The Sky's The Limit - question

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I gotta ask this anyway. Since this series deals so much with TNG, does it answer this question that has been bugging me for awhile - why Starfleet waited so long (nearly 20 years) to commission the Enterprise-D, after the C was destroyed?

(Was it, as I suspect, intentionally done - i.e. Starfleet briefly 'retired' the name Enterprise as a memorial to the loss of the C's crew, since the Enterprise-C is the only one ever to be destroyed with all hands lost?)

 

[greenmystik]

I remember them talking about the Galaxy class ship being in development not long after the E-C was lost. I believe it was in the neighborhood of 10-12 years by the time the E-D was built. It could have been more but I can remember at least 10 years of development being cited somewhere. So maybe they were waiting for this new class of explorer/city ship to be built, since it was supposed to be their crowning jewel at the time, to be the next Enterprise.

 

[Smiley]

Read Christopher's Star Trek: The Buried Age for a possible answer to that question. Not only does it have fun with continuity, but it's a darn good story as well.

 

[greenmystik]

I think that's where I remember seeing the 10 years development. Definitely a good read.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I remember them talking about the Galaxy class ship being in development not long after the E-C was lost. I believe it was in the neighborhood of 10-12 years by the time the E-D was built. It could have been more but I can remember at least 10 years of development being cited somewhere. So maybe they were waiting for this new class of explorer/city ship to be built, since it was supposed to be their crowning jewel at the time, to be the next Enterprise.

I thought about that, but most of the Enterprises up to that point were not completely state of the art ships - very powerful ones, to be sure, but not totally cutting edge. (The Excelsior class, for example, had already been flying for several years when the Enterprise-B was commissioned. And who knows how old the Ambassador class was, when the C debuted?) So I gotta go with my earlier theory on this.

 

[Dayton Ward]

Considering how long is supposed to have passed between the initial design of the Galaxy-class ships and when the first one came off the assembly line, Enterprise could have been on a list of proposed names for ships from the time the first blueprints were drafted.