I like to think that the Enterprise-B is still in service, as a training ship for Cadets, a museum ship for visitors, and a large part of Earth's Home Fleet for emergencies.
Why, exactly, was the Enterprise and her crew decommissioned?
- Thread starter Amasov
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Simple. At this point they had all been in Starfleet for around 30 plus years. Even military organizations in the future have time limits on service, particularly service members who can't move up in rank anymore. We've seen numerous examples of the rigid selection process just to get into the academy and how hard it is to graduate. Surely the same rules apply for how long you can serve and how many people can serve in Starfleet at a time.
Also, the ship was decommissioned because the more advanced Enterprise B was ready to take it's place.
I thought it was because the ship and crew were all old. Also that newer and better ships were being built and it was not worth it to keep updating the Enterprise. I think many of them did want to retire, not Kirk but some of the others, I think? The ship was a legend and should have been at the very least many into a museum or something, some kind of respect? Hero ship?
The crew was indeed old. The ship, however, was only 7 years old at that point, if one is to believe that the ship was built during the Whale Probe incident. And I'm still waiting for someone to give me a satisfactory answer as to why the Miranda class (a contemporary to the Constitution class) was still in service during DS9 when the Constitution class wasn't?
And 'Excelsior' didn't affect the Miranda class?
It did not.
Why?
It was not big enough.
Ah, I see. This is bullshit hour for Fireproof78.
More idle speculation than anything else. Honestly, it sucks that the Excelsiors replaced the Constitution for reasons that are completely unknown to me. It's an ugly ship that had no business going in to the TNG era.
But, emotions aside, my answer was meant as tongue in cheek. No offense intended.
And most hours are BS hours for me. I don't get paid enough to take this seriously any more.
Most likely reason? Because they needed scenes with lots of ships and the constitution is too identified with the old Enterprise. If you are looking for a canon reason you'll just have to use your imagination.
The only reason I can see the Miranda class lasting that long is its probably a VERY versatile class of ship and easily upgradeable.
- Smaller overall target profile from all angles. Shorter, less vulnerable under-slung nacelle pylons protected by saucer from high aspect targeting. No thin, vulnerable neck section to exploit.
- Greater versatility of mission profile and equipment/weapons pods thanks to modular connect hardpoints on sides of saucer, sides and center of rollbar, underside, etc. Smaller profile also results in a more compact, energy efficient and therefore stronger shield bubble.
- Modular aft squared-off portion of saucer section can be easily swapped out for a variety of different mission profiles including combat, patrol, exploration, sciences, medical, transport, light shuttle/fighter carrier, etc. Also easily upgradeable with new technologies as time goes on.
- Roughly the same internal volume of the Constitution Class but in a smaller, more efficient, less resource intensive spaceframe makes for a less "expensive" and faster mass production timeline.
- Greater automation of systems such as torpedo loading and others allows for a much smaller crew.
- Additional aft torpedo tubes and heavier rollbar phaser pods in addition to the conventional saucer phaser ports makes the ship better armed for its size.
- Ability to add additional impulse engines and reactors to central pod for additional speed and energy boost for patrol/interdiction craft (sometimes seen on DS9 Mirandas during the Dominion War).
During the TOS-era the Miranda would have been a formidable little ship, somewhat like the Defiant in its own way, and served as the backbone of the fleet for over a century. By the TNG-era it's become largely outclassed but due to its versatility, resource saving and upgradeable construction, and smaller crew size requirements it still serves in relatively high numbers.
Yet if she were cobbled together from existing spares and latest off-the-shelf stuff but according to old blueprints, she might have been about as useful and long-lived as an F-104 assembled in the eighties. Sure, there might be merit in installing the latest gadgetry inside a Starfighter, perhaps in hopes of making sales of a fleetwide upgrade. But the design, once useful, was now shit, as the world had moved on.
This analogy we can postulate easily enough, since we do know the Constitution design as seen in TOS is old (and we merely haggle about exactly how old). We just need to leave unpostulated that old designs would somehow still be useful as time moves on. It then makes perfect sense to immediately retire a hull that needs repairs.
New ships wouldn't necessarily be "waiting" in any practical or formal sense for old and outdated stuff to bow out: launching the E-B would not be predicated on the E-A retirement in any way. But getting the old stuff stricken from records would be pure savings nevertheless. Starfleet may be extremely bad at streamlining, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try!
(Granted, they might not need to: they face such a diverse set of opponents that they could wring worth out of ships that no longer can face the Klingons or the Romulans. And political pressures might exist for supporting a diverse fleet, with various members backing up their native projects or requiring Starfleet to do it for them. So it's not particularly unrealistic for Starfleet to be a mess compared to some well-run navies of today.)
We have seen way more Mirandas than Constitutions. Granted, our sample of Mirandas with TOS era registries is fairly small, barely exceeding the Constitution ones seen on screen. But we did hear Kirk speak of there being just a dozen ships like his, while no such limitation was mentioned on other types, so we can easily believe in Kirk flying a "silver bullet". The Constitution is mostly a Miranda with components rearranged, and the rearrangement might make her superior but too special for her own good; the generalist baseline model would be built in greater numbers and thus survive thanks to her inferiority.
Basically, it's WWI Clemsons surviving to serve in WWII, in diminishing capacity but in such great numbers that it was cheaper to "modernize" (say, gut half the propulsion and armament to boost endurance) than to scrap and replace. The analogy is merely missing the expensive 1920s counterpart that was retired even before the war because she burned too much fuel to give her that superior speed.
And it's the lack of a big war rather than the onset of a WWII analogy that forces the ships to serve on. If the UFP keeps on expanding, it needs to do way more with marginally more; it doesn't even get an inflow of resources thanks to a big and beautiful crisis like WWII. So it runs its ships ragged, like the Soviets did when they failed to get a proper WWIII.
Or something like that. But it's not an unnecessarily puzzling issue, because we never get the impression that the Mirandas would be useful in the 24th century still. They are gutted ex-starships in TNG, Clemson style, and exist in order to blow up in DS9. They don't "survive" as much as they merely "continue to exist", being stockpiled in surplus depots in TNG and emerging one more time to do their duty for DS9. Which makes sense, as the Dominion War is fought on pre-Dreadnought rules, and those rules still state that the side with the more gunbarrels present in the battle wins, utterly regardless of quality issues...
Timo Saloniemi
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With regards to the Miranda class, I've always seen the Akira class as having been something of the successor ship to the Mirandas - Voyager's "Relativity" ended up establishing that there had been Akira classes in production and service as early as 2370/71 (depending on how long prior to Voyager's official launch those scenes took place in), but we don't actually see an Akira class until First Contact, set in 2373, two years later.
Basically, I see the Miranda class as having been aging, though still having been one of Starfleet's big workhorses for the past century. When the war breaks out, a lot of them that had been decommissioned got pressed back into service in the name of having one more ship to throw out there, a reliable design that did the job it needed to, but had been near the end of its functional design life.
As for the decommissioning of the Enterprise-A, I tend to think that's a combination of an already aging ship design (Morrow was ready to put the original Enterprise out to pasture nearly a decade prior), which I assume the A was one of the last Constitution class ships to come out of the shipyards as it was, so that they could make way for the more advanced designs, and gave her the Enterprise name as a reward for Captain Kirk and crew saving Earth (this is one of the behind the scenes ideas as well), the senior staff stepping down, leaving the ship without most of the experienced hands who have guided the ship over the years, which brings down its efficiency as the new crew would have to learn (so why not have them learning in a state of the art ship at the start of its class's lifespan, rather than the end of it?), and the damage the Enterprise took over Khitomer - there was that bit where Chang's bird of prey blasts a hole right through the whole saucer. That's damage that is not easily fixed, probably did damage to the hull's overall structure. The result there ends up being that Starfleet could put the Enterprise-A through an extensive repair and refit... Or they could decommission the ship and put a new Enterprise, with the Excelsior class ship design (and the new variants that are coming off the assembly line), into service.
I say combination because it's probably the mixing of all these factors - one could have kept the ship going for another tour of duty. Two, maybe. But all three? The Enterprise-A reached the end of her viability as being a frontline starship, and probably ended up as a museum afterwards (or, if you take Shatner's The Ashes of Eden novel, ended up sold off as surplus and eventually destroyed in stopping the plans of yet another mad admiral - personally, I prefer the museum idea).
Basically, I see the Miranda class as having been aging, though still having been one of Starfleet's big workhorses for the past century. When the war breaks out, a lot of them that had been decommissioned got pressed back into service in the name of having one more ship to throw out there, a reliable design that did the job it needed to, but had been near the end of its functional design life.
As for the decommissioning of the Enterprise-A, I tend to think that's a combination of an already aging ship design (Morrow was ready to put the original Enterprise out to pasture nearly a decade prior), which I assume the A was one of the last Constitution class ships to come out of the shipyards as it was, so that they could make way for the more advanced designs, and gave her the Enterprise name as a reward for Captain Kirk and crew saving Earth (this is one of the behind the scenes ideas as well), the senior staff stepping down, leaving the ship without most of the experienced hands who have guided the ship over the years, which brings down its efficiency as the new crew would have to learn (so why not have them learning in a state of the art ship at the start of its class's lifespan, rather than the end of it?), and the damage the Enterprise took over Khitomer - there was that bit where Chang's bird of prey blasts a hole right through the whole saucer. That's damage that is not easily fixed, probably did damage to the hull's overall structure. The result there ends up being that Starfleet could put the Enterprise-A through an extensive repair and refit... Or they could decommission the ship and put a new Enterprise, with the Excelsior class ship design (and the new variants that are coming off the assembly line), into service.
I say combination because it's probably the mixing of all these factors - one could have kept the ship going for another tour of duty. Two, maybe. But all three? The Enterprise-A reached the end of her viability as being a frontline starship, and probably ended up as a museum afterwards (or, if you take Shatner's The Ashes of Eden novel, ended up sold off as surplus and eventually destroyed in stopping the plans of yet another mad admiral - personally, I prefer the museum idea).
I always took the gap between C and D to be out of respect for the dead. the crew wasn't lost with the original or A
That's a good view to take, too. If we take it a step further, the Klingons might even have requested it because of the honorable sacrifice of the Enterprise-C crew. It clearly made a big mark on them, big enough that it fully made them allies of the Federation.
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