Original 12 Constitution class ships

[Forbin]

It's a crying shame that she died with virtually no war record... At least Bismark got to go out in a final blaze of glory.

That could be taken to mean your sympathies were with the Axis, or at least that you wish the Allies had suffered more to defeat fascism. I'd like to think you just got a little carried away romanticizing about war machines , and you agree our guys suffered enough as it was.

Oh my god, lighten up.

 

[J.T.B.]

Mikasa is only known if one know Russo-Japanese War history (1904-05)...

True, but she is also basically Japan's equivalent to Victory or Constitution, preserved for national veneration. Not really a household name in the US, but none of them are.

Akagi and Kaga might have made good starship names, but I imagine some names were still touchy in 1966.

Probably so. Victory at Sea would probably have made an impression on many viewers as it did me: "Akagi, smashed and sinking! Kaga, smashed and sinking!"

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Kongo always seemed like an odd choice for a Japanese-origin name to me. Not as famous as battleships Mikasa or Yamato, or the Pearl Harbor carriers. Maybe because she was on the "good" side in WW1?

Is it wrong that the thought of a TOS U.S.S. Yamato makes me think these guys would be the ones crewing it

 

[Captain Rob]

I love those guys. I used to watch that show all the time as a kid. The recent live action movie that came out was pretty good. But I hated how they crammed everything together.

"That could be taken to mean your sympathies were with the Axis, or at least that you wish the Allies had suffered more to defeat fascism."

No.
I had two uncles that fought in World War II.
I can appreciate the technology and design of an Aston Martin or Ferrari. Even if the owner is a serial killer. I would off the guy in a flash. Just make sure he wasn't in the car first.
The Wiki article on Yamato ( which isn't very long) indicates that the name was probably more important than the ship. It was commissioned just days after Pearl Harbor and spent half the war doing valet service for Admiral Yamamoto. And then convoy escort in the relative safe areas. I would have preferred it was captured in port and saved as a reminder of Japan's excesses.

 

[Maurice]

It's a crying shame that she died with virtually no war record... At least Bismark got to go out in a final blaze of glory.

That could be taken to mean your sympathies were with the Axis, or at least that you wish the Allies had suffered more to defeat fascism. I'd like to think you just got a little carried away romanticizing about war machines , and you agree our guys suffered enough as it was.

Oh my god, lighten up.

More people would likely have died had she had a "war record", so thank goodness she didn't.

 

[Kemaiku]

Damn, I'll be 68 when the next Big E hits the water.

54 here.

41

 

[Forbin]

That could be taken to mean your sympathies were with the Axis, or at least that you wish the Allies had suffered more to defeat fascism. I'd like to think you just got a little carried away romanticizing about war machines , and you agree our guys suffered enough as it was.

Oh my god, lighten up.

More people would likely have died had she had a "war record", so thank goodness she didn't.

No shit, Sherlock.

She didn't. History doesn't change because people indulge in "what if" scenarios. Look how popular the "Luft '46" whatiffery is. None of those folks wish the Nazis had won, they just like the cool planes.

And before anyone questions my sympathies regarding things that happened 70 years ago, just because I like cool war machines, here's a pic of my hero, my Dad in 1945:

9 Japanese kills (many of them during the mass kamikaze raids on Okinawa), innumerable ground vehicles and trains destroyed, at least one Japanese destroyer damaged, 108 missions (many of them to Japan itself), wounded 3 times, shot down 3 times, spent 8 days in a 1-man life raft.

I got my interest in military vehicles of all stripes from him.

 

[f14peter]

Oh my god, lighten up.

More people would likely have died had she had a "war record", so thank goodness she didn't.

No shit, Sherlock.

She didn't. History doesn't change because people indulge in "what if" scenarios. Look how popular the "Luft '46" whatiffery is. None of those folks wish the Nazis had won, they just like the cool planes.

And before anyone questions my sympathies regarding things that happened 70 years ago, just because I like cool war machines, here's a pic of my hero, my Dad in 1945:

9 Japanese kills (many of them during the mass kamikaze raids on Okinawa), innumerable ground vehicles and trains destroyed, at least one Japanese destroyer damaged, 108 missions (many of them to Japan itself), wounded 3 times, shot down 3 times, spent 8 days in a 1-man life raft.

I got my interest in military vehicles of all stripes from him.

Going purely off of memory ...

that picture, looks like an early P-47D Thunderbolt, Razorback version. Scoring kills over/near Okinawa, along with ground scores and missions to Japan makes me speculate he may have eventually drove the long range P-47N, yes? Or maybe transferred to the VLR Mustang units flying from Iwo?

I'd have to dig through my library, but I have many of the
Osprey Publishing "Aces ..." books, and I probably have a "P-47 Aces of the Pacific" (or something near to), is your father refrenced there?

 

[Wingsley]

It never ceases to amaze how a discussion thread like this can bring up so many details, historical facts about naval ships, and so many examples of CDST (Contradictions and Discontinuity in Star Trek). Truly amazing!

Thanks to GSchnitzer for pulling out the "The Making of Star Trek" quote. Very interesting.

The AMT model image from Mr. Lurry's office in "The Trouble with Tribbles" is very interesting indeed. Didn't know that. Could there have been another Federation starship arriving at K-7 in response to Mr. Barris' distress call? If so, the image could have been another starship.

This thread, so far, brought up interesting points about where the ship names have possibly come from and how they could be applied. It also reinforced that nothing was etched in stone with TOS.

• Was the TOS Starship Enterprise actually designated a Constitution-class ship, in canon TOS?
  
• Did Mr. Roddenberry ever declare Kirk's TOS Enterprise to be a Constitution-class vessel?
  
• Was the specific ship class of any vessel verbally elaborated upon during TOS? (Remember: that Bridge plaque next to the turbolift only says "STARSHIP CLASS"; no "Constitution" or any other class name.)
  
• Did any character in TOS ever mention the existence of starship class nomenclature at all?

Our discussion in this thread revolves around this exchange between Captain Kirk and Captain Christopher during the turbolift scene in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday":

KIRK: Bridge.

CHRISTOPHER: Must have taken quite a lot to build a ship like this.

KIRK: There are only twelve like it in the fleet.

CHRISTOPHER: I see. Did the Navy

KIRK: We're a combined service, Captain. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency.

CHRISTOPHER: United Earth?

KIRK: This is very difficult to explain. We're from your future. A time warp placed us here. It was an accident.

CHRISTOPHER: You seem to have a lot of them. However, I can't deny the fact that you're here. With this ship.

While it is plausible and logical the Kirk's "twelve like it" comment was directed at the notion of twelve ships being members of the same starship class, and that they could have been the Constitution-class of starships, he never said that explicitly. Captain Kirk never mentioned the Constitution-class, nor the existence of any classification of space vessel. He simply bragged to Captain Christopher that "there are only twelve like it in the fleet". This loosely suggests there are other ships that are not "like it", but does't conclusively state that, either. Kirk's brag does illuminate there are at least 12 ships that are part of a fleet, possibly a much larger organization. Kirk mentions a "combined service" and also reveals "our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency". Kirk never tells Christopher about Starfleet or the United Federation of Planets, either. It is therefore equally logical to string together what Kirk does say and come to a different conclusion about what he was telling Christopher.

"There are only twelve like it in the fleet."

"We're a combined service, Captain. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency."

Could it be that Kirk is bragging that the United Earth Space Probe Agency sponsors 12 or 13 Federation starships-of-the-line (or even 12 or 13 Constitution-class vessels) as part of a larger, unnamed Federation Starfleet?

Why not?

If we can't readily conclude whether or not the U.S.S. Intrepid was the same class of starship as the Enterprise during TOS (remastering aside), then why should we readily conclude that Kirk was bragging on the basis of starship class in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday"? If one inference is vague enough to be inconclusive, why shouldn't the other be conclusive as well?

TOS never showed us more than one type of Federation starship-of-the-line. If you look at TOS unto itself, it looks like a starship is a starship is a starship. As in "STARSHIP CLASS". As if they all look basically like Kirk's TOS Enterprise, more or less. If TOS depicted a Federation with only one type of starship, and there are only 12 or 13 of that type, then is it not logical to conclude that the entire Federation has only 12 or 13 starships, total?

CDST wins again.

 

[Commishsleer]

I thought when Kirk referred to a combined service he was talking about combining the Army, Navy and Airforce.
Whether you refer to them as the Constitution Class or Starship Class there were 12 ships that looked like the Enterprise in Starfleet.
And Starfleet had other ships that travelled between the stars. These were referred to in TOS if not shown.

 

[Forbin]

More people would likely have died had she had a "war record", so thank goodness she didn't.

No shit, Sherlock.

She didn't. History doesn't change because people indulge in "what if" scenarios. Look how popular the "Luft '46" whatiffery is. None of those folks wish the Nazis had won, they just like the cool planes.

And before anyone questions my sympathies regarding things that happened 70 years ago, just because I like cool war machines, here's a pic of my hero, my Dad in 1945:

9 Japanese kills (many of them during the mass kamikaze raids on Okinawa), innumerable ground vehicles and trains destroyed, at least one Japanese destroyer damaged, 108 missions (many of them to Japan itself), wounded 3 times, shot down 3 times, spent 8 days in a 1-man life raft.

I got my interest in military vehicles of all stripes from him.

Going purely off of memory ...

that picture, looks like an early P-47D Thunderbolt, Razorback version. Scoring kills over/near Okinawa, along with ground scores and missions to Japan makes me speculate he may have eventually drove the long range P-47N, yes? Or maybe transferred to the VLR Mustang units flying from Iwo?

I'd have to dig through my library, but I have many of the
Osprey Publishing "Aces ..." books, and I probably have a "P-47 Aces of the Pacific" (or something near to), is your father refrenced there?

Yes, he finished the war flying P-47Ns from Ie Shima with the 318th FG, 333rd FS (the pictures is a P-47D-23 from that unit). Sadly I've never found a photo of his plane in any publication, nor reference to him. Apparently not everybody got into the history books . Here's his story, as told to me over the years, plus some stories he wrote himself:
http://www.inpayne.com/dad/dadsplash.html

 

[Wingsley]

There is nothing in what Capt. Kirk said to Capt. Christopher that ever mentions or directly implies anything about starship classes. The term "ship class" is never mentioned. (See transcription of the turbolift scene above.)

 

[Nebusj]

I thought when Kirk referred to a combined service he was talking about combining the Army, Navy and Airforce.

I'm rather certain that's what was meant by his being in a 'combined service'; come to it, wasn't Christopher's interrupted question leading up to whether this was some Navy project?

But the argument that the armed forces of the United States might be usefully organized by some criteria other than the means by which fighting forces are brought to the battle was particularly strong in the 40s-through-60s, not least because intra-service rivalries annoyed a lot of the civilian command, and the budget office wondered if we really needed three long-range ballistic missile programs.

 

[Wingsley]

In the context of TOS, I always thought the Federation would create a combined-service organization under the Starfleet umbrella because Starfleet, by definition, was supposedly a go-anywhere, do-anything type of organization anyway and the Federation would need a space armada to project its power (for both military and non-military reasons) in order to have a useful presence in deep space.

 

[Maurice]

No shit, Sherlock.

Charming. Not.

 

[Ithekro]

Space is pretty vast for only 12 starships. If they were basically the Federation's main heavy exploration ship that might mean something, but Enterprise sometimes patrols the borders during her five year mission. One would have to assume there are more ships in the fleet.

However if one went by 1930s logic, if the USS Portland was wiped back in time to 1810 and they took on a officer from USS Constellation, the captain of Portland could say there are only one other like it in the fleet, even though there are a several similar heavy cruisers in service or under contruction in the mid-1930s.

 

[Wingsley]

I agree. It never made sense to me that a 100-year-old Federation would only have 12 starships-of-the-line deployed. The only way it made sense to me was if the "twelve like it" meant there were 12 cruisers from Earth, and maybe 12 cruisers from Vulcan, and maybe 12 cruisers from Andor, etc. The "twelve like it" would mean that the Earth-based starships would be unique in that they were built by Terran shipbuilding crews and outfitted for mostly-human astronaut-crews.

 

[Warped9]

Something else to remember is that unlike the period when TNG was in production there was a lot that was nebulous during first season of TOS. There was a lot that wasn't yet established and nailed down. A lot was still being conceived as they progressed with each episode.

The overall impression seemed to be that Starfleet was indeed a sizable organization with the twelve Enterprise type heavy cruisers sitting at the top of the heap. This is backed up by the material in The Making Of Star Trek describing the Enterprise type ships as the largest and most powerful ships launched by the Federation. Another general idea was that the crews of some of those ships were manned predominantly by one species. So you could have had an all Andorian Constitution-class vessel as well as all Vulcan as well as others. And that notion is backed up by reference to the Intrepid and its 400 plus Vulcan crew.

It is curious that while there's quite a bit of material regarding the Enterprise type ships in TMoST it doesn't mention a Constitution-class even though that graphic denoting Constitution-class had already appeared onscreen.

 

[Wingsley]

^ Yep. More CDST.

One aspect of TOS seems to be overlooked: the rate at which starships are destroyed, and yet Kirk and company aren't ready to take the leap into a permanent all-out war footing. It almost seems like Starfleet tells its starship crews to expect there's a good chance they will either encounter other ships/crews destroyed or there's a good chance they could be destroyed. Look at how many starships the Enterprise was sent out to either investigate or rescue. Two Valiants, the Constellation, the S.S. Beagle, the Intrepid, the Exeter, the Defiant. (This doesn't even touch what the M-5 did to the Excalibur.) If there were only a dozen starships, the Federation would naturally view itself as being in serious trouble.

Since Kirk and the Federation obviously don't consider themselves as being under siege, it would seem logical that those losses are absorbed in the context of a much-larger body of starships.

Franz Joseph seemed to catch on with this, making the Constitution-class 140-strong.

I say that if the Federation were 100+ years old at the time of TOS, and the Constitution-class is maybe only 20 years old, then there must be a body of similarly configured older cruisers from a previous generation to draw upon for TMP-style refits. (My non-canon name for this previous generation of cruisers is the Magna Carta class.)

So another scenario for the "twelve like it" would place the Federation of the 2250s and 2260s in a period of major star cruiser rejuvenation, taking older Magna Carta-class cruisers out of service and refitting them to the new Constitution-class specs. Perhaps there were only twelve all-new Constitutions built in the 2240s, Constitution (1700) and Enterprise (1701) among them. Others such as Exeter (1672) Intrepid (1631), Excalibur (1664) and Potemkin (1657) could be refits carried over from the Magna Carta era. And ships with even lower numbers, such as Republic (1371), and Constellation (1017), could conceivably have been rebuilt at least twice, their original configurations possibly pre-dating Magna Carta. While Lexington (1709) and Hood (1703) could have been part of the original 12 Constitutions built in the 2240s, and Defiant (1764) possibly built some time after that. (Post-12-like-it)

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Franz Joseph seemed to catch on with this, making the Constitution-class 140-strong.

Point of order. In the FJTM, there are three classes.

The class ship of the MK-IX is the Constitution (NCC-1700). This class had 14 originally, with four listed as lost at some point (Constellation, Farragut, Intrepid, and Valiant).

The class ship of the MK-IXA is the Bonhomme Richard (NCC-1712). The Defiance [sic] is in this class.

The class ship of the MK-IXB is the Achernar (NCC-1732). This is the most numerous class.