, especially when they're from charts and displays that were never meant to be seen up close or scrutinized the way we can now.
Don't get me wrong; I'm totally fine discussing registries, and I look forward to actually seeing the list in HD or screencaps thereof so that I can take a stab at guessing what they say. All I'm saying is that it's not entirely necessary to create explanations for every single inconsistency we see, especially when they're from charts and displays that were never meant to be seen up close or scrutinized the way we can now.
My quick opinion of this thread topic (which has likely been discussed before) is that the Hood's registry is canon as 42295 and that 2541 is an error and never existed via retcon. Doesn't matter if it was actually seen in the show the creators changed the ncc system halfway during season 2 when the Yamato was stated by Riker as 1305-e and later changed to 71807 a few episodes later. In your argument 1305-e should be canon because we hear it on screen. The same could be said about the USS Brattain which was erroneously shown as "Brittain". The ship must be Brattain since it is named after a historical figure.
The sad truth is a lot of what was actually shown on screen with ship info was flat out wrong as the creative team was morphing all the time and there wasn't one all seeing trek advisor there to catch those errors though I think Okuda and Jein tried their best. A lot of stuff was the result of quick turnaround time the creators realizing afterwards of a slip too late for them to change it. With Hood I think what happened was that during Season 1 the idea of the 70,000+ registries hadn't been thought of yet so someone figured Excelsior class ships would be in the 2000-2500 range and probably be about 60 years old while Miranda's like lantree would be in the 1800's and 70+ years old. The original intention was to build a model the Fearless as an Ambassador class ship which would be the main model used through much of TNG but due to budget restraints things changed. When the Fearless was shown as an excelsior it's registry was 14598 which threw the system out of whack. That compounded by the fact that the Ambassador model they did build was inferior and difficult to use over the years we saw more and more Excelsior and Miranda ships (due to the availability of the models via cgi), a new system was developed which placed excelsior construction mainly in the 10,000-45,000 range and Miranda's 21,000-31,000 range. The only throwbacks were the Lantree, Repulse and the Constellation class which make them very old ships from Kirks time.
Also just as a last point I'm no longer confident that the Melbourne was ever an Excelsior class even though it is seen clearly on screen in DSN. I suspect what happened is that someone gave the group a bunch of numbers and names and said "here put these on the models and blow them up" and they so not thinking that a 60,000 number belonged on a nebula and not an excelsior etc. They probably did it because a close up of a nebula blowing up would probably not show the numbers as clearly that's all. Either that or the Melbourne could have been retconned to an Excelsior but we can speculate it should have a different registry 42043 perhaps. That actually seems more likely as the DSN footage happened later and the registry discrepancy probably wouldn't have been thought of until after the scene was done. As stated a lot of these factors can be explained by real world reasons either the creators made mistakes or changed their minds via retconning tng but really my opinion is that canon is what they state it to be via intent of the creative team vs what may actually be shown on screen. Yeah that's weird but it keeps me sane lol.
The sad truth is a lot of what was actually shown on screen with ship info was flat out wrong as the creative team was morphing all the time and there wasn't one all seeing trek advisor there to catch those errors though I think Okuda and Jein tried their best. A lot of stuff was the result of quick turnaround time the creators realizing afterwards of a slip too late for them to change it. With Hood I think what happened was that during Season 1 the idea of the 70,000+ registries hadn't been thought of yet so someone figured Excelsior class ships would be in the 2000-2500 range and probably be about 60 years old while Miranda's like lantree would be in the 1800's and 70+ years old. The original intention was to build a model the Fearless as an Ambassador class ship which would be the main model used through much of TNG but due to budget restraints things changed. When the Fearless was shown as an excelsior it's registry was 14598 which threw the system out of whack. That compounded by the fact that the Ambassador model they did build was inferior and difficult to use over the years we saw more and more Excelsior and Miranda ships (due to the availability of the models via cgi), a new system was developed which placed excelsior construction mainly in the 10,000-45,000 range and Miranda's 21,000-31,000 range. The only throwbacks were the Lantree, Repulse and the Constellation class which make them very old ships from Kirks time.
Also just as a last point I'm no longer confident that the Melbourne was ever an Excelsior class even though it is seen clearly on screen in DSN. I suspect what happened is that someone gave the group a bunch of numbers and names and said "here put these on the models and blow them up" and they so not thinking that a 60,000 number belonged on a nebula and not an excelsior etc. They probably did it because a close up of a nebula blowing up would probably not show the numbers as clearly that's all. Either that or the Melbourne could have been retconned to an Excelsior but we can speculate it should have a different registry 42043 perhaps. That actually seems more likely as the DSN footage happened later and the registry discrepancy probably wouldn't have been thought of until after the scene was done. As stated a lot of these factors can be explained by real world reasons either the creators made mistakes or changed their minds via retconning tng but really my opinion is that canon is what they state it to be via intent of the creative team vs what may actually be shown on screen. Yeah that's weird but it keeps me sane lol.
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It would be nice to have the registries follow a block pattern, a number range for the expected production runs for each class of ship. This was violated several times in TOS and people have been jumping through hoops to explain how some ships did not fit inside the expected range. The Excelsior prototype having a 2000 number brought the block system back into focus once again, then TNG followed by ST-V and DS-9 had ships with very long numbers indicating Starfleet had built a LOT of ships since Kirks time.
My only problem with the block system is that it assumes a class production will be as expected and it gets unwieldy when you have so many different classes of ships being produced. I tend to think what a ship gets numbered is mostly determined by some frustrated bureaucrat in an office somewhere and has little to do with the name of type of vessel.
To be honest I do not have the slightest idea what Voyagers or Defiants NCC numbers are- they never seemed important enough to keep track of.
My only problem with the block system is that it assumes a class production will be as expected and it gets unwieldy when you have so many different classes of ships being produced. I tend to think what a ship gets numbered is mostly determined by some frustrated bureaucrat in an office somewhere and has little to do with the name of type of vessel.
To be honest I do not have the slightest idea what Voyagers or Defiants NCC numbers are- they never seemed important enough to keep track of.
I'm reminded of a current thread on the board with regards to using CGI for fixing things a user deemed bad in an episode of TOS, where another user replied how much is too much and where does it stop?
Well, how about in this instance CGI fixies are used for, it goes no further than fixing registry inconsistances on ships in various Trek shows. Then other seperate issues will be taken one at a time as discussion occurs.
It's like one time where, I think it was here, I created a thread abut fixing legitimate problems needing to be fixed in TNG, and one suggestion was an episode where the Enterprise fired phasers from the front photon torpedo bay launcher.
I think that to SOME extent they do. The way I see it the ships were ordered in waves. For example the Excelsior 2000 probably had it's first wave in the 2500's then second wave in the 10,000's (the 2310's) and last largest wave in the 30,000-45,000's. I think this suggests that a ship gets a name and registry much like ships of history when the keel is laid down so that might account why some ships might be launched out of sequence if they were sitting around at utopia planetia until the order to complete them was made.
There are some advantages and disadvantages to having a block/batch system. There's always a possibility that some ships in a given order either will get canceled or reallocated to another class, and that might be where some registries end up. Mastercom did this with the Coventry and Surya frigates, which evolved into the Miranda/Avenger model and some variants during the movie era and largely kept the same registries. FASA treated the Reliant/Miranda as a movie-era evolution of their TOS Anton class, which had 1800 series registries and the new builds were given their own unique system. So any ships like the USS Reliant with an 18xx registry simply kept its own number, and any new-build vessel would get a different batch number.
The chief problem with this system, as you mention, is having both a very high range of registry numbers in the TNG+ era, and those numbers not always making a degree of sequential sense to try and judge when ships in a class (or related class) were built relative to one another. Judging the numbers to represent more or less the total number of ships built over time doesn't really help, because the numbers still seem a bit inflated or nonsensical. FASA's TNG OM has some ships with registries in the 80000 or 90000 range, which seems high even for a simple batch number, and some canonical ships like the Defiant have registries in the 70k range.
Perhaps if Matt Jeffries' original idea had been followed more consistently than it was (the registries were meant to both indicate when the class entered service and when the specific ships entered service as well), things might have turned out differently. That so many registries wound up all over the place in canon makes it difficult to try and use that system as well, IMO.
Unless, we choose to ignore or re-interpret things that are just inconsistant.
For example, in my mind, the Hood that we see is actually supposed to have the later 5-digit registry number, while the NCC-2451 Hood did exist, but was probably destroyed, my guess is likely around or before the Tomed Incident, since the Romulans really would have been the adversary that the Federation was most likely to have border incidents with at the time, going by the registry, which would have been late 2290s-early 2300s.
Maybe if production had more funds/time/technology at hand, things would have probably been different, with the Fearless mentioned a few posts above being an Ambassador class, instead of an Excelsior class.
For example, in my mind, the Hood that we see is actually supposed to have the later 5-digit registry number, while the NCC-2451 Hood did exist, but was probably destroyed, my guess is likely around or before the Tomed Incident, since the Romulans really would have been the adversary that the Federation was most likely to have border incidents with at the time, going by the registry, which would have been late 2290s-early 2300s.
Maybe if production had more funds/time/technology at hand, things would have probably been different, with the Fearless mentioned a few posts above being an Ambassador class, instead of an Excelsior class.
