OK, I must be missing something here. What does the DDG-1000 example prove or disprove exactly?
Ship continuity.
- Thread starter Jon holder
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OK, I must be missing something here. What does the DDG-1000 example prove or disprove exactly?
Oh, good point.
I've said before that I believe the Starfleet Registry doesn't actually care if two starships historically use the same number, as long as two active ships aren't using the same number.
Per Discovery, ships actively transmit their registries/call signs to other ships, who can then cross-reference the databank to check what ship it is. Perhaps, the original 1031 (and 1030) were long since scrapped when the Discovery was being blueprinted, and its constructors chose an available registry (1031) for sentimental value (a birthday, Halloween, Section 31 funding them, the year of the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba...).
The Glenn, despite its "earlier" registry, is said to be more advanced than the Discovery. That never bothered me, because I assumed they were both built roughly analgous, with the Glenn benefitting from some construction delays leading to implementation of advancements from Discovery's shakedown.
But maybe the Glenn was registered and contracted later, but chose an available registry one higher than Discovery to give it more precedence in lists and such. Or maybe 1032 was unavailable.
Maybe 1017 has some meaning to the builder of the Constellation. And 956 to the Eagle. And 3801 to the Ptolemy.
Well I'm almost certain the US Navy hasn't had a 1000 ships.
They had almost 600 active during Reagan era, now 430ish (in 2017). But thats not even close to max they ever had. In WW2 they had almost 7,000 by end of the war!
There have been 1002~ US Navy destroyers alone, historically. It seems like they renumbered/redesignated some of them, so the grand total is probably lower than 1002, but still massive.
And yet we still skipped past about 800 DDG numbers to DDG-1000, 1001, and 1002, even while continuing to use numbers in the upper 100s for new Arleigh Burke builds. The point here is that the US Navy has proven perfectly willing to skip numbers around within a series, for little more reason than to sound cool, so you can't use them as proof that Starfleet can't skip back and forth in their NCC numbers. Other navies have done the same, to say nothing of things like tank, plane, or division numbers.
For that matter, the Royal Navy provides lots of examples of naming classes after a theme and not the first ship, and all it takes is one Starfleet admiral deciding they like that idea for a decade or two to throw off our preconceived notion of class names.
Did they reserve the 100's many many years ago? Otherwise it's a contrast to the #'s they skipped and never reused in the CV line from various cancelled ships.
We're lucky it wasn't the 7101.
The US Navy has at least two different modern lines of destroyers running at once. The DD line (gun mainly destroyers) and the DDG line (guided missile destroyers). At some point the two became the same things as technology made it necessary for all the destroyer to be guide missile types. The Spruance-class and Kidd-class destroyers were DD line (the Kidd-class were designated DDG however). The Ticonderoga-class were suppose to be DDG line, but were re-designated as cruisers, the first few ships of this class were originally DDG, and thus those numbers were skipped when the next class of DDG started at DDG-51. The Arleigh Burke-class follows were the Ticonderoga-class suppose to go and are DDG line. The Zumwalt-class continue the DD line numbers but at designated DDG. future Zumwalt-class ships have been cancelled after the third ship (to be commissioned in the next few years). The Arleigh Burke-class construction has been restarted, with four ships already in service in the low DDG-100s, with approval into the DDG-130s.
Note: There is both a DD-51 (USS O'Brien, ordered in 1913) and a DDG-51 (USS Arleigh Burke, ordered in 1985) The DL (destroyer leader) line got at high as 41 before being rolled into the cruiser line with USS Arkansas (CGN-41 before commissioning)
Note: There is both a DD-51 (USS O'Brien, ordered in 1913) and a DDG-51 (USS Arleigh Burke, ordered in 1985) The DL (destroyer leader) line got at high as 41 before being rolled into the cruiser line with USS Arkansas (CGN-41 before commissioning)
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Is there a better list than the one I found that tells us how many Destroyers there have actually been?
Aside from say a Wiki page on all US destroyers, there would be the individual destroyer class pages that provide some backstory sometimes on their designation changes.
The United States however has separate number lines for different ship types. While all the Aircraft Carriers are 1 - 80 presently (with some numbers missing due to cancelled ships), it includes the CV, CVL, CVA, CVB, CVS, CVAN, and CVNs in their line. The Escort Carriers, CVE have a different line of numbers. US Cruisers have different number lines that have started, restarted, and been renumbered multiple times. The Cruiser line is probably the most confused. With some numbers just outright skipped to make renumbering converted classes easier.
But you can easily have multiple ships in the US Navy numbered say 70, at the same time. (Currently three: CVN-70 USS Carl Vinson, CG-70 USS Cape St. George, and DDG-70 USS Hopper)
The United States however has separate number lines for different ship types. While all the Aircraft Carriers are 1 - 80 presently (with some numbers missing due to cancelled ships), it includes the CV, CVL, CVA, CVB, CVS, CVAN, and CVNs in their line. The Escort Carriers, CVE have a different line of numbers. US Cruisers have different number lines that have started, restarted, and been renumbered multiple times. The Cruiser line is probably the most confused. With some numbers just outright skipped to make renumbering converted classes easier.
But you can easily have multiple ships in the US Navy numbered say 70, at the same time. (Currently three: CVN-70 USS Carl Vinson, CG-70 USS Cape St. George, and DDG-70 USS Hopper)
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I linked to the Wiki page, it's just a tad confusing
And yeah, i know there can be multiples of the same # for different types of ships. My original example was to show (at least with carriers), that an earlier # is an older ship. The Destroyer list throws a wrench in that, but I don't see Starfleet going that route since the registry #'s aren't class or ship type related outside of the initial Constitutions.
Its a long list. We build a lot of destroyers for the two World Wars, plus a lot to replaces those built during the Second World War as they aged out, plus now using them more or less as cruisers anyway in the modern age...they have kind of lost their definition, since there is almost no difference between a modern cruiser and a modern destroyer.
The list doesn't even include the destroyer escorts (DE and DEG). There were A LOT of those. They were reclassified as frigates (FF and FFG) in 1975. The DE hull numbers had huge gaps in them (hundreds of ships) due to ships being cancelled, or orders reserved for foreign sales (France and Italy has several ships paid for via DE construction. These hulls numbers are skipped)
The list doesn't even include the destroyer escorts (DE and DEG). There were A LOT of those. They were reclassified as frigates (FF and FFG) in 1975. The DE hull numbers had huge gaps in them (hundreds of ships) due to ships being cancelled, or orders reserved for foreign sales (France and Italy has several ships paid for via DE construction. These hulls numbers are skipped)
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The thing to note is, when writers of Star Trek bother to refer to registry numbers at all, it's always with the lower-is-older agenda!
TOS had but one registry ever mentioned onscreen, that of the Republic, and the dramatic point was that this was an older ship, from an earlier stage in Kirk's life, so naturally the number was lower than that of Kirk's current ship, too.
The movies gave the Excelsior a high number to indicate modernity over the hero ship, and the Grissom a low one to indicate inferiority. What Khan got was parity, or a slight edge.
By the time TNG got its own models such as the Ambassador class one, Sternbach and Okuda were in full swing, and registries were decidedly chronological, with older ships given lower registries in apparent proportion to their age. Prior to that, there had already been a clear effort to put the other Starfleet ships (Excelsiors, Oberths, Mirandas and unseens) in between the "Galaxy family" and the TOS movies.
Basically, the registries have never before been anything but chronological functionally, except perhaps in Franz Joseph's listings and other such offscreen tangents on Star Trek... DSC is actually trailblazing in specifically choosing to portray NCC-1031 as newer than NCC-1226, when it could have chosen to do the opposite, or to do nothing and let the audience decide as with NCC-1017.
Which is why the idea that ships in the NCC-1000 range would be recycled wrecks, their actual class ships long gone, is so damn appealing... But we're talking about a couple of hundred points this way or that, which hardly disrupts the pattern so clearly seen in five-digit regstries.
Timo Saloniemi
TOS had but one registry ever mentioned onscreen, that of the Republic, and the dramatic point was that this was an older ship, from an earlier stage in Kirk's life, so naturally the number was lower than that of Kirk's current ship, too.
The movies gave the Excelsior a high number to indicate modernity over the hero ship, and the Grissom a low one to indicate inferiority. What Khan got was parity, or a slight edge.
By the time TNG got its own models such as the Ambassador class one, Sternbach and Okuda were in full swing, and registries were decidedly chronological, with older ships given lower registries in apparent proportion to their age. Prior to that, there had already been a clear effort to put the other Starfleet ships (Excelsiors, Oberths, Mirandas and unseens) in between the "Galaxy family" and the TOS movies.
Basically, the registries have never before been anything but chronological functionally, except perhaps in Franz Joseph's listings and other such offscreen tangents on Star Trek... DSC is actually trailblazing in specifically choosing to portray NCC-1031 as newer than NCC-1226, when it could have chosen to do the opposite, or to do nothing and let the audience decide as with NCC-1017.
Which is why the idea that ships in the NCC-1000 range would be recycled wrecks, their actual class ships long gone, is so damn appealing... But we're talking about a couple of hundred points this way or that, which hardly disrupts the pattern so clearly seen in five-digit regstries.
Timo Saloniemi
Don't forget the wall chart in Commodore Stone's office showing ships with registries between 16XX and 18XX.
Pretty much in agreement here.
However, I'm not sure as much thought went into the Discovery's registry number as you're giving credit to. I don't think anyone actually said something like, "Hey, let's change things around and assign lower registry numbers to new ships!" I think the 1031 number just meant something to Fuller, like how 21166 was a number that meant something to Okuda even though that registry was given to a ship that should have had a far lower one.
Until I see ships with names that are the class names of the DSC ships we've seen so far, I'm going to go under the assumption that during this era, ship class names are not named after the first ship of that class built.
I actually imagine that the Grissom is older -- or at least from the same era -- as the TOS ships. It doesn't have the hull detail of the refits, and the nacelles look to be a mix of TOS and TMP style. The bridge got a redo at some point, but otherwise the ship is (was) probably a clunky, 50 year old science vessel.
I don't like that idea considering that they'e still in use in TNG era.
