Doubtful. Describing it as "The Great Experiment" and giving it an NX- classification point toward it being a new design meant to test the transwarp engines for viability. That such a design would become ubiquitous 80 years later points toward the design being sound enough that even though the transwarp engines failed, the ship itself was workable. Give the testbed a reliable engine system and outfit it for standard duty, and you have the first of a new class of starships that become the workhorses of Starfleet for decades to come.
What was the prior designation of the Enterprise A?
- Thread starter Johnny7oak
- Start date
The big problem I have with this is that there should be no reason to equip a risky propulsion experiment into a full starship, complete with guns and shuttlebays.
Then again, if the only way to properly test transwarp is to build a ship that big, then the extra risk and expense involved in giving her guns and shuttlebays might be insignificant, and the backup plan of giving her mundane engines could have been there from the get-go.
Not that there'd be any reason to think that transwarp failed. If it did, probably the engines of later ships in the class would look at least somewhat different! But that's unrelated to the implausibility of equipping a "nothing but testbed" vessel with starship mission gear. NASA didn't give the testbed shuttle Enterprise mission gear such as robotic arms even though that one wasn't a proof-of-concept vessel at all, but a specific test program element for an "already spoken for" spacecraft design whose operational shape was perfectly known. Back when NASA tested the basic concept of winged spacecraft, those had nothing resembling operational mission gear!
Timo Saloniemi
Then again, if the only way to properly test transwarp is to build a ship that big, then the extra risk and expense involved in giving her guns and shuttlebays might be insignificant, and the backup plan of giving her mundane engines could have been there from the get-go.
Not that there'd be any reason to think that transwarp failed. If it did, probably the engines of later ships in the class would look at least somewhat different! But that's unrelated to the implausibility of equipping a "nothing but testbed" vessel with starship mission gear. NASA didn't give the testbed shuttle Enterprise mission gear such as robotic arms even though that one wasn't a proof-of-concept vessel at all, but a specific test program element for an "already spoken for" spacecraft design whose operational shape was perfectly known. Back when NASA tested the basic concept of winged spacecraft, those had nothing resembling operational mission gear!
Timo Saloniemi
I imagine that she did get bumped up as Sulu's tea cup says "USS Excelsior, NCC-2000".
My apologies if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, but I don't think there was actually any question as to whether or not the registry did get "bumped up" to NCC. As you mentioned, it showed that way on the tea cup in TUC, and it also appeared as NCC on the hull itself in TUC, too. I thought Leto_II was just saying that we don't know exactly *when* it was changed, other than sometime between its final appearance in TVH and its first appearance in TUC.
^ I didn't remember that at all! Good catch!
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