Well, we will have to disagree on some of that. I consider Enterprise and Picard to be part of the same universe as TOS, TMP, TNG, DS9 and Voyager. Discovery is some close but different universe moving in a similar and yet different timeline. The Kelvin timeline is the same (and I don't mean after they change the past... the USS Kelvin has no place in the TOS timeline). I love how they brought in the single nacelle designs, but otherwise that timeline has nothing to offer.
I agree with that last quote. It seems like too many retcons to accept at this point if they were the same universe.
Leaving out how the JJ-verse and Disco are blatantly not the original Trek universe... Enterprise just doesn't fit what we knew of the era from TOS and the like: First contact with the Klingons. Andorians with ears. Starfleet having phasers, photon torpedoes, and transporters some seventy-five to ninety-five years early. The size of the ship vis-a-vis the TOS
Enterprise. After Cochrane broke the warp barrier in 2063, the Earth colonies didn't combine their system-defense fleets into a unified Starfleet until the 2130s -- Enterprise is decently on track with that, but I feel it works better to have the Romulan Wars be what spurs that (dialogue refers to the conflict being between Romulans and
Earth, not
Humans), and that snowballs into the formation of the Federation a few years later. If Enterprise had had the ship smaller and named something else, if it started in the Romulan Wars and ended with the founding of the Federation and the dream of a warp-5 ship,
that woulda been great. Oh -- and also no frikkin' Temporal Cold War (in addition to no phasers, photon torpedoes, or transporters). As it was, it would have worked great with a slight redress as the early voyages of NCC-1701 under Robert April. Bonus points if they'd adapted the story from Diane Carey's "Final Frontier" for the pilot.
As for Picard... None of the characters
feel right. Seven is suddenly bi or gay, despite
zero evidence of this on Voyager. They didn't get the actors back to play Maddox or Icheb, despite both being AAA (alive, active, and available). I am
pretty sure Icheb being tortured to death would get Q Junior's attention, since he's the latter's best friend and Q Junior was ready to die to save Icheb before. The warp drive (and starships) look way, way off from what we previously saw of the era. Which, speaking of, we're solidly in the middle of the "All Good Things..."/"Endgame"/"The Visitor" time period, and zero sign of those uniforms so previously used so consistently. And a Starfleet Admiral dropping the F-bomb is
disgustingly unprofessional for the Star Trek setting. A
sotto voce "
merde" from Picard is about the strongest we got, apart from Data's "oh, shit". The setting and situation didn't call for that. That was edgy for edgy's sake.
Both shows have a lot of good
moments, and I like both more than Disco, but they just don't
fit the previously-established canon. *shrug*
For the record, I also prefer to think that they're both the same class, akin to the differences between the original Excelsior, the upgraded version from TUC, and the refit from GEN. But mostly because I think the Rigel class, being from the 'new' age period of starship design as outlined in my previous post, should look more like the BoBW kitbashes rather than an Ambassador class variant.
I jave a certain rough threshold of variance before it's a new class. "The Cage" to production? Still
Constitution class. Production to TMP?
Enterprise class. Completely new warp engines, main sensor, navigational deflectors, lower sensor platform, bridge superstructure, impulse engines, photon torpedo deck, warp nacelle pylons, and 6% increase in overall size? Yeah, that counts.
Enterprise-C to
Zhukov? Same class. Both of those to Andy's "Encounter at Farpoint" matte painting? Could that be the
Rigel class? I have zero problem with that, but what we see in the TNG era is less acknowledgement of subclasses and variants. No matter how altered, I feel Starfleet would still just consider that
Ambassador class -- just a later version of it.
Maybe start with the off-round/shallow ellipse of the
Niagara class, slap on some elongated
Galaxy nacelles a la the
New Orleans class, and there's your
Rigel?
If the engines (fuel and reactor) are in the nacelles then why would they both be running out of control? Only one integrator was fused and running wild - the one that Scott was trying to fix. The other nacelle was probably just matching speed in order to avoid turning the ship into a spinning top, no doubt an automated integral feature to all paired nacelles.
I can grudgingly accept this. I snipped most of that post. You raised some good points and I will have to think further. I'm back around to where I was a couple years ago, where antimatter aboard starships was a newish thing with the class and, along with Duotronics making possible FTL navigation and sensing, allowed the higher warp velocities to make longer-range exploration possible (the "Time Barrier" Tyler spoke of in "The Cage"). If the antimatter is stored up in the engine pods, possibly with replenishment piping up from the ship if they have spin-reversal tech aboard (to explain "Obsession"), maybe the matter stores are in both primary and secondary hulls, near their respective engineering facilities. For the saucer, there are fusion reactors providing impulse power, and for the secondary, maybe that's a fusion reactor farm aft of Main Engineering to power the ship. Don't ask me to explain the dilithium in that setup -- I only just started mentally re-tackling this...
i think that you make great points and it is interesting to see that someone else has tried to match these class names up. I actually would like to hear more of your reasoning, but I have also mentioned some key points here to try to not take up too much space.
I have also looked at class names with no models and models with no class names to see what I could do. I still like the Qualor II Planet of the Titans study model for the
Apollo class. I added bussard collectors to the fronts of the nacelles, reworked the secondary hull slightly in the areas we can't see, and added some
Excelsior-
Ambassador mixed detailing to show it as an intermediate design. I go with the
Excelsior study model with the two small
Grissom style engines for the
Merced class (remember Data's commentary about a ship of this class being able to catch the
Enterprise as "too small, too slow"). And so on.
Until this thread, this was not known to me, as I had only ever heard NCC as being NC from noncombatant American planes, being combined with CCC from Russian military vessels. Can you tell me where this info comes from?
The problem there is that I've read so many bits and pieces quoted here and there, and the rare full interview, that all of Jefferies' ruminations have just sort of formed a rudimentary timeline in my head. He came up with 'NCC' based on the Civil Aviation code of "NC" for US-flagged civilian craft. He tacked a second "C" on because it sounded good and gave it a bit of a remove from reality. He learned later that the Soviet Union's Civil Aviation code at the time was "CC", and liked the symbolism of these two superpowers who were adversaries in the 20th century "melding together" to peacefully explore the galaxy in the remove of the 23rd.
At the time he did the "Court Martial" wall chart, he had already decided that Starships/Heavy Cruisers had "NCC" prefixes, while other vessel types had other prefixes. This is why the chart headed "STAR SHIP STATUS" has no "NCC" before the hull numbers. This is informed conjecture. He'd already noodled after coming up with the registry prior to the first pilot what the numbers indicated (17th Cruiser design, 01st production hull), and had, between then and "Court Martial" run across the US Navy hull number prefixes, so I figure that's when he speculated about at least Destroyers (Kirk's never-screened backstory included commanding a Destroyer prior to the
Enterprise). The only other clear thing I know is that, when doing prelim work for Phase 2, he came up with "1701A [note no hyphen] - first moderize [sic]/refit". The Powers That Be obviously noted that, even if they didn't use it as he intended in TVH.
I'll go back through all my books and magazines again at some point to be able to cite references, but I specifically remember him noting "CC" for wet navy cruisers, and saying he'd speculated on other double letters for other ship types, like "DD" for Destroyers (almost certainly prompted by conversations with Gene where the latter mentioned his new Captain had previously commanded one).
I actually like the idea that NCC numbers are largely serial. The reason that I used the assumptions I did id that it allowed me to suggest what class a ship would based on the NCC number, and so some inferred data was better that no data. For a totally off-the-cuff example example, if NCC-45678 was a known Excelsior-class, then this system let me suggest that NCC-45700 or NCC-4599 might either be Excelsior class or one of the derivative classes. Not perfect, but it would let a person put a class, and model to almost every ship listed on the NCC chart at Memeory Alpha at that time.
I
do like it, and wish it worked as well as Jefferies' TOS era production blocks. I've done my best with the scant "Lost Era" detail we have. Here's a biggie. "Dark Page" establishes Lwaxana and Ian Troi married proximal to stardate 30000. After about a year of entries, there's a seven-year gap in Lwaxana's journal -- that she started that year, ending a few months after Deanna was born. Per the show lore, Kestra was born in 2330 and Deanna in 2336. So Lwaxana's journal, started on stardate 30620, was started in 2329. Counting back at a thousand stardate units a year, 30620 should be about halfway through 2353, though. After the TOS Five-Year Mission, the stardates, that
had been moving steadily at about 1,200 units a year, stalled out between series and films. Two-and-a-half years and the stardate was about the same. Stardates were completely borked through TWOK, TSFS, and TVH, too. I have not yet come up with a rationalization for this. At the TOS rate, stardates would have hit TNG timeframes (41000+) around 2300. Counting back from TNG first season at a thousand a year, they zero out in 2323. So
something's going on there between 2272 and 2364.
In the same vein, registries post 2285/NCC-2500 steadily go up, but not at a logarithmic rate. The
Ambassador, at NX-10521 was ordered circa 2305. I don't know if some pre-registry-revamp NDD ships got carried over with new registry numbers, but I like that explanation rather than an explosion of some 7,500 new ships built in twenty years (or 375 per year, steady rate). I know Starfleet shipbuilding capacity has been expanding, but that much, that fast? That also makes a nice cutoff : Four-digit registry? Late 23rd century. Five-digit registry? 24th century.
However, again, they made it through nearly 60,000 in forty years (from NX-10521 ordered in 2305 to NX-70637 ordered in 2343). That's nearly 1,600 ships a year, steady rate. So there's a lot to sort out, there. Has capacity just increased
that much? Did they build a bunch of drydocks to crank out
Excelsiors after the Tomed Incident, but then didn't have to fight the Romulans, after all? Were ships ordered but then not built when tensions waned? If Mike had talked to Matt about registry meanings in 1986, maybe he would've carried the block model forward. It'd certainly be less unwieldy.
This has given me more to think about, since the secondary hull could be a "glorified nacelle."
If you're a Star Trek writer who doesn't know how the ship works, you might think the important stuff is all in the saucer and the secondary hull is just shuttlebay and cargo bays. Certainly, in "Day of the Dove", Main Engineering was on "number six deck" in the saucer and the entity had sealed the accesses through the interconnecting neck "trapping nearly four hundred crewmen belowdecks". Despite the VFX then showing the entity leaving the ship from the secondary hull. *shrug* But yeah, I can see many instances where the writers seemed to regard the saucer as the main part of the ship, and the whole secondary-hull-plus-warp-engines assembly as one dacelle depending
from that main hull, like the engine pod of a 747 hanging off the airplane's wing.
The writing is too vague and intermittently-consistent to get clear on much. Matt Jeffries' set model did clarify one thing for me, though. Main Engineering, the set, is only the starboard half of Main Engineering, the shipboard facility -- the ceiling braces all curve down from port to starboard. Scotty's office on the upper level is straddling the two sides. Whether it's symmetrical, I don't know. Whether the room is all we see and there's some other vital systemry just to port, necessitating moving the facility off the centerline, I don't know. But it's all too big to fit in the saucer. I need to go back through the entire series and note all references to the ship's structure and layout. It's been too long. But my sense is too many of the writers
did think of the secondary hull as a "glorified nacelle" with sticky-off bits to make the ship go.
I don’t think there were any ships originally listed as Renaissance class that were later shown to be Excelsiors. I think the only time that happened was with the Melbourne and the Crazy Horse (the latter listed as a Cheyenne class ship in the Encyclopedia with a 5XXXX registry only to be shown later with stock footage of the Repulse, but the registry wasn’t changed in the ‘pedia to something lower.)
Since we saw the
Nebula-
Melbourne in both "Best of Both Worlds" and "Emissary", I stick with that over the
Excelsior, regardless of which is clearer. And in my lists, the
Crazy Horse is still a
Cheyenne.
Agreed. This is similar to how the crew would always refer to THE transporter room, even though there were several different ones depicted throughout the series. Precisely which one would always be known to the characters in question
I like to think they rotate transporter rooms with each duty shift, so everyone knows which one is the active one. This lets maintenance happen. They talked about that a bit more in TNG -- where O'Brien acknowledged the one that was his favorite.
Seem like every 40 years or so Starfleet will seek to build a new class of Large Explorers, the premier ship of Starfleet and one of the most prestigious ships in the Federation.
But first test the new technologies in smaller ships. Then test the Explorers components in a utility vehicle, a Work Elephant. (an Indian elephant being an analogy). If the work elephant is successful, then use components to construct a new exploration vessel.
So Apollo utility ships are assembled first. Successful enough that a decision is made to go ahead with the Ambassador class.
Decades late the Nebula class is constructed, and then the Galaxy class.
I expect that only a handful of each class would be constructed.
They take their time on the linchpin classes, as they intend them to be in service for as long as possible, which is automatically limited for classes that need to be and stay on the bleeding edge of technology for as long as possible, when it's always moving forward. Over the twenty years of the development cycle, ships sporting the features of the class under development will start showing up. The
Cheyenne and
Springfield had underscaled
Galaxy saucers. By
New Orleans, they had early
Galaxy style warp engines.
Challenger had full-size
Galaxy engines.
Nebula was the first to feature the full size saucer
and engines.
I'm more interested, currently, in the post-rollout progression. The
Constitution class in 2245 was arguably smaller and more primitive than what we saw twenty years on in TOS, by which point the
Miranda class was in service, and that saucer is much more different yet. The span from 2245 to 2285 fascinates me -- the overlap of the ultimate evolution of the
Constutution superimposed with the advent of
Excelsior-family designs. Then again from 2285 to 2323, when the
Ambassador was launched. We know between
Ambassador and
Galaxy, there were in-between designs with less-elliptical saucers and other engines besides the ones from those two classes.
The page also says, "The book erroneously describes this painting as an early design stage of the Enterprise-D." So that explains that confusion. The painting is of the Ambassador class, but a print source was the first to mistake that painting for the older 1980 one that was an early version of what would become the Galaxy class.
I caught so many errors in those BTS books. The Star Trek Sketchbook by Herb and Yvonne Solow has a frontpiece the caption says was the start of it all -- Jefferies' first drawing of the
Enterprise. It's not wrong. Sorta. It's the first drawing Jefferies did for Phase 2. The actual three-view he did in pastels on black boardstock isn't even
in that book -- it's over in "The Art of Star Trek".
This is the proto-
Enterprise-D:
Andy went to that when he got the job to design the new ship for TNG and came up with this:
But this was designed to be the class between
Excelsior and
Galaxy from the get-go, and included on the conference room wall display as the
Enterprise-C. This was never a direction Andy was going for the TNG hero ship:
