Okay now that would make a interesting fan fic lol The Enterprise crew busts Harry Mudd (again) dealing powerful drugs meant to give you a longer life...only to fine it's the desiccated, crystalline remains of the Exeter crew.
What was the prior designation of the Enterprise A?
- Thread starter Johnny7oak
- Start date
I always imagined that no one on the Yorktown actually died, but she was left little more than a derelict. During her repairs, she was renamed Enterprise and shoved out of spacedock before she was really ready. I like to think that Captain Randolph and his crew wound up getting a completely new Yorktown out of the deal while Kirk and his gang had to get all the bugs out of the new Enterprise.
That's exactly what I always thought - that the Enterprise-A was already under construction, but hadn't yet been named, when Kirk did his thing.
(We really have no idea how long it usually takes Starfleet to give a new ship its name, anyway. That may be one of the last things they do.)
My personal theory was that the Enterprise-A was a newly-refitted Constitution Class ship that had no crew assigned yet, not a newly constructed ship. I don't know, nor is there a way to know for sure which ship it had been, but even though GR floated the idea it was the Yorktown, I don't see how that is possible. Here's a few thoughts I have on the Enterprise-A's origins:
First, I think GR wasn't even involved with Star Trek IV. He certainly didn't write the story since it was Nimoy and Bennett, with Bennett, Krikes, Meyer, and Meerson writing the screenplay. I think adding a ship named Yorktown was added as an Easter Egg of sorts, at the time it was written. It wasn't intended to imply it later became the Enterprise-A. So, when GR suggested the Enterprise-A was originally the Yorktown , I think it was more a case of some fan asking him what ship the Enterprise-A used to be, and that was the answer he thought of.
Second, I don't think the writers gave it much thought whether the Enterprise-A was a new ship, or newly refitted ship. But If it were a new ship, why decommission it a mere 5-6 years later? It had a few hull breeches by the end of TUC, but nothing that couldn't have been repaired. That tells me the Enterprise-A was an old ship, and like the original refit Enterprise, which also had battle damage, Starfleet decided that it wasn't worth refitting and repairing the Enterprise-A, especially since the command crew was standing down, anyway. If the Enterprise-A were a new ship, it would be repaired with a change of command.
Third, while not said explicitly, we are lead to believe in TSFS, the Excelsior Class is intended to replace the constitution class. This may have taken years, if not decades to do, but we do know that by the TNG-era, it seemed that the Excelsior class largely had replaced the Connies, since we never saw one in action, besides a broken secondary hull at Wolf 359, which may or may not have been a Connie. So why build a new constitution class from the ground up, when you intend on phasing it out? Seems more likely to me that the Enterprise-A was an old Constitution Class ship that was ordered to be refitted around the same time the Excelsior was being built, and had just been finished by TVH.
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Mine is that Harriman, in command of the largest starship known to us at the time, with nicely working warp drive, shields and transporters, held the professional opinion that this "condition" precluded a rescue operation. And this was a situation where Starfleet was asked to rescue civilians. There thus would seem to be strong precedent against people who have not sworn to forfeit their lives to go rescue people who have.
Which sounds fine to me. But this means that the corridor of destruction from the RNZ to Earth is "all lethal", with a margin of mere hours since the departure of the villain or his possible return. If the Prez did beg for Leo Walsh to go and rescue the Yorktown in those conditions, Walsh would be likely to say "Gee, sounds bad, I'll be telling the first man capable of doing something about that. If I meet one".
How so? We don't hear of anything better in Star Trek. It's just how things work in that universe: if a starship loses all power, people die. Why should it be different?
Because if she did and (as we can readily tell from Kirk's total inaction and ignorance) failed to tell Kirk, she'd be Queen Bitch of Villains, and that doesn't sound like a sound premise.
I certainly would - the difference in broadcast power allocated might well be thousandfold, between Starfleet worrying about its ships and the Head Honcho of the Known Universe informing everybody that the Last Trump has sounded..
Of course, one isn't prerequisite to the other - "Captain Vijay" could just have been told to sod off so that Kirk could get his replica. The argument that the Yorktown crew had slim chances of survival is a separate one.
Timo Saloniemi
There's a world of difference between Starfleet ordering a ship to go rescue another ship that has lost power, and a ship out for a PR cruise around the Solar System that just happens to come upon a distress signal from a ship that's close to an extremely dangerous spacial anomaly (and IIRC, I don't believe Starfleet actually ordered anyone to rescue them, or at least not the Ent-B specifically.) Sounds to me like Harriman had every reason to think that it was a bad idea.
Huh? Once the probe is out of range, why would its transmissions still be lethal? Are you implying that everywhere the probe went, its transmissions just left that area of space dead for all eternity? Because once the probe stopped transmitting when it was in Earth orbit, the power came back on.
And the Saratoga, while she still had power, was able to tell when the probe was near before its transmissions crippled the ship. So any rescue vessel in the act of saving a crippled ship's crew would have had time to see if the probe was coming back before being able to escape.
Just because one doesn't hear anything better doesn't mean that contingencies don't exist.
So then either she did tell Kirk offscreen and he decided that they couldn't help, or she didn't bother him because she already knew they couldn't help, which makes her far from a "queen bitch of villains." And Spock himself stated that he was receiving several distress calls. If Kirk didn't have the idea to time travel, they probably would have tried to help other disabled ships.
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It took six or seven photon hits, we saw explosions all over the ship, and the saucer was penetrated. I think that's worst beating we have seen in Trek which did not result the ship being destroyed. It is perfectly possible that the ship had taken serious damage and was basically held together by structural integrity field.
Anything is possible, sure.
But I would think that if a ship can go through an extensive refit like the Enterprise 1701 did, repairing the damage seen on Enterprise-A would be doable. Plus, if the damage was so bad that they couldn't repair it and the ship was being held together by force fields, I would think the crew would have to debark the ship for their safety, instead of warping home (with a detour) like they do.
That just leads me to believe there is an extra element going on with the decommissioning, and the Enterprise-A being an older ship, instead of a brand new one, makes the most sense to me.
In the end, the Enterprise-A being a renamed older ship is just another idea that could be tossed about. There are several ideas about the ship that could work.
True, since there is no "canon" explanation.
I'm not saying anyone is wrong, just a renamed ship other than Yorktown seems to make the most sense to me.
I've always held the position that there's more than one way to look at the Enterprise-A and given that far stranger things have happened in Trek, there's room for those different approaches. I've never had a problem with her being the Yorktown, just like I've never had a problem with her being another older ship or even an all-new build. It's always been a "what idea works for you" thing, IMO.
My own theory is that it was a newbuild that they didn't finish initially because the Excelsior class was so close to being commissioned large scale, and when they needed a ship to mollify Kirk and company, they just finished it and gave it to them. Their first mission was to give it a shakedown cruise.
The thing is, Harriman had no knowledge of this extremely dangerous spatial anomaly, while those trying to help the Yorktown would have heard of the extremely dangerous spatial cylinder of death. Harriman tells us it's not likely for even a very powerful ship to engage in rescue ops in the highly generic, "usual" case, and ST4 doesn't exactly suggest that ships more powerful than the Yorktown and therefore potentially capable of surviving the rescue operation would be available.
Because the timeline analysis shows that if it decides to turn around, it will be on top of the rescuers in a jiffy. And there's no telling what the space turd is up to.
Apparently, something happened differently with the Yorktown. Or was the Saratoga unable to tell the Yorktown anything, so the second ship suffered the exact same fate, but then did not lose the ability to tell others about it? Something did happen differently after all, then. We're back to "there's no telling what will happen" in either case.
Would they bet their lives on that? Harriman turned down a rescue operation despite not being confronted by an actively malevolent enemy.
And Harriman had no backup available within the time allotted; why would the Yorktown? Again, we have to consider the timeline. What is the E-B/Lakul distance so that no other rescue is possible? Three lightyears, says the dialogue. So there are no rescue-capable ships in that direction in a cone that extends to six lightyears at the very least (and probably farther, as the E-B would be exceptionally fast for her day). What is the time delay involved? We hear of no ETA in ST:GEN, alas. But something between fifteen minutes and an hour would be dramatically fitting there.
Now, the probe eliminated two starships, one of which was able to report that there was a supervillain on the loose. The clear implication is that no further starships are available; the less clear implication would be that everybody in a lesser vessel would have had the sense to put distance between themselves and the supervillain.
What, people choose to die horribly because they don't want to make use of the contingencies that exist?
We know dead starships in deep space kill people; the question is how fast. Matt Decker survived in a very poorly powered ship for some hours, but even he was no Robinson Crusoe with a long if not all that bright future ahead of him. Picard's crew was about to perish in little more than six hours. We really would need to hear of some survival feat or a type of gear that makes the feat possible before deciding that yes, Picard's crew did commit needless suicide.
Again, timeline. Earth feels the attack of the probe. Cut to the BoP. Kirk wonders why there is no escort for them, asks if Uhura has anything on the comm channels. She says "Very active, sir. Multi-phasic transmissions, overlapping. It's almost a gibberish. I will see if I can sort it out."
If Uhura had been listening to that "very active almost-gibberish" without comment for hours upon hours already, that qualifies her for the rarely applied General Order 666 wherein Communication Officers get keel-hauled after being fed razor blades. If she had been listening to Eartha Kitt instead, that just qualifies her for a sound whipping, I guess. But not for a continuing career in communications.
In any case, the scene makes it pretty clear that the distress is news to everybody involved. If it weren't, why would Kirk wonder about the lack of escort in the first place, and why would his sidekicks make their reports as if those broke news?
The single scenario that preserves the professional integrity of the heroes is the one where no distress calls reached anybody before that timepoint, supposedly because the probe made such short work of communications. In that scenario, Uhura's gibberish is overlapping distress calls (which she should be able to sort out or at least recognize immediately), but rendered almost unidentifiable through the probe's overpowering whalespeak, and almost unnoticeable (that is, probably "unidentifiable as communications") by the same means.
But you just said he would not have. The Yorktown had been calling for three hours, and Uhura had been turning a deaf ear or Kirk had been saying he preferred to make it to his appointment with the defense attorney in time.
Not my preferred scenario. A possible one, and there are others, but again, not the one that preserves the hero status of the heroes even in the broadest sense.
Timo Saloniemi
You remember the ending incorrectly. They don't warp home - they commit suicide by impulse-flying straight into the local sun! (Apparently, the ship breaks down before they succeed, tho.)
Agreed. Although other extra elements could involve the political need to put both Kirk and the Enterprise on ice for good; the operational need to retire all assets not vitally needed (including modern ones in poor repair) now that the Klingons have stood down and there's an alien homeworld to rescue; and an already decided generation change that was not altered in the slightest by the events of the movie.
But Kirk thinks the E-A will continue serving under a new crew, so perhaps there is no decommissioning being planned at the end of the movie? That is, the "we" being decommissioned means the top officers - they will be called to the Morlan Court, their decorations torn off, their swords broken, and so forth.
It would only be after the movie that it would be learned that the ship indeed is a goner - and perhaps that some of the top officers may be allowed to serve on (say, Chekov's retirement status in ST:GEN not being clarified).
Timo Saloniemi
I'd say it's a new ship. If it's a veteran ship renamed I think that's disrespectful to the old one and its record. My 2 cents.
Unless that old ship was already mothballed due to the oncoming Excelsior class and the name was already planned for an Excelsior.
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