Spoilers ST Lower Decks - Starships and Technology Season Three Discussion
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The Merced, Rubidoux and Solvang have problematic registries:
The Merced's is 87075, way too high for the known California class registries or chronological registries in general, even if it was brand-new as of 2380 (and there's no indication that this is the case.)
The Rubidoux's is 12109, way too low for the known California class registries or chronological registries in general, even if it was built several decades ago (and there's no indication that this is the case.) And to make matters even worse:
The Solvang (the Rubidoux's replacement) has a registry of 12101, which is even lower than the Rubidoux's and also makes no sense for a brand-new California class ship as of 2380. (There's no indication that the Solvang was an older ship that was refit.)
All the other known California class registries make chronological sense for the time period. So what the heck is up with those three ships? Logic dictates that the design of the California class puts their initial commissioning date anywhere between 2350-2370 (and the oldest chronological registries for the class should be around NCC-5XXXX, not 1XXXX.) Calis with registries of 72XXX-75XXX, as have been shown recently, fit much better. Perhaps those other registries were just in-jokes or something.
It would be super-helpful to know just when the California class started production. But right now I don't see them as being any older than, say, the BoBW kitbashes or any ship from the Galaxy class design lineage.
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At one point in time, NCC Registries and Names had a order & Rhyme / Reason.
At some point, they gave up and the NCC #'s are treated more like modern day license plate registration to a Name.
So NCC-# = Assigned Name of StarFleet Starship.
This is handled by the DSV (Department of StarShip Vessels) who maintains the active Registry over time.
So # Order doesn't really matter anymore since the names just get assigned to a number and only certain combinations of Names & Numbers are kept together.
NCC-1701-<Insert Letter Here> is a example of Name & Registry # kept together for historical reasons.
And that point was the 14 years between the start of TNG and the end of VOY (1987-2001), which was the most prolific time Star Trek on TV ever had, then or since.
Did they? Who kept the order of the registries? I wonder how that was all managed. It's rather odd to put stock in random numbers but I supposed that they must be organized in some way.
I think Mike Okuda and his crew made a decent attempt at keeping track of all the registries at one time, but then it simply ran away from them and the task got too big to maintain.
This. The Okudas, Sternbach, Drexler, Hutzel, Jein et. al were the group that had the most influence about registry numbers, during TNG, DS9 and VOY. Incidentally because of this, 90% of the registries they came up with during that time were chronological, which is why there is such debate for people who care about such things (like myself) when registries all of a sudden make no sense. They weren’t ‘random numbers;’ they were an attempt to show a logical progression of starship design over a century’s worth of time (i.e. a ship with a registry of NCC-2500 would have been built during the TMP movie era, while a ship with a registry of NCC-45235 would have been built during the pre-TNG era, etc.) There were a few discrepancies, but overall they were pretty consistent during that time.
That makes sense. I would have not expected anyone to make that effort. It already started out as random so applying order would become an insurmountable task.
I'm sure I'm alone in not keeping track or finding value in it. But, to me, a registry is a unique identifier, not something showing historical data.
Mileage will vary. Thanks for the history lesson.
I bet there was also more effort made for prominent ships, while background ships got the in-jokey stuff that the Berman art department loved to include. Then with high-def, behind-the-scenes photo documentation, Eaglemoss models, etc., we got to see those registries... and some of them started to make less sense.
Clearly Starfleet is accommodating the model kit market (seen with Rutherford's model Cerritos) by making registry numbers easy to alter by cutting the transfer stickers up. 
There is a California class Eureka NCC-74543 operating in 2380, but by 2400 there is an Excelsior II class Eureka NCC-42023 operating. So while there’s a discrepancy in the chronological registry scheme, we can conjecture that the Cali class Eureka was decommissioned or destroyed prior to 2400.
I know it's unrelated to Lower Decks, but those Excelsior II registries don't make sense. Do they mean to imply that all the NCC-42xxx series 'normal' Excelsiors we've seen before are really supposed to be of the Excelsior II kind? Or that some of the old Excelsiors were eventually upgraded to the Excelsior II class, keeping the same registry? Or that Excelsior and Excelsior II ships were being built side by side? And what would be the class ship of the Excelsior II class, given that we have a USS Excelsior NCC-42037 with a registry higher than that of the Eureka?
Some of the unofficial works and fan manuals have this sort of system, with the USS Enterprise being the first ship modified with the TMP era technology (and this model therefore being the Enterprise class variant in such works), and Ships of the Starfleet having Mark II variants for both the Constitution and the Enterprise series. FASA had a number of ship variants in many classes, albeit using letter designations for them to denote improvements or significant changes from the first model.
FASA also had a Block I/Block II system for warships in Battletech to denote variations, although the modern writers have used that more to address the art problem that arose when Technical Readout: 3057 was published. Basically, they wanted to bring back the warships that had first appeared as Star League vessels in TRO: 2750, but the original art from that book had apparently been misplaced and wasn't available to meet the deadline. The TRO: 3057 ships were given entirely new art to represent Clan vessels (the Clans being the descendants of the Star League), and some fans to this day dislike the changes for various reasons. Most of the newer art doesn't look entirely incompatible between the two versions, but there are oddities like the Black Lion battlecruisers.
Unfortunately, from my perspective, it's very vague as to how long the Block I designs (2750, per writers now) remained in service after their Block II counterparts were being built. Early Clan books used the 2750 designs in a few places before TRO: 3057 came out, and the two-book Liberation of Terra set is a bit of an odd duck because not all the artists worked on both books. It's a modern series filling in the gaps of the Amaris Civil War (which caused the League's collapse) and the Exodus which led to the creation of the Clans, but I'm not sure what art references were available. The first LOT volume ends with the Exodus fleet leaving and consistently uses the 2750 designs, while the second volume consistently uses the 3057 designs for the early Clans. Even the 3057 version of the Vincent corvette, which is implied in the TRO to be a Clan-specific variant. Some early Clan era books also used normal versions of the Union and Overlord dropships, before it was established that the Clans typically used more advanced Union/Overlord C versions. It's certainly not impossible for them to use the older models, just unusual.
FASA also had a Block I/Block II system for warships in Battletech to denote variations, although the modern writers have used that more to address the art problem that arose when Technical Readout: 3057 was published. Basically, they wanted to bring back the warships that had first appeared as Star League vessels in TRO: 2750, but the original art from that book had apparently been misplaced and wasn't available to meet the deadline. The TRO: 3057 ships were given entirely new art to represent Clan vessels (the Clans being the descendants of the Star League), and some fans to this day dislike the changes for various reasons. Most of the newer art doesn't look entirely incompatible between the two versions, but there are oddities like the Black Lion battlecruisers.
Unfortunately, from my perspective, it's very vague as to how long the Block I designs (2750, per writers now) remained in service after their Block II counterparts were being built. Early Clan books used the 2750 designs in a few places before TRO: 3057 came out, and the two-book Liberation of Terra set is a bit of an odd duck because not all the artists worked on both books. It's a modern series filling in the gaps of the Amaris Civil War (which caused the League's collapse) and the Exodus which led to the creation of the Clans, but I'm not sure what art references were available. The first LOT volume ends with the Exodus fleet leaving and consistently uses the 2750 designs, while the second volume consistently uses the 3057 designs for the early Clans. Even the 3057 version of the Vincent corvette, which is implied in the TRO to be a Clan-specific variant. Some early Clan era books also used normal versions of the Union and Overlord dropships, before it was established that the Clans typically used more advanced Union/Overlord C versions. It's certainly not impossible for them to use the older models, just unusual.
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Baskir, Vandal, and Slayer were beautiful designs
I agree that it is very ambiguous as to what those 4XXXX registries denote.
While it was all the rage to change the design of the TOS Enterprise to the Discoprise and then claim that it's the same ship, I don't think that's the case here.
That's the option that makes the most sense registry-wise, but I don't think Drexler's intent was that they were refits, since they are significantly larger than the Excelsior class. And the Constitution II class Titan isn't a refit of an original Constitution class (although it looks like it could be...), so I don't see the Ex-II's as refits of the original Ex's.
I don't think that's the case either, because it doesn't make sense to build a clearly much more advanced ship while continuing to build a much less advanced ship at the same time. Also, the Excelsior II looks even more advanced than the Galaxy and Sovereign classes, which wouldn’t be the case if they were built pre-TNG.
That was definitely a snafu on their part.
I believe that Drexler's intent was that the Excelsior II class is supposed to be brand-new as of 2400 or whatever, but he should have been the first person to understand that 4XXXX registries would make no sense chronologically.
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Probably not side by side but given the uniqueness of the Excelsior project I can imagine registries were assigned for long term development. When the Excelsior II was revealed they continued on with that block of registries rather than being in line with the rest of the fleet.
I don’t particularly like that theory, but at least it would explain the low numbers better than had they just been assigned randomly.
I myself am not a huge fan of making new ships resemble old ships. I didn’t like it when LDS showed the Obena, I didn’t like it when PIC showed the Excelsior II (although I do like the design of the ship), and I certainly didn’t like it when they revealed the Titan-A. Things like that smack of laziness and unoriginality to me.
Yeah, I wonder if there was any rationale behind that choice or simply lack of consideration for what came before.
On the other hand, I would also like to know if they intend the 'Constitution II' class to be the 2270s Constitution refit as we know it, or something else completely. Are the Roman-numbered classes new builds, refits or some of both?
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