Were there other Enterprises between the NX-01 and the NCC-1701?

AFAIK, no, it wasn't. The other ships in the class got the refit (i.e. the secondary hull) but not the Enterprise itself.

 

Yeah, "These Are the Voyages..." was very clear that Enterprise NX-01 was retired when the Federation was founded. Which makes sense, since it was basically the ship that got the ball rolling on the founding of both the Coalition of Planets and then the Federation itself. If a single ship were responsible for unifying the Thirteen Colonies into the U.S., I think we'd want to retire it and keep it as a museum ship too!

 

I actually like the NX class better WITH the secondary hull than without...

 

I misread that as ”museum shop” and still found myself agreeing. My first job was at a small local museum where a log cabin dating to the 1600s was our museum shop. I spent many of my hours there setting up their bar code system… It was a very pleasant place to work and now I’m imagining some 18 year old reading at a counter waiting for people to come by and purchase a book of paper dolls based on the bridge crew. (Purchase with what? I don’t know. Imagine this is before the idea of money became hazy or the customers are aliens who still use it.)

 

I always felt like it was a missed opportunity to depict the basic shape of the Constitution class as being the direct descendant of Earth designs. I think it would be much more interesting if the various design elements of the Constitution class each came from different founding Federation worlds, so I try to headcanon that idea in as much as I can. I try to imagine that secondary hull only got added to NX-class ships after the Andorians shared their tech with Earth (since I like to imagine the cigar-shaped secondary hulls are descended from the Kumari class).

 

I think that could definitely work. In the 90s I assumed a 22nd century Star Trek show would start in 2161 and be about the first Starfleet ships with human and alien crew members integrating and working together. The founding of the Federation is an easy jumping off point and I think it would be interesting to see what mistakes they made and how they grew up. Plus at the beginning if they just turned all the alien ships into Federation starships, are there D'Kyrs or Kumaris that now turn up with the crew in Franklin type uniforms and opening hailing frequencies "This is the Federation starship Suurok." You could do something like that, or move along a few decades and play more like early TOS or early TNG with the weirdness and dangers of space travel. I think any era can work as long as the story is good.

 

A bit like HMS Victory for the Royal Navy. She's still listed as active, despite having been in service for 245 years, the last hundred of which have been spent in drydock.

 

Close-up the glass etchings in Pike's Strange New Worlds briefing room are apparently the NX-01 and the U.S.S. Essex. But it would've made more sense that was a Daedalus Enterprise really... I mean, doesn't it generally follow the displayed ships are namesakes? They were paintings aboard "In a Mirror, Darkly"'s TOS Defiant recreation. And right now, the three Titans models.

I'd just get around the "fifth, sixth etc to bear the name" on the dedication plague by having that refer to Enterprises with the NCC-1701 registry. That's already been fudged with an Earth Starfleet one after all.

An early Federation ship called Enterprise could be the NCC-701 perhaps?

 

I would go with NCC-171 for a Daedalus-class Enterprise, only because Essex and Horizon were NCC-173 and NCC-176 but also it doesn't matter.
I do love the idea of the NX-01 being a museum and brought out for ceremonies and whatnot, like maybe the centenary of the founding of the Federation or it's launch. I think it would be dope seeing it in like a ship parade or whatever. Jonathan Archer and his crew might have had the ship for ten years but by Riker's time it's spent centuries through the hands of other people who devoted their lives to keep this thing running.
If the secondary hull did get put in, I wonder if there's controversy or arguments in-universe between fans of the original design and the refit. What if they did a full "restoration" and ripped the secondary hull off?

I love this. Even without currency I think people would still come by for souvenirs. It does make me wonder how the collector market works though. Is ebay illegal?

 

They labeled it the Essex precisely because there was no Federation Starfleet ship that existed between the NX-01 and the NCC-1701, at least not in the prime timeline. I agree with you however that they could have made another Enterprise just like what I speculated when I made this thread, or even several, if they were UESPA ships.

 

Perhaps the ring ship depicted on the wall in "First Flight" was an artists conception of a ship that hadn't actually been created yet.

 

Or the USS Constitution, aka Old Ironsides, which was launched in 1797 and is still afloat and still in commission. HMS Victory is older, but the Constitution is the oldest ship still afloat.

 

There are a few possibilities for Enterprises between the NX-01 and the NCC-1701.
1) There was an UESPA starship Enterprise as others have mentioned.
2) There was an United Earth Stellar Navy (a service in the never made Star Trek: The Beginning movie) starship Enterprise.

It is also possible that once the Federation was established that the NX-01 was refit and recommissioned as the USS Enterprise NX-01 and remained in service for many years after its previous decommission thus explaining away the seeming large gap without a starship named Enterprise without resorting to Enterprises in other services. Having the refit take place after the events of These Are The Voyages would eliminate the seeming discontinuity of Enterprise in TATV having not been refit.

Maybe the Essex was originally named the Enterprise, but was renamed which is why it was in Pike's briefing room.

 

I really don't think there even really needs to be an explanation for the gap between the NX-01 and the 1701. 33 years passed between the decommissioning of the fourth United States Ship Enterprise in 1844 and the launch of the fifth in 1877, and 19 years passed between the decommissioning of USS Enterprise (SP-790) and the launch of USS Enterprise (CV-6). 278 years passed between the sinking of the original Ark Royal in 1636 and the launch of HMS Ark Royal in 1914. 66 years passed between the decommissioning of the 1913 HMS Queen Elizabeth and the launch of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) in 2014.

But it would create a discontinuity by contradicting the explicit references to the 1701 having been the first Federation starship Enterprise, and frankly I think that would take away from the 1701's specialness in-universe. Like, maybe part of the reason the 1701 is so special is that it was the first starship in 84 years named Enterprise.

 

IIRC, the Rise Of The Federation novels had the NX-01 retired. Her spaceframe was too badly damaged during the war to be spaceworthy and she became a museum piece. Starfleet was debating on commissioning a new Enterprise, but they felt that it would antogonise the Klingons too much, considering the troubles between Enterprise and the Klingons (I think the Romulan War novels had some things happening between Archer and the Klingons beyond what we saw in Enterprise).

Also, the new Starfleet of the UFP consisted of all the Fleets of the memberworlds, so not just Earth ships but also Andorian and Tellarite for example. And the Andorians had a ship with a name that basically translated to Enterprise. So they left it at that.

 

If there is a gap, it might be intentional.

One extreme view might contend that there MUST be an "Enterprise" in the fleet at all times.
Another view could consider "Enterprise" namesake as special and should be "saved" for a special vessel, leading to a gap with no "Enterprise".

For some reason, no spacecraft was deemed worthy of the name so it was "saved" for something special coming in the next few years... or decade or two...

 

TBH I wouldn't have cared if there were more ships named Enterprise between NX-01 and NCC-1701. Not every ship needs to have a letter suffixed after it's name. Why only use a ships name once? The stargazer in picard s2 did not have a letter suffix after it's name. It had an '8' added to the registry number. And I presume the original titan was also not an eighty thousand series ship.

Now that I think about it. They really should've explored a ship's name lineage in TOS. Would've been cool to have a 'Yesterday's Enterprise' type episode, where the crew runs into the previous ship named enterprise. No time travel though. Just have the previous enterprise, floating in orbit of a planet somewhere, abandoned with no signs of life. Make it mystery type episode as to what happened to the crew. And that's what TOS was good at; Mysteries and Adventure.

 

It's not about the suffix. It's about the dedication plaques stating '4th ship to bear the name,' etc. We have to assume that these statements only applied to Federation Starfleet starship Enterprises, and not Earth ship Enterprises. Which means that UESPA, which was part of United Earth and not part of Starfleet, could very well have had multiple Enterprises in the 84 years between the decommissioning of the NX-01 and the commissioning of the NCC-1701. The 1701 could also have been a UESPA ship before falling under the auspices of Starfleet during Kirk's command in TOS.

 

With SNW, the theoretical Kelvinverse April's Enterprise (NCC-0701) could have been a Sombra-class starship. Using the early (original) Constitution designs to make the ship to fill in the gaps in the fleet against the Klingons while the new tech Constitution-class was delayed until the late 2250s.

 

My own take is that while NX-01 Enterprise was a historic vessel and was definitely a game-changer during her day, Starfleet really didn't begin the practice of passing down names of earlier starships to newer ones until sometime before TOS (or perhaps more likely, sometime before DIS). But as soon as Starfleet decided to begin passing down starship names, NCC-1701 was the first and received the name Enterprise, and that there was quite a big deal about it during her construction and subsequent initial launch.