Where did the Enterprise A come from?

[Timo]

I would go even farther and say that during the TNG era there were also a couple hundred starships in service, which would make the 39 ships lost at Wolf 359 a far more devastating number than if Starfleet had, say, 10,000+ ships at its disposal.

Why, though? It isn't devastating, as we immediately learn: Shelby dismisses the losses as immaterial, easily replaced within the year.

It's a tragedy, and a slap in the face of Starfleet, but it doesn't exactly devastate. And it's part of the TNG writing continuum where the ability to show four intact starships, tops, is described as a deployment of two dozen ships and then dismissed as a peanut-gallery maneuver... The writers wanted it big, and didn't really need to hold back much.

I doubt that was the reason. They probably just pulled "7,000" out of their ass at random.

Also, there are 7,000 active ships, no doubt meaning that many, many more have been retired and scrapped since the NCC registry scheme was created. The newest of the new being NCC-7100 thus wouldn't really fit the picture of there being 7100 NCC-decorated ships out there saving the universe.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

Why, though? It isn't devastating, as we immediately learn: Shelby dismisses the losses as immaterial, easily replaced within the year.

I never said it was devastating. I said it would have been devastating if Starfleet only had 200 ships to begin with.

 

[Timo]

Ok. It just doesn't sound like a goal the writers would have agreed with. Sure, the Borg antics are a great excuse for a "thin" Starfleet presence in "The Wounded" and other such adventures, but a lack of strategic consequences seemed to be desirable in "BoBW", so that the focus could be on other types of consequence (up to and including a whole episode dedicated to them).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

How many of those 7,000 are runabouts? Or cargo haulers?

 

[Timo]

The context in which Control mentions the 7,000 ships more or less dictates that 7,000 = all. That is, the point there is that every single active ship in Starfleet will eventually obey Control, not just the frontline combatants or explorers or intel assets or other "important" ships.

So the cargo haulers should be included. Runabouts and shuttles and workbees might not, as those might not have "missions" in the sense that Control wants to control. If so, "non-starships" might not outnumber "proper" starships after all, although they could easily represent half the figure.

TAS shows us that cargo haulers don't "consume NCC resources", what with having their own letter-expanded registry schemes. TOS and LDS do show the Antares or Woden type of transport/tug "consuming NCCs", though, NCC-501 going for a crewed Antares and NCC-502 for a pair of apparently uncrewed tugs. The LDS implication would be that a gaggle of 'em cargo drones doesn't yet eat up a gaggleful of numbers, though, but carries just one NCC number - perhaps that of the command ship in the gaggle. So the 7,000 do not suffer from strict or specific limitations on how many could carry "proper" NCC numbers. Starfleet goes through starships at a prodigious rate in TOS, so even if the NCCs are up to 10,000 or so by the end of the 23rd century, the bulk of those could well be starships, relatively few then existing at a given time while casualty replacements keep being built.

Idle speculation like that doesn't nail down a ratio of starships vs. non-starships in the 7,000. The writers are free to adjust that to make Kirk's dirty dozen more or less significant to the whole; currently, its significance is ill defined, except as a subset of the as such important "starship"/"proper starship" category. If need be, the 7,000 might only feature a dozen modern starships, all of them Constitution class. Or then eight hundred, in sixteen parallel modern classes and fifty-two remnants of older classes, whichever is more fun. Certainly our current ability to see designs other than Constitution would seem to erode faith in the former extreme, though...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[cooleddie74]

How many of those 7,000 are runabouts? Or cargo haulers?

That's my take. Much as the U.S. Navy's overall numerical strength includes smaller and less powerful support vessels like oilers and escorts I imagine any "7,000-ship" Starfleet includes science vessels and smaller ships like runabouts and deep space training vessels.

 

[Unicron]

IIRC, FASA's ship production list for late movie-early TNG era included several thousand ships, of which a significant proportion were smaller utility vessels like commercial transports. Granted, FASA's figures weren't always the most reliable.