Was the Enterprise-A a hangar queen?

[Timo]

the phaser fire alert

Actually, it would be fun if this could be stated to have been a feature back in TOS already. After all, none of TOS actually contradicts this: all the firings of hand phasers aboard the ship at kill setting were by authorized personnel and may have been duly logged in a forensic file rather than routed to the alarm klaxons, while all the criminal use of phasers (such as in "Conscience of the King") would have been at other settings (stun, self-destruct). That the alarm itself never actually went off in TOS need not distract us from following this interpretation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

^Plus, a lot of those phaser-fire incidents happened with the ship at yellow or red alert; maybe putting the ship on alert status shuts down the alarms, because any phaser fire would be seen by the ship's computer as justified.

--Sran

 

[DonIago]

^That doesn't track to me. If the ship is on alert status but a hostile boarding party beams aboard, having those alerts active could mean the difference between crew being able to mount an ambush and being taken by surprise.

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

^That doesn't track to me. If the ship is on alert status but a hostile boarding party beams aboard, having those alerts active could mean the difference between crew being able to mount an ambush and being taken by surprise.

^I thought you'd say that. I'm operating on the premise that the phasers stored aboard the ship have been scanned by the computer, so any other type of weapons fire would register as hostile.

--Sran

 

[Greg Cox]

the phaser fire alert

Actually, it would be fun if this could be stated to have been a feature back in TOS already. After all, none of TOS actually contradicts this: all the firings of hand phasers aboard the ship at kill setting were by authorized personnel and may have been duly logged in a forensic file rather than routed to the alarm klaxons, while all the criminal use of phasers (such as in "Conscience of the King") would have been at other settings (stun, self-destruct). That the alarm itself never actually went off in TOS need not distract us from following this interpretation.

Timo Saloniemi

Funny you should mention "Conscience of the King" since my new Enterprise-A book is a sequel to that ep. Can't remember, though, if I specifically state that the the phaser-fire alarm is a new feature or not . . . .

 

[Dukhat]

What was the Enterprise-A's mission?

(A) training ship

(B) Earth sector defense

(C) Under constant repair

(D) other

(D), and possibly (B). I've always had the belief that the reason why the TOS Enterprise was going to be decommissioned (besides being "20 years old" lol) was that Starfleet was planning on replacing it with a brand-new Excelsior-class Enterprise (NCC-1701-A). However, after the events of TVH, Starfleet instead decided to rename an old Connie as the Ent-A as a temporary ship for Kirk until the new Excelsior class ship was finished construction (now called the Ent-B), which would explain why the Ent-A was decommissioned so soon.

What does this have to do with the above? Since the Ent-A was just considered a temporary extravagance to Kirk for a few years, it probably wasn't an active-duty ship. Ignoring for the moment the insanity in TFF of Starfleet actually using this defective ship and soon-to-be-retired crew for a rescue mission to the Neutral Zone, the ship was probably just used for light duty and simple assignments near Sector 001.