Agreed. And even if it would be easy for Starfleet to build a scaled-up version of an existing century-old design, that doesn't mean they would. It has been suggested that they might have deliberately went with a retro design to "sell" the new ship class to bureaucrats and the politicans pulling the purse strings, but seriously... And if the Excelsior layout represents some kind of optimum from a warp dynamics standpoint, then you wouldn't see the rather big variety in designs that Starfleet employs. Sure, some variety would be expected to account for different warp field geometries with different performance characteristics, but it's a veritable zoo out there, and then try to factor in all the alien ship designs that are even more different... IMHO, the blasted thing makes much more sense as a modernization of an existing Excelsior, visual evidence that it's supposed to be uoscaled be damned.
Though that still leaves the Archimedes registry suggesting it's a rather recently commissioned ship, and I'm not inclined to believe that refitted ships are eligible to receive a new registry... Maybe the Archimedes is an experimental Excelsior conversion that received a new NX-registry for that occasson, which then became a 'regular' NCC-number when it entered regular service? And if several of her classmates underwent the same treatment, with a USS Obena the first, that would even justify the separate class name.
Blah, this is a difficult beast to rationalize.
Though that still leaves the Archimedes registry suggesting it's a rather recently commissioned ship, and I'm not inclined to believe that refitted ships are eligible to receive a new registry... Maybe the Archimedes is an experimental Excelsior conversion that received a new NX-registry for that occasson, which then became a 'regular' NCC-number when it entered regular service? And if several of her classmates underwent the same treatment, with a USS Obena the first, that would even justify the separate class name.
Blah, this is a difficult beast to rationalize.
