Why do Admirals always use Excelsior Class ships?

I can see admirals traveling in "their" dedicated command ships (actual flag ships), although the first availible ship might be used on occasion.

The admiral would not be in direct command of the ship, there would be a flag captain on a command ship, or the ship's normal captain if it was just convenant transport.

 

I could see the Admirals doing a lot of F-to-G traveling. That is, they generally aren't in the happy situation where they can go from A (their home base, or Earth) directly to B (the crisis spot) - they constantly hop all across the theater of operations, taking whatever rides they can. And the Excelsior just happens to be the ship that is usually found on the spot.

Ross going to Romulus would be one of the rare A-to-B trips, with a fast and agile courier both needed and made available. Ships of Galaxy caliber in turn just wouldn't be numerous enough to be available for F-to-G. But when an Admiral did need a flagship, she might try and acquire a big and modern one; it's just that we basically never see these flagships in action, because the rules of drama are heavily against it. For all we know, every flagship utilized in fleet command tasks indeed was a big monster, and we are simply being misled with the noncanon idea that the Gorkon would have been a mere Excelsior, say.

Timo Saloniemi

 

IIRC, Cornwell used a private transport/shuttle to get to and from Discovery. She didn't travel aboard a regular Starfleet ship.

 

The Klingon War.. that dark seldom mentioned period of time where flag officers flew coach.

 

This is debatable, since the shuttle we saw was in reality a Discovery shuttle, with markings from that ship on the hull.

Naturally, those markings could not be seen in the episode, at least not easily. But if we accept those, it follows that Cornwell arrived on a "cruiser" as stated (and not a pleasure cruiser, such as the Aurora or the Vulcan one in the Mirror Universe, but a bona fide starship), rendezvoused with Lorca at the spot where Sarek went missing (so basically right next to the meeting venue, as Sarek was about to arrive when his ride got bombed), and then was invited aboard Lorca's ship in a shuttle (his or hers, depends on how we read the unreadable markings - but she did request permission to "land" right off the bat, so probably hers) - and finally was given a shuttle ride to the meeting directly from the Discovery, without a superfluous detour to the cruiser, considering they were late anyway.

Sailing all the way in aboard either the Discovery or the cruiser would naturally have been against the conditions set by the Klingons - understandable from the Starfleet POV, but also essential for the kidnap ploy.

Timo Saloniemi

 

... which is also why, in the anti-time future, Admiral Riker still bums around the place in his little Galaxy Class. Modified with an extra nacelle and more guns, of course, because we all know what guys do when they hit their mid-life crisis.

 

Little?

 

I'm assuming by then it's been outsized. Lol.

 

My fanon explanation: as a testbed for transwarp, the Excelsior spaceframe was designed *specifically* to optimize the transwarp drive's effectiveness and efficiency. The classes that came after - Ambassador, Galaxy, Nebula, etc - sacrificed some small part of that in favor of other features, such as more labs, more weapons, larger crew compliments, etc. So the Excelsior-class remained the ship with the very best reliable SPEED to move Admiralty around on while still providing the desired level of shields and other defensive capabilities to protect them in an emergency.

Until the Intrepid-class came along, with its variable warp geometry and at-least-on-par-with-Excelsior abilities, otherwise. Which is why Admiral Ross was on one.

 

Series explanation, it was after ST3 and all they had at the time was the Oberth, Miranda and Excelssior ships, so, tits up ship of the week was usually one of those. Back then it was quite expensive to make a ship, 100,000$ and up, so they tried to get there milage out of them. We eventually get the Nebula, Ambassador, Vorcha, Negvar, Pastuer before the advent of CGI. So I don't fault them for reuse, its what they had at the time, and the budget for. Enterprise mostly solved that with new ships poping up most episodes, though even then there was some reuse.

In show Explanation: Excelsior class is 80 years old by the time of the start of Tng, they keep them updated, but new ships are the front line of exploration. So by this time, excelsior are used mostly for internal transportation. Admirals, dignitary, cargo, colony work, border patrol,etc. busy work.
For admirals, it depends who they are, where there going. Someone like Admiral Hansen probably came from Earth, there are probably a number of ships for Earth Defense that get rotated around, and have ships that are "Ready to go" to back up near Earth ships in an emergency. So Admiral Hansen probably called up space dock, asked for the next ship in the rotation, and hopped on board. Thats someone in a hurry.
Now for Admirals that aren't in any hurry, then they grab whatever ship happens to be going in there direction. Kinda like standby! Even TOS had an admiral/commodore/dignitary on board that was just hitching a ride.
For Admirals that are in charge of star bases or sectors, there's probably a "Flagship" that is stationed by the base, that he can hop on and go where ever he's needed.
In the real world, Admirals are in charge of fleets, example is a carrier task force. in the aircraft carrier, there's an admiral.
In the books, the Full Circle Fleet has an admiral in charge, so if theirs a task force, or large enough group of ships going out, there's probably an admiral somewhere in there.

 

For years, TNG used the old ILM ship filming models (except for the re-fit 1701-A model as the Production Team felt any use of that model would cause casual viewers to wonder "Where's Kirk and Co...?") so they had a choice of the Obereth Science Ship, the Miranda Light Cruiser, and the Excelsior model, so they picked the latter as an 'Admiral's' ship.

Then once they had the shots of the two ships (Excelsior and 1701-D) rendezvousing, it was more cost effective to reuse said shot over and over as needed.

 

Actually, for the first few seasons of TNG, most of the old model usage was actually from stock footage from the films, and the models weren’t reshot at all. All scenes of the Klingon Battlecruiser, Spacedock (as a different starbase), Regula 1 (as a different starbase) and the Bird of Prey were all just stock footage.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The original intention for the Stargazer was that Picard’s old ship would be a Constitution (the kitbashed model in the ready room was never intended to be the Stargazer until Greg Jein built a filming model based on it).

As for the Excelsior being the ‘Admiral’s’ ship...that wasn’t the intent either. In EaF, the Enterprise was supposed to rendezvous with an Ambassador class ship (using Andrew Probert’s original matte painting on the viewscreen). But they decided that the painting wasn’t realistic enough so they went with filming the Excelsior model.

 

No-one knows yet, but all Starfleet Admirals have been compromised by a sentient meme developed by the St'anlee.

 

Which created the unfortunately ironic situation where The Battle is the one episode without the Stargazer model in the ready room. They replaced it with a movie-era Connie model.

 

...That is, Picard replaced it. Due to the very sight of it somehow giving him odd headaches long before the teaser already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Isn't it also missing in the previous episode? Hide and Q maybe?

 

Weren't they overgrown yachts to begin with?

 

That means nothing (or should mean nothing) when most production companies use CGI for all space scenes on a TV show (Babylon 5, Space: Above And Beyond, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Enterprise, Star Trek Discovery, etc.) I personally would expect a show to have complete CGI for the space scenes, no matter how people feel how 'cheap' it looks, just so that the model used aren't always the same (a big problem on Star Trek: TNG.)

 

Whether the show is all CGI, or partially CGI with real models, it would be cheaper to re-use existing footage. Whether it is lazy or not is another matter. Not sure what your point is?

 

I suspect the continued unabashed fuglyness of Ambassador class kept Excelsior's on the screen for quite awhile. But I don't know.