@yotsuya good summary: I would add that the advent of the explosive shell in the main batteries of warships played a huge factor in switch to metal hulls. Well, that plus rifling and breech-loading.
Well, the usual definition of "acceptable canon" is "appears on screen" (which can be visual or a dialog reference), and said ST6:TUC reference seems to be good enough for Memory Alpha to consider NCC-934 to be Eagle and Constitution-class, canonically. IIRC it was in dialog that Eagle was referred to as a Connie. MA is ambivalent about Constitution's NCC, leaving 1700 undefined -- which is what provided an opening for my speculations. "Appears in an okudagram" is a much more specific and stringent standard, and jettisoning something because it fails that test ALSO means jettisoning a lot of other things that likewise fail that standard (I don't have examples at my fingertips, but I'm certain they're out there). Are you sure you want to go there? TBH I also personally hate the notion of a ship with that low of an NCC number being a Connie, especially a ship that miraculously remains in service into the TNG era, but I'm not going to simply "wish it away". Having to accept its existence as such, I set out to make it work somehow. If one has to stretch all the way back to 1017, 934 isn't that much further back....as a one-off. I just wish the dreadnaughts hadn't been given numbers in the 21xx range...or that writers hadn't given the nice round 2000 number to Excelsior. It's just a headache trying to build a chronological timeline of NCC's... I mean, if Fleet is willing to re-use antique if not ancient NCC's without -A/-B/-C etc., then how can we ALSO have the rapid inflation of NCC's? There seem to be tens of thousands of ships built in just the TNG "decade" (TNG through Voyager) alone!!!
Isn't for me, though - Memory Alpha is often full of shit. No, it wasn't. In fact, dialogue doesn't acknowledge the existence of any ships named Eagle. That's the baseline for speculation. Whatever one makes of that is up to personal tastes and all. Or then there are always tens of thousands of ships being built, but at earlier points in Fleet history, they didn't get NCC numbers. Take DSC, say, where the heroes believe there are about 7,000 ships in Starfleet, yet no NCC registry goes past the low 1700s in that show yet. A simple change in bureaucratic practices could result in the "surge" we may witness, rather than any change in actual production. Timo Saloniemi
Has anyone from the original series or later ever addressed registry numbers in discussions or at cons? I would love to hear their explanations, even if we discover that they were never meant to make sense.
Other than 1701, 1371, and 1017, there are no registry numbers in TOS that link to anything. We have a wall of numbers in Court Martial, but they aren't linked to anything. We have Jefferies explanation of how he came up with 1701, but I have never seen anything about how those registry numbers were selected. It seem sot be random. They wanted Constellation to be different from Enterprise and rearranged the number for the decal (they had to make the U.S.S. Constellation decal so I don't know why they didn't make a more original number). What does happen as later series progress is that the numbers jump. There doesn't appear to be any pattern other than newer ships tend to have higher numbers. The only way I can make sense of what ships have what number is that the NCC number is an order number. Not all orders are completed and a lot of order numbers are reserved without any intention of using them. I would say that different ranges are allocated for different types of ships at different times. So in the TOS era, the 16, 17, and 18 ranges have ships in the Constitution Class. Reliant is also in the 18 range. The Scout Destroyers are in the 5 and 6 ranges (TMP dialog and Grissom and later Oberth). The larger ships (the one dreadnaught in TMP dialog and Excelsior). The Constellation class has a 19 number. But the Excelsior seems to be one off so a couple of the 20 range are also Constitution Class. It would make sense that some replacement ships would have higher numbers. But where they fit and how it is arranges seems to be completely haphazard. I think each era has a set of ranges and we get just enough ships to see the increase in numbers but without revealing a pattern.
For the movies, I'm sure the Reliant's 1864 registry was meant to indicate that she was somewhat newer than the Enterprise, but not by too much. But in STIII, I'm almost certain that the Excelsior's 2000 reg and the Grissom's 638 reg was nothing more than a big ship having a 'big' registry and a small ship having a 'small' registry, irrespective of the idea that the Grissom was almost certainly a newer ship than the TOS and TMP Constitution class.
I think this might have merit, but... Three digit numbers for smaller ships like scout/destroyer/survey. Four digits for larger capital ships like starships/heavy frigates/battlecruisers. So, what do we do when you run out of numbers for the smaller ships (i.e. 999 for small ships, and 8999 for large ships)? I'd think there would be more smaller ships over larger ships.
The Grissom's number is in keeping with FJ's Scout/Destroyer class registries (a few of which were actually used in TMP). FJ used 5xx and 6xx for scouts and destoyers, 17xx and 18xx for heavy cruisers, 21xx for dreadnaughts, and 38xx for tugs. What follows in the movies is 1864 for Reliant, 638 for Grissom, 2000 for Excelsior, and a lot of behind the scenes numbers from 956 to 2048.
I don’t believe for one minute that whoever came up with the Grissom’s registry number (or the Excelsior’s, for that matter) knew anything about FJ’s work.
ILM were contracted to build the models. Unless someone like @Maurice or anyone else in the know can correct me, I doubt ILM knew or cared about FJ.
If that’s the case, then one would think that he would have known about the U.S.S. Entente, which was mentioned in TMP and had a higher registry than the Excelsior. “2000” was considered a ‘futuristic’ number in the ‘80’s, since that year was so ‘far away’ at that time. I’m sure the idea was to show that the Excelsior was the ‘future’ of Starfleet vessels, not that it had anything to do with a non-canon registry scheme for certain types of ships.
So because they didn't follow FJ's work exactly, you assume that they didn't know or care about it? That's an odd assumption. You can care about your predecessors' work while still doing your own thing.
Ok, maybe “not care” is too harsh a statement. Rather, if they did know about the FJ tech manual, it wasn’t the impetus for the numbers they chose to label those models, IMHO.
The guys who did the voiceovers and the computer screens were typically different people who did the models, so it's difficult to say who came up with what number and why. Andy Probert wrote the Epsilon Nine chatter (hence his name being in it) and went to the FJ tech manual for ship names and registries, subject only to Trumbull's approval. According to the TWOK script the Reliant was supposed to be an older ship of the Enterprise class, but when they designed a wholly different ship the number got changed, probably without any real thought as to if it were a newer or older ship. I suspect NX-2000 was just a nice round number what screams "much newer than 1701" and that's all.
A lot of the registry numbers came from the production. But it is a simple guess that they referenced the FJ lists so they didn't duplicate any numbers.
Not claiming anything other than that Bill George fits the profile of someone who could be influenced by FJ. He even worked for Greg Jein before joining ILM. As for the Entente, I'm not sure how common that knowledge was in the 1980s. The Revere/Columbia comm traffic is so clear that I remember hearing it in the theater in 1979 but the Entente part is hard to make out even on modern surround systems.