The "A" Game

[FalTorPan]

Perhaps one of those corrupted the ship's registry number?

Timo Saloniemi

Oooh, good one!


Marian

I like that explanation, too.

I like the notion that other ships have had histories as notable as the Enterprise, and the idea that the legacy of one such ship would be commemorated in another ship of the Galaxy class. To me the Galaxy-class USS Yamato's registry number is NCC-1305-E.

As far as which number is more cannnnnnnnnnon and correct, who's really to say? For that matter, who at the studio would even care?

 

[Unicron]

But if so, the new class would still be of the Miranda design, so what would this solve? They would still be building spanking new Mirandas (or another class of that basic design) in the early 24th century and giving them registries in the 31000 range.

No, it would be a subclass of the Miranda family but an entirely distinct design. And while it wouldn't necessarily prevent other variants from having 31000 registries, the bulk of those would be Saratoga class ships that were either refit or new builds. So if you came across a frigate with a 31000 registry, it would probably be a Saratoga class.

 

[Timo]

Oh, no doubt Mirandas with 31000 range registries would have design differences vs. Mirandas with 21000 or 1800 registries. Ditto with the various "batches" of Excelsiors or Oberths. But I don't see the point of saying that the 31000 range subclass was spearheaded by the ST4:TVH vessel which was for some reason re-registered. It would seem equally if not more likely that an all-new vessel with the name Saratoga would be built at some point, and not necessarily as a batch leader, either.

Personally, I think there are rather high odds that the ST4 vessel was lost with all hands, what with being stranded in deep space near the Neutral Zone without power (assuming the probe did the Yorktown thing to every vessel it encountered). Whether Starfleet would be willing to recover and reactivate a floating grave depends on a number of factors; perhaps they would like to rename the derelict at reactivation for psychological reasons.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

Maybe. I just don't see any specific evidence of that, and assuming it to be the same ship with a new registry is the easiest way to avoid any possible confusion. If the Saratoga was indeed the spearhead of a new class, then a new registry makes sense anyway.

 

[USS KG5]

Oh, no doubt Mirandas with 31000 range registries would have design differences vs. Mirandas with 21000 or 1800 registries. Ditto with the various "batches" of Excelsiors or Oberths. But I don't see the point of saying that the 31000 range subclass was spearheaded by the ST4:TVH vessel which was for some reason re-registered. It would seem equally if not more likely that an all-new vessel with the name Saratoga would be built at some point, and not necessarily as a batch leader, either.

Personally, I think there are rather high odds that the ST4 vessel was lost with all hands, what with being stranded in deep space near the Neutral Zone without power (assuming the probe did the Yorktown thing to every vessel it encountered). Whether Starfleet would be willing to recover and reactivate a floating grave depends on a number of factors; perhaps they would like to rename the derelict at reactivation for psychological reasons.

Timo Saloniemi

Less bloodthirstily (There is no reason to believe the Saratoga and Yorktown did not get the same kind of handy-dandy power reactivation Earth did ) it could easily have met with another incident at some point in the future that led to its replacement with a newer ship of the same class.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I personally prefer that the Enterprise is the only ship to have those suffixes in its registry. Not because I think that honor should only go to the Enterprise, but because I just thought it was a silly practice to begin with...

Pretty soon, every ship in the fleet will have suffixes. The Saratoga-C, the Yorktown-E, the Killer-B, and so on. Stop it already...


Perhaps Starfleet in the future should just abandon NCC hull registries and just identify ships by their names and suffixes...

 

[hellsgate]

[rant] I personally think the suffixes (NCC 1701-A) should remain confined to fan-fic & novelizations. TV series & Movies should do their own thing. [/rant]

 

[FalTorPan]

I think registry numbers should all be hexadecimal representations of prime numbers.

NCC-641
NCC-BBF

Much better.

 

[aridas sofia]

The idea of affixing a letter to the hull number came from Matt Jefferies himself, and can be seen on one of his sketches working out the Phase II design. He explains in his note that "1701-A" would have meant the first modification of the 1701 hull, "1701-B" the second modification, and so on. So, by his reckoning, the TMP ship should have been "NCC-1701-A" and any later ship built new from the keel up should have had a new number.

I suspect that the misunderstandings within the TMP production team about whether the final Enterprise redesign was a rebuild or a new ship led to the "1701-A" being forgotten. Probert thought it a new ship, warranting a new "NCC-1800" number, but Roddenberry felt squeamish about letting go of that iconic "NCC-1701".

In a more sensible Starfleet the Phase II ship was probably the rebuild, and numbered "NCC-1701-A", while the TMP ship was a newbuild and numbered "NCC-1800".

 

[Guartho]

When I was a kid I swore up and down that TMP was the A and the one in TVH and FF was B. It's funny what strange ideas you get in your head and cling to.

 

[Manticore]

When I was a kid I swore up and down that TMP was the A and the one in TVH and FF was B. It's funny what strange ideas you get in your head and cling to.

It's funny, that's what I thought too. But then, I thought that the original was destroyed at the end of TOS in a fight against the Klingons (which I guess was a corruption of what happened TSFS. ) I could not for the life of me reconcile the E-B being an Excelsior!

 

[ElScoob]

Just as a bit of semi-relevant trivia, I seem to recall that early drafts of the basic concept for TNG had the show's Enterprise designated NCC-1701-7, the seventh starship to bear the name (and would have taken place 150 years after the TOS films, hence it being the seventh ship).

Eventually they tweaked that a bit, dialing things back to 78 years later and the fifth ship. Once STIV came out, and we saw the 1701-A, it was decided to make the new ship 1701-D (rather than, presumably, 1701-5), in order to maintain continuity with what the feature films had laid down.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

First of all, hello to everyone on the BBS. I'm brand new to this group, but I've been a Trekkie (yes, with an i-e, thank you very much) since I was old enough to say "Star Trek." I'm an avid fan, love the Andorians, hate the Akiraprise, and am "optimistically horrified" about ST:XI.

I hope that sums it all up in a nutshell for you.

Now that's out of the way, I have a gripe, which will lead to a question, which--in turn--I hope will lead to intelligent comment from the BBSers.

Here goes:

What's with the -A in starship registries? Or -B -C -D, etc.? Bear in mind, I know the real-world reasons; writers wanting to "connect" the various incarnations of the Starship Enterprise to fans throughout the series iterations.

But the gripe I have is when it's taken to the extreme (the Enterprise-J from ENT being a prime example that makes me roll my eyes in annoyance).

So let's talk application. If we were really dealing with real ships and real names, do we even need that sloppy suffix? Gosh, registries would sure look a lot neater (and be a pinch easier to fit into the 23rd-century equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet!).

But, alas, we're left with the -A. So, why would Starfleet decide to use this device, real-world? Do they forget which ship is which? Do they do it for tradition's sake? Or is there some other reason they just don't assign a brand new hull number to each ship build?

[Puts soap-box away]

Anyways, that's my question. What are your thoughts?

*c/a

Well, I never really bought the "naval construction contract" as being the meaning of NCC. It seems silly to put a contract number on the hull rather than a ship designation... sort of like using the document number on the bottom of your birth certificate to refer to you instead of your name, or your "serial number" (social security in the USA).

To me, NCC is "navigational contact code" and is essentially the IFF (identify-friend-or-foe) transponder designation of the ship. Each ship has a radio beacon which either constantly broadcasts this "pip" or sends it when given a "recognized query pip" from another vessel (depending on the alert situation). It's basically a brief signal that says to the other ships in the area "Hi, this is who I am."

So, you're seeing this code without having visual recognition of the ship. Evidently, someone in Starfleet wanted certain well-recognized codes to be replicated. Most likely, to be honest, this would be for ENEMY recognition purposes, I think. If the "Enterprise" is the most legendary ship in the eyes of the Klingons, that gives you a psychological advantage when facing them that the "Joe's Starship" might not have. So you reuse the designation so that the potential hostiles will see this and have that psychological "oh, this is the Enterprise, I'd better be careful" reaction.

That's the most reasonable explanation I can envision. Of course, the fact that there were never two ships with 1701 codes at the same time (well, "Yesterday's Enterprise" notwithstanding) also makes it a bit more efficient as a numbering scheme... but that seems trivial compared to the "recognition factor" argument.

Of course, there's also the "honoring the original ship" argument, but again, Federation folks would be less likely to be affected by the NUMBER, and more by the NAME, wouldn't they be?

 

[Timo]

To be sure, the very idea of putting the letters in front of the numbers reeks of utter illogic unless the letters give information independently of the numbers.

That is, NCC cannot literally mean "naval construction contract" or "navigational contact code" because if that were true, every vessel would have NCC in front of the number. And that would be complete waste of paint, much like insisting that every car license plate must begin with the letters "CLP".

However, NCC can be given any interpretation that provides the ogler with additional information. Say, it may be an "area code", much like the lettering in certain registry plates tells the state or county of origin of the vehicle, or the lettering in aircraft registries tells the nation of origin. Or it may be a code describing the vehicle's nature or function, so that a person reading a list of starship registries can tell the heavy cruisers apart from the light tankers. The former theory is the likelier, considering that very dissimilar ships have been witnessed with NCC, and that NCC seems exclusive to Starfleet vessels while other Federation operators use other three-letter combinations (originally/incidentally acronyms?) typically beginning with the letter N.

By the same token, the letter suffix might tell a story we need or want to hear. I accept that there would always be a portion of the "audience" (in the Trek universe) who would observe starships via their registry numbers, by looking at computer screens or listening to radio chatter etc. And I accept it would be a good idea psychologically to repeat certain "cool" registries for the benefit of this audience, in which case the suffixes would be vital in telling apart the various repetitions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[aridas sofia]

^When I came up with "navigational contact code" it was a) never intended to be the only prefix, and b) intended to be the prefix for commissioned "class one" starships. "Class two" support spacecraft in Starfleet, like we saw in TAS' Huron, etc. would have an appended NCC, primarily because there were so many of them. What else was used in civilian recreational and commerce was left open.

I've since drifted from my attachment to "navigational contact code," which in any event, I'd developed to give an "active duty" meaning to "naval construction contract". I didn't know of Jefferies' background for NCC, conflating "NC" and "CCCP". That kind of historical background, with some distant meaning lost to memory, is a much closer approximation of what I'd expect in TOS. Acronyms were mercifully absent in those shows, and in their absence separated the Trek future from the 1960s, acronym-soaked NASA past.

 

[Forbin]

For a while I was on the same appended-NCC kick, so when I did my USS Venture kitbash I made the number "NCC-S-yaddayadda" for "Survey ship." I figured that also covered me in case someone else used that particular number.

I seem to have stopped doing that almost instantly.