STO: Both Worlds: Battle of Wolf 359

[Dukhat]

I can pull up a bunch of ships but by and large, the TNG-era was fairly consistent with registries as long as the ship in question was something being focused on. If the registry numbers came from more of a background type thing, a computer readout, etc. they can vary quite wildly.

One example are registries of Constellation-Class ships.

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USS Constance	NCC-10367		Destroyed	2367
USS Constellation	NX-1974	Class Protoype	Active	2293
USS Hathaway	NCC-2593		Active	2368
USS Stargazer	NCC-2893		Retired, preserved at Fleet Museum	2401
USS Victory	NCC-9754

That would depend on what was actually happening in Starfleet for them to go from ships with 2XXX registries in the 2290's or so, to ships with 1XXXX, 2XXXX, 3XXXX and 4XXXX between the 2300's to the 2340's. Not to mention that during that span of time, there didn't seem to be much in the way of newer designs being mass-produced until the 2350's when the Galaxy class family of designs/possible FC ships were being constructed.

So we have the Excelsior, the Miranda, the Oberth, and the Constellation (all TMP-era designs) being mass-produced during at least a 50 year time span, for whatever reason (well we know the reason; the TNG producers were forced to use the movie models as guest ships instead of having all new models built even though the show took place 80 years later.) The only outlier seems to be the Ambassador class, which again didn't seem to be produced in mass numbers. So if we focus on the above four classes, we get the 'wildly ranging' numbers of which you speak. But that's because they were produced during a much a long period of time than the Galaxy class family was by the start of TNG.

Excelsior: 2XXX, 1XXXX, 3XXXX, 4XXXX (5XXXX, 6XXXX)*
Miranda: 1XXX, 2XXXX, 3XXXX
Oberth: 6XX, 1XXXX, 2XXXX, 3XXXX, 5XXXX
Constellation: 1XXX, 2XXX, 3XXX, 7XXX, 9XXX, 1XXXX


So I really don't see a problem here.

*These two registries were production errors and should possibly not be part of this list.