That would be beyond petty and silly, and I doubt the Dominion would care either way.
What is your personal head canon?
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
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That would be beyond petty and silly, and I doubt the Dominion would care either way.
The Defiant still carried an NX registry when it was destroyed. That conceivably makes the rules different for it.
If it was still considered an "experimental" testbed, the Starfleet rules might allow for the NX registry vessels to retain their original registries, since if the Defiant had blown up during shakedown (e.g., Sisko says the ship "nearly shook itself apart" when they first tried the design) it might allow for the registry to stay the same, unlike a class of ship that’s in full production.
I gotta guess they try out some ideas that blow up in their face at first before they figure out a practical version.
If it was still considered an "experimental" testbed, the Starfleet rules might allow for the NX registry vessels to retain their original registries, since if the Defiant had blown up during shakedown (e.g., Sisko says the ship "nearly shook itself apart" when they first tried the design) it might allow for the registry to stay the same, unlike a class of ship that’s in full production.
I gotta guess they try out some ideas that blow up in their face at first before they figure out a practical version.
Yep. It is interesting to watch ENTERPRISE as a TOS reboot through that lens. As the cage said, time/space barrier was just broken, they are the first ship able to go that far and check up on lost ships and outposts, first Vulcan in the fleet, a trio that includes the Captain, a Vulcan, and a good ole country boy.... etc, etc.
Tyler just said the ship was faster.
I just head canon that line as a significant improvement in warp drive technology since 2236. Hell, if spore hub drive technology could be developed by the 2250s then I can easily buy that the Constitution-class starship engines were capable of significantly faster speeds than Starfleet and Earth vessels prior to the S.S. Columbia's crash.
Plus eventual warp 13.
It would be on brand though for a guy who left his prized baseball behind just so he could live rent-free in Dukat's head for a while.
The Defiant-class was in full production at that point though, that's how they were able to get another Defiant so quickly. We see at least four and possibly seven Defiants throughout the whole of VOY (ironically more than we see in DS9). In DS9 itself we have the Sao Paulo and the Valiant in addition to the original Defiant (your mileage may vary on whether the mirror Defiant counts or not).
Going on a slight tangent here, but now I wonder how many Starfleet ships 'make it' till they're decommissioned/scrapped versus how many ships get lost, get destroyed/ damaged beyond reasonable repair efforts.
I know we are contorting to justify the registry, but that makes no sense from an engineering standpoint, you need unique identifiers for tracking problems, changes, and improvements.
FWIW, the US Navy doesn't use hull numbers for that. It uses something called the Unit Identification Code (UIC).
UIC is a five character alpha-numeric code used to identify organizational entities within the Department of the Navy (DON). UICS are sequentially assigned beginning with 00001. All activities must have a UIC for manpower and budget reasons.
- source (pdf)
So when a ship has it's name and/or hull number changed (like a lot of ships did during the 1975 NATO realignment) there is a number that doesn't change to track the unit with.- source (pdf)
List of UIC and corresponding hull numbers.
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It's never actually said in TOS that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet. That was just a common fan assumption in the 60s and 70s. But honestly, it doesn't make much sense, since we know from "The Immunity Syndrome" that the USS Intrepid is crewed entirely by Vulcans.
And no, the Intrepid isn't some civilian Vulcan science starship. That's also a recurring theory to justify the "Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet" argument.
What I was going by is that we know an NX registry vessel can transition to having an NCC designation. The Excelsior does it between Search for Spock and The Undiscovered Country.
What I could see is a conjecture that they kept the NX designation for the Defiant because they were letting Chief O'Brien and Sisko tinker with the thing and try out weird applications to the tech that they could apply to the entire class. And if the Defiant was still considered an experimental testbed, they don't consider a rebuilt version to be an "A" or another iteration of the Defiant. Just part of the testing of the prototype.
Arguably, I can see it wasteful in the other direction.
If the Defiant had actually "shook itself apart" during its initial shakedown, should they have applied the "A" designation or given an entirely different registry number after they rebuilt the prototype? Or would you just add that to the history of the experimental "NX" registry, note the issues and problems, and then rebuild it with differences that the NCC ships can use to work off of?
I mean why (beyond the initial NX class of the Earth Starfleet) would you give a ship an "NX" designation if you were going to apply all of the rules of the NCC registry to it? The experimental designation has to mean something and denote that this is something where we're still working on the technology and lead to some differences in how it's treated in terms of the registry otherwise Starfleet would just give them all NCCs.
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That would be my guess too. We know other Defiants don't have cloaking capability.
Just as the post-Burn Federation only really rebuilt itself after the cause of the Burn was revealed (and dilithium and warp drive in themselves turned out not to be inherently dangerous things to use on a large scale), the Tholians and Breen have only reconsolidated as major powers in the last couple of years. The Burn had shattered the Tholian Assembly into innumerable little separated holdfasts that risked as little warp travel as possible; once the danger was proven by the Federation to be past, they quickly reunified into the new Tholian Republic*. Likewise the Breen Confederacy, which had been similarly affected, now made a concerted push to solidify a new Breen Imperium.
*One might object that the Tholians, having been an active participant in both the Temporal Cold War and its culmination in the brief-yet-endless-from-the-inside Temporal Wars proper, might have had a better idea of what to expect. But in fact, the Temporal Wars were largely over (or mutually solidified-by-agreement) by the end of the 30th century; this appears to have led the Tholians to have no reliable knowledge of the Burn, which came some time later.
*One might object that the Tholians, having been an active participant in both the Temporal Cold War and its culmination in the brief-yet-endless-from-the-inside Temporal Wars proper, might have had a better idea of what to expect. But in fact, the Temporal Wars were largely over (or mutually solidified-by-agreement) by the end of the 30th century; this appears to have led the Tholians to have no reliable knowledge of the Burn, which came some time later.
Here's one I haven't seen but others may share... The U.S.S. Vengeance is the Kelvin universe's version of the Prime universe's U.S.S. Excelsior. The adversarial role represented in "ST:TSFS" and "ST:ID" mirrors nicely, and they even have similar profiles if you squint more than a little bit. Vengeance also had a faster engine as Excelsior was supposed to. The main difference other than appearance is that the Vengeance was a big secret and Excelsior seemed very publicized. I believe both ships were likely approved for construction around the same time, with Excelsior being a much longer, drawn out project, and were both eyed for being useful in the event of a likely (or orchestrated) Federation-Klingon War.
There's an artist on DeviantArt who had the same theory, and redesigned the Vengeance with a more typical Starfleet colour scheme and slightly more Excelsior-y lines.
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