"The Ultimate Computer" Remastered -- Preview? Pix?

[Nebusj]

Mister_Atoz said:
In regards to the Starship Republic issue, isn't it possible that the ship mentioned in "Court Martial" was an earlier class retired sometime after the events mentioned in the episode, and that a Constitution Class starship named Republic was commissioned later. After all, the aircraft carrier Enterprise which was in service at the time this episode was filmed, is an entirely different ship from the other aircraft carrier named Enterprise in service twenty years before.

The case for the Republic being a Constitution class (and let's remember that no ship was canonically established as a Constitution-class ship until 1987): whenever we saw another starship on the Original Series, it was a Constitution. The name seems to have been used something like Dreadnought originally was in naval affairs, for this one particular model of things. Later the name got generalized, but that often happens to names.

Case against: in the first part of ``The Menagerie'', produced essentially simultaneously with ``Court-Martial'' and therefore likely to represent the intentions of the show creators at the time, Pike is explicitly said by Stone to have been injured on an ``inspection tour of a cadet vessel. Old Class J starship.'' As far as I know this is the only mention of alternate classes of starships in the Original Series, but it is there and the intention is obvious: there are older ships which can be used to give cadets experience on real vessels without committing the ships of the line to ferrying them about.

Proposal for my Timo merit badge: the cadets whom Pike saved were part of Class J -- or possibly Jay -- and the starship was an older Constitution-class vessel doing its time as a training vessel. It was the old ``Class J'' starship because it was the old starship given over to Class J. This would be analogous to the way in The Wrath of Khan that the Enterprise was an old training starship, training the new Enterprise Class of cadets.

 

[Spike730]

Here's my theory:
In the 2240s, the NCC-1700 design was so fundamantally advanced compared with the rest of the fleet that the term "spaceship" wouldn't do it justice. Hence the class was called Starship-class and the captains of such vessels were called "Starship Fleet Captain" (or simply Fleet Captain). And while the ships received a standard NCC-Starfleet registry they would also get a U.S.S. prefix. This would explain why other Starfleet-registered vessels like the Antares or Woden didn't have a U.S.S. on the hull.

In the late 2250s/early 2260s the NCC-1700 class lost its special status within the fleet, because new starship classes were developed and older vessels (like the Republic) were upgraded (new warpdrive, new weapon systems, etc.) to starship status. The class was renamed to Constitution-class (as evidenced by the Defiant dedication plaque and Scotty's phaser schematics).

That would allow the Republic to be a starship but not necessarily of the Constitution-class.

 

[Timo]

Personally, I'd like to allow for the fact that NX-01 was considered a starship. To nominate the top designs (capital ships, battleship analogies, whatever) of any given era "starship" would do the trick nicely - until every ship in the newer generations was at least as good as the best ships of the preceding generations, making the segregation sound silly.

As far as I know this is the only mention of alternate classes of starships in the Original Series

Unless one counts the fact that Kirk considerd the old Archon a starship, too. That ancient ship was highly unlikely to be of the same class as Kirk's own ride.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[cooleddie74]

Spike730 said:
Here's my theory:
In the 2240s, the NCC-1700 design was so fundamantally advanced compared with the rest of the fleet that the term "spaceship" wouldn't do it justice. Hence the class was called Starship-class and the captains of such vessels were called "Starship Fleet Captain" (or simply Fleet Captain). And while the ships received a standard NCC-Starfleet registry they would also get a U.S.S. prefix. This would explain why other Starfleet-registered vessels like the Antares or Woden didn't have a U.S.S. on the hull.

In the late 2250s/early 2260s the NCC-1700 class lost its special status within the fleet, because new starship classes were developed and older vessels (like the Republic) were upgraded (new warpdrive, new weapon systems, etc.) to starship status. The class was renamed to Constitution-class (as evidenced by the Defiant dedication plaque and Scotty's phaser schematics).

That would allow the Republic to be a starship but not necessarily of the Constitution-class.

A very good and nicely thought-out theory. Workable. But Paramount and the franchise producers went ahead and had the Republic be a Constitution-class ship in the published reference books of the 1990s so I doubt they'd go and change anything after a decade or more of saying one thing rather than another. While the reference books aren't as canon as the actual TV episodes and movies they are canon ENOUGH to a large enough proportion of the dedicated fanbase that just about every fan I've talked to about the Republic considers her one of the Constitution-class starships of the era.

 

[Timo]

Fans have also made apple juice out of the lemons handed to them - there's a long-standing theory that the Republic and the Constellation, with the odd registries out, were pathfinding refits of earlier, possibly radically different classes. Not minor twiddling with a pre-existing "starship configuration", but radical tests of, say, substituting a saucer for a formerly spherical primary hull.

I could live with that, although it would be simpler to say that the Republic never had anything to do with the Constitution class and always looked completely different. After all, the Constellation originally did look distinct from Kirk's ship, as she was built out of an inaccurate AMT kit. (And too bad TOS-R removed those distinctions. )

Timo Saloniemi

 

[cooleddie74]

Meh. Canon is a funny thing sometimes. Even when the studio says something is, many fans rebel. And when it was never fully established on-screen a lot of fans demand it be canon and official.