But were there three different Bountys in that movie?
What ships SHOULD they have used in the Dominion War?
- Thread starter Arpy
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But were there three different Bountys in that movie?
I've never been a big fan of the idea that the Nebula was a cruiser to go with the Galaxy's being an Explorer, even though some games even show it that way. I prefer the idea that certain layouts of ships have the same roles from post-TOS all the way to at least Nemesis. I wanted to use the word "configuration" rather than "layout" but I am referring to the way the "modules" are connected vs. the way the "modules" appear.
In other words, The Constitution, Enterprise, Excelsior, Ambassador, and so on all have a saucer with two nacelles on top and a secondary hull below the saucer, and apparently are all cruisers (of course there may have been others, and the Ambassador is possibly not its own generation). The Oberth, Springfield and Steamrunner all have a saucer, two nacelles on top and a secondary hull that it attached to the saucer through the nacelle struts, so to me would all seem to be mostly used as "scouts" like the Oberth was.
Likewise, to me the Nebula should be a "survey vessel/cargo carrier/frigate, or whatever we want to call the Miranda, because it has a Saucer on top with two nacelles below and a configurable pod. The Akira probably falls into this classification also, and since it was designed to carry shuttles or small fighters, even though that has not been shown onscreen, it being a "carrier" even though it is smaller than the Explorers could make sense.
I think it is possible the "Explorer" name is new for TNG, and the starships were at most called "cruisers" most of the time prior to that (not that dreadnoughts and others did not exist, but they were uncommon). As such, another vessel, possibly unseen, would be the "cruiser" of the TNG era. I think, despite the extra pods, the New Orleans is a good candidate for that. (But if the New Orleans was called a "frigate" onscreen, then it would need to be something else.)
Was this vessel's name not seen on some fleet charts in TNG? If so, it could have been a regular Excelsior or an Enterprise-B style update.
I'm not a fan of the current use of just putting a roman-numeral "II" after a class name and then making a new class that resembles the old one. I think this is being done for offscreen reasons to keep it simple for fans and let the audience feel familiarity by knowing ships are supposed to resemble their older counterparts. I frankly don't consider it canon for that reason. If there had not been a long break, onscreen and offscreen, in new content under the Star Trek name, this would probably not have happened.
(In Star Wars, an X-wing is an X-wing, no matter how new.)
The infamous “Starship Deploy Status” chart that was barely readable in TNG “Measure of a Man” had a USS Excelsior listed. Its registry number was illegible, but it didn’t look like ‘42037’ (MA has it listed as 27445.) The chart isn’t really proof of anything as some of its info was contradicted later (the Saratoga’s registry, for example, was different on the chart than on the later model used in ‘Emissary’) and illegible background displays can always be taken with a grain of salt.
Not only that, but I’m also not a fan of making those ‘II’ or ‘III’ ships resemble the former ships with that class name.
Thanks for the info. While I could believe that there had been 3 Excelsiors, numbered 2000, 27445, and 42037, I would not think a new ship numbered in the 42000's would have bee new during TNG. The Saratoga registry changing would have to be an error too. What would they not have just used the existing number of 27445 in the cartoon?
Two possibilities I see, not mutually exclusive:
1. 42037 is some personal number of importance like birthday or something like that.
2. The number of 42037 is meant to retroactively tell us we should imagine many Excelsiors in TNG and DS9 as having details like those on the Galaxy or Sovereign, especially those with numbers in the 42000's.
I sort-of understand the value of option 2, in that it could suggest refits that are as substantial as the one in TMP could keep these ships in service longer. In my view, it would really just be better than that just to imagine TNG and DS9 as having more Centaurs and Nebulas where Mirandas are shown, and more Ambassadors and the (possibly unseen) Galaxy-family cruiser where Excelsiors are shown. It would even do in later seasons logically to see more Akiras and Intrepids for the same reason.
The refit Constitution is the Constitution II now, rather than Enterprise-class, or just Constitution like the various refits of the Essex-class aircraft carriers became to history. So could some of the Excelsior IIs have been extreme refits of old starships as well as new construction, like the new USS Excelsior herself, since Sulu's ship was obviously retired and but in the museum? Back in the 2340s maybe. To supplement the Ambassadors with more than just internal refits of Excelsiors. Or to throw something in the Cardassians faces.
I think Drexler, for whatever reason, just decided to match the Excelsior II's registry numbers to the 4XXXX numbers from the TNG/DS9 Excelsiors. The real question to ask is why TNG felt the need to give Excelsiors such high numbers to begin with.
Sorry, to me that smacks of the whole 'we can no longer trust our own eyes' mentality so prevalent these days with DSC and SNW. I saw Excelsiors that look just like the one I saw in TSFS, and I have no reason to believe they were anything else other than what I saw on screen.
The only mid-point that we saw design-wise between the TMP-era ship designs and the TNG-era Galaxy-type designs was the Ambassador class. I would think that if Starfleet wanted to refit old Excelsiors, that they would look more like the Ambassador. Almost like that proto-Ambassador that Andrew Probert came up with after the fact.
The Excelsior II's look far more like ships from the 2400's than ships from the 2300's-2340's. Not to mention that they are much larger in size. I still have a hard time believing that they are refits.
See above.
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I do not like the idea of just adding a "II" to a class and calling it a new class. I first thought the model kit said the class was "Enterprise" because the Enterprise-A was the last ship of its sort in service. The more changes, the more it should be a new class with a new name.
I said I thought they were trying to tell us what they would like us to imagine, not that I necessarily support that. It could work some cases, but that would require asking more questions about scale and detail that would call to question many items in the written sources, like the Encylopedia entries based on the charts created for being used onscreen, for example. I would prefer the 27000's number instead of the 42000's for this case, for example.
Something I would be amenable to is that if DS9 ever gets the HD treatment, that they replace all the Excelsiors, Mirandas & K'T'ingas with newer designs. But I doubt that will ever happen (the remaster or the changes.)
Personally, I think that that the Excelsior IIs were a heavily updated Excelsiors that were rebuilt in the aftermath of the destruction of Utopia Planitia to supplement the fleet numbers without making new ships. I am assuming that there are political fighting between the Federation Council bean counters and Starfleet. It was just a way for Starfleet to get new(ish) ships during a time of post-War downsizing and a major crisis.
I suppose that’s possible. It would explain why the Excelsior has a higher registry number than either the Eureka or the Mestral. And it would be consistent with PIC’s retcon of the TMP Constitution class now being referred to as the ‘Constitution II’ class. The only real issue is the stark difference in size between the Excelsior and the Excelsior II. Of course, people have been debating for a while now that the original Excelsior should be much bigger than the officially stated length of 467 meters (which I personally also agree with.) And Picard does refer to reactivating ‘’mothballed ships” to replace his destroyed evacuation fleet.
The only thing I don’t like about this scenario is that Starfleet would have given a later Excelsior class ship the same name as the prototype (although the registry is different) while the original prototype was decommissioned in 2320 (according to background material) and moved to the Starfleet Museum. I don’t care for the idea that the name of the class ship gets reused for a later ship of the same class. Reusing the name for a different class is one thing (the name Daedalus being used for a Galaxy class starship, for example), but I think it’s confusing when it’s a ship of the same class.
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It's not outlandish, given the Titan in PIC S3. It's a "refit" of the Luna-Class Titan, although in reality it's an entirely new design.
WHY they do this, rather than just build a new ship is not clear, but it at least seem to happen. Perhaps there are enough rare/unreplicatable components that are still useful in the old ships that they are considered "refits", even though they've been really been rebuilt from the keel up.
Although PIC was weird with its terminology. The Stargazer was said to be a "refit", even though it also definitely was not a refit and was definitely a new ship.
(I've long held a theory that the Khitomer Accords put a limit on how many ships the powers could have/build, so if Starfleet was in a situation where want to upgrade/expand the fleet, but they were already building too many hulls, they would just go full-on rebuild of existing ships, with legally satisfied treaty stipulations. Even if they mothballed an old ship, they still couldn't build a new one because they were already building the max. Treaty has no embargo on upgrading old ships, so they get creative.)
It's just bad writing. Bad writing doesn't need to be given an excuse as to why it doesn't make sense.
The fleet was already down sized through war time attrition. There would be a need to both modernize and build up fleet numbers.
Rebuilding the surviving Excelsiors would be a stop gap. Presumably this would be quicker and cheaper than building new ships from scratch, so long as the chosen ships were still more or less intact. For Excelsiors that were partly wrecked, perhaps surviving sections from different ships could be thrown together to create a few Curry/Raging Queen types. To get ships that are at least somewhat useful.
The War Galaxies? Adapt them for peace time roles. In general, I think any ship from the Galaxy family of designs would remain in service, because they would be relatively modern.
The existing Ambassador ships are on duty...in Federation space.
Other ship classes? Repair and upgrade the surviving ships. I think the surviving Mirandas might be marginally useful, and have a status similar to the DC-3 today.
Over all, any ship that is a least some what useful would be pressed into service. If only as gophers.
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Those Picard quotes never made sense. They completely misused the word refit.
To be fair so did The Motion Picture. What happened to the 1701 was more correctly a retrofit.
One novel suggests that regarding Khtiomer and the new accords, the newer Excelsiors can only be built alongside the decommissioning of other older ships. Avoiding spoilers, I'll say that by the end of the book this was not necessarily going to be strictly followed. But basically this is the opposite theory of what you suggest, and Starfleet after Star Trek 6 was going to need to make more new ships if they wanted to expand in the novel.
The Constellation class probably already existed before that, but it fits with this mindset, being a new ship that used existing modules, with a bigger crew and more science equipment that looked ready for peacetime, but that not-so-secretly could also be used for battle. Probes are launched from photon torpedo launchers, it seems. So more of those could have been built not but still in service by DS9.
The Excelsior class and all its related ships would be new, so that fits.
This leaves the Miranda class as a ship that oddly seems to have existed perhaps a long time before the battle at Khitomer and yet is still in service in DS9.
I could see the Curry being a cargo ship, I am not sure why it would use nacelles of the TMP design, but I don't see the idea of it as a full-size in-universe kit bash during the war as a viable option. If it had Galaxy-style nacelles or "pen-style" nacelles I could envision that it was a ship that had attributes of both the Excelsior era and the time between the movies and TNG.
While writing this post, it occurs to me that perhaps the Curry and the ships like it are all TMP era tech inside the engines, even internally, and simply uses Excelsior hull components to have a bigger cargo area. Why you would develop a cargo ship in this way is still hard to figure out. Are there any real-world examples of older-style engines being put into a warship hull to create a military cargo ship?
In other words I suppose that I could see the Curry as having been a warship that was converted to a cargo carrier by changing its configuration, intentionally and in a planned-out fashion, but not in the middle of a war using whatever parts of various ships survived a battle. But, if Starfleet had decided to take a cruiser (which the Excelsior class apparently was) and convert it to a cargo carrier because they needed to transport more supplies during the war, why use TMP-style nacelles? Why not use Galaxy-style nacelles (for an effect similar to the Niagara-class), Intrepid-style nacelles, or even the pen-style nacelles, to imply the ship got an engine upgrade during its refitting process?
Yes, they did. But in the case of the Titan/E-G, it IS still considered to be the same ship just... massively retooled.
It's also a way to go, but I think that makes a bit less sense given how seemingly obsessed Starfleet with upgrading/refitting old ships or Frankensteining ships to make new ones. It really seems more likely that just building a ton of new ships was an unattractive option and was more feasible to keep old vessels going as long as possible.
Which fits my theory better.
Starfleet would be able to keep anything it has, but be limited in what it can build new. As the Federation continues to expand and Starfleet needs more ships, it's pumping out the max of new ships it's allowed to build, while desperately clinging onto anything it already has via direct refit/upgrades or kitbashing ships so they can claim it's still an existing ship.
They just... have a crap ton of Miranda's, and decommissioning them wouldn't actually buy them more space for new ships. So... they keep using them.
This was why I addressed in my theory that the warp drive would be the hardest thing to refit/upgrade/change entirely.
The observation I made was that there are apparently all sorts of upgrades that occur to these ships, but the warp nacelles stay the same. I would lead me to believe that swapping warp drives is the most major upgrade that can be and might not even be realistic on many ships.
My theory answers your question... why would they build a ship like that? Because they didn't really have much of a choice. They could waste an available new construction on a cargo ship, or they could utilize an existing vessel(s) and just retool it to a new purpose, leaving a new construction slot available for something better.
They use the TMP-era warp drives because that's what the donor vessel had and the whole system still worked so... they kept it.
Part of me wonders that, under my theory, what a "new construction" would actually be defined as. I'm leaning towards thinking it's not defined by hull, but by warp core. That might make the most sense all around... treaty stipulations enforce x number of new warp cores constructed... and maybe also sheds some light on why the Romulans don't use them, trying to side-step the treaty "We didn't build ANY new warp cores..." That fully explains the whole "crap ton of TMP-era warp drives in use". If you have a working warp core, you use it.
In this instance, a mothballed ship would either have its warp core removed, or it's mothballed because the warp drive system is no longer working properly. Treaty might allow a stipulation to hold onto a partially-working vessel.
To some extent even kind of explains the PIC S3 fleet museum... it's stated none of the other ships can fly. Makes sense... if they all hard warp cores, they're eating up an available core for a workable ship.
Even disregarding my theory entirely, it might just... not work, or just be ridiculously difficult to make work. Let's go modern day... take a nuclear-powered naval engine and slap it on a oil tanker... I'm by no means an expert, but something tells me that's not going to work.
Going back to the ‘should’ of this topic, the ships I’d want most to see are Ambassadors (preferably Probert, but a mix of would work), Sovereigns, Intrepids, and (only because of the use of Mirandas) Constitution Refits—though in my future Sora AI remaster of the series, I’d get rid of anything earlier than the Excelsiors (most E-B ‘Refits’) in battle proper. Some Galaxys without saucers would also work, maybe with detached saucers behind the front lines (maybe as troop transports?) with Olympic support ships and others.
I’m not the biggest fan of the Defiants either but okay, if we’re doing Mirandas and other ships I’d rather not see but would fit the canon, there’d be swarms of them. I mean, wasn't that the point? Unless it was just a test bed for techs to integrate into larger ships like the new Sovereigns and refits like the Lakota. Even so, what other “escort” type ships have we seen in Trek? Use’em or lose’em.
Berman might have wanted to save ships like the Sovereign for the big screen, but I mean come on, one of those should have been Ross’s flagship. Or a Galaxy flanked by a couple of them to throw directly at the Dominion battleships.
I’m not the biggest fan of the Defiants either but okay, if we’re doing Mirandas and other ships I’d rather not see but would fit the canon, there’d be swarms of them. I mean, wasn't that the point? Unless it was just a test bed for techs to integrate into larger ships like the new Sovereigns and refits like the Lakota. Even so, what other “escort” type ships have we seen in Trek? Use’em or lose’em.
Berman might have wanted to save ships like the Sovereign for the big screen, but I mean come on, one of those should have been Ross’s flagship. Or a Galaxy flanked by a couple of them to throw directly at the Dominion battleships.
The Centaur is such a weird one. It’s the Excelsior hull but with much larger windows and that Miranda torpedo pod suggesting a much smaller ship. Someone mentioned the Klingon Bird-of-Prey size issues…well, here we went again.
There was such a dearth of new designs in those days that anything the underfunded art department slapped together from existing model kit parts and whatnot was worth its weight in gold. Some were handsomer than others (e.g. Centaur vs Yeager). We all have our favorites. Mine remains the Curry, but I’m a sucker for a new configuration, even when it doesn’t make sense—like the USS John Glenn from the Ships of the Line calendars….don’t know if I buy it, but I get mesmerized trying to understand it.
There was such a dearth of new designs in those days that anything the underfunded art department slapped together from existing model kit parts and whatnot was worth its weight in gold. Some were handsomer than others (e.g. Centaur vs Yeager). We all have our favorites. Mine remains the Curry, but I’m a sucker for a new configuration, even when it doesn’t make sense—like the USS John Glenn from the Ships of the Line calendars….don’t know if I buy it, but I get mesmerized trying to understand it.
