Yes.
Why was the Constitution refit never seen in TNG or thereafter/
- Thread starter Jason_Adank
- Start date
Yes.
To be fair, most people at the time were watching DS9 on 13-inch low-def TVs, and would never have noticed this kind of stuff. I know I was. And my TV was B&W to boot.
Having the Odyssey be a Galaxy class was the perfect choice to make. At that time, Trek fans associated the Galaxy class as Starfleet's best of the best because they watched the Enterprise for seven years on TNG. They had an instinctive knowledge that this ship was Starfleet's toughest most advanced ship. So to see the Dominion tear one apart so quickly and easily in their first appearance and destroy the ship really drives home that the Dominion are a Serious Threat.
TOS itself did just that in The Doomsday Machine where the Constitution class USS Constellation was completely wrecked to show how much of a threat the titular Doomsday Machine posed to the Enterprise. Plus as already mentioned in the thread, TNG itself showed the Galaxy class USS Yamato destroyed in the opening scene of Contagion in order to show how high the stakes were for that episode. Plus, later after DS9 had established the Defiant was Starfleet's toughest and meanest ship around, they had it destroyed when the Breen joined the Dominion to show the Breen meant Serious Business. Plus, a year earlier, they showed up how powerful the Dominion's new battleship was by having it tear apart the Defiant class USS Valiant. Are any of these examples a slap in the face?
If anything, the real slap in the face was when the Enterprise D was mercilessly owned by a rundown Klingon BoP in Generations. Curiously, you're not taking issue with that.
It may be a question of warp profiles. Upgrades to the engines only matter if the ship can create a warp field able to push the engines that far, hence why ships are getting flatter compared to the Connie. The Miranda and Excelsior both are - and the Excelsior's partly successful "transwarp" capabilities may reflect the birth of the TNG warp scale. So both those classes would be easier to update to TNG warp standards. A Connie couldn't keep up. And perhaps that's why the less streamlined Ambassador couldn't either - it was an attempt at a "hotel in space" long-range vessel like the Galaxy would be, but less able to match the speed standards of the day.
The desktop models of the Constitution-class used in TNG were often altered to be have sideways nacelles, and, more importantly for this discussion, the windowed areas on the saucer replaced with what appear to be cargo doors. Looking at what happened to the Miranda being used as a cargo ship in TNG, it seems possible that these were also converted to cargo carriers.
Potentially, since the Wambundu-class from TNG is referred to as both a cruiser and a transport in TNG reference material, and given a speed of warp 3, which would have been about Warp 6 on the old scale, we may even have a class name for the converted ships once they become freighters. This gives us both an image for a previously unseen class, and an explanation of how there could be Constitution-class ships in TNG, but we don't see them.
As above, I like to think that there are variants of the Excelsior that help explain this. I've read from Ex Astris Scientia that, given a 642-meter Galaxy, the Excelsior was rendered at two different sizes over the life of the show, coming in at 467 and 511 meters, and one fan on this site suggested the Excelsior could be as big as 640 meters judging by its windows. To me, the Excelsior could have scalable components like the Galaxy does (in order to create New Orleans, Cheyenne, etc.) Thus what we see on TNG and DS9 are different classes even though they are shown with the same model. The Renaissance-class is a good name contender for the newer, large Excelsiors since they have NCC numbers in the mid 40000's.
Then the Ambassador-class serves as an advanced up-fitting of the Excelsior; not a refit, but newly-built ship with a more-featured, but similar spaceframe. The Ambassador has a very similar shape, but a bigger saucer and more filled-out hull. The Excelsior apparently did short missions on 3 years, so the Ambassador could handle longer ones or at least had a bigger crew and more facilities. This also explains why we see so few Ambassador-derived ships, since it would not be its own distinct generation of cruiser.
I like the idea about the cargo doors (Ex-Astris-Scientia even made a diagram of this: https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/schematics/constitution-variant2.jpg ), but I don't think that was the original intention. I think they just forgot to put in the windows.
The Wambundu class was referred to as a light cruiser. The Constitution class is a heavy cruiser, so I don't think there is a corollary (at least not for that particular class.)
The Excelsior class was definitely given the wrong size in the official publications. It's far larger than what is officially accepted. But I don't think there are two different scales for the exact same model, otherwise the bridge domes would have to be scaled larger than the ship (which is what Ed Miarecki did when he built the BoBW kitbashes to get a sense of scale). Plus, I'm not a fan of upscaling the same model to different proportions like they did with the BoP just because they were too cheap to build newer, larger-scale filming models. Even Adam Buckner used a TMP Enterprise bridge dome on his model of the Centaur (which used an Excelsior saucer) to show that the ship was much smaller than the Excelsior components he used to kitbash the model.
I prefer to think that there were many Ambassadors produced, but that the majority of them were assigned to deep space missions rather than front-line ships, which was why we saw so few of them.
I think one of the most surprising scale perception issues was with the Oberth. I always perceived it to be quite small, but theres a docking port sticker on the side of one of its pylons that, when scale up to a connie's, makes it almost equal in size to the refit.
I remember seeing that photo, and I’m pretty sure that sticker was added to the model after the fact. I don’t believe it was on the original Grissom configuration of the model. FYI, the ILM modelmaker (who originally built the model) viewed the ship as a ‘shuttle.’ Make of that what you will. But yes, there’s definitely something off with the official size of the ship.
Thanks for the reply. I wondered of the Constitution was considered a light cruiser later on when the Excelsior came to exist, but I did not want to fully comitt to that claim in my post.
I see where you are coming from with that. Given the different size bridges seen in the third and sixth movies, I decided to overlook that to a degree. Actually, the Bridge module was changed between the third and sixth movies now that I think about it, meaning that for many TNG appearances it would have had the larger bridge module. But it is mostly the early episodes made prior to Star Trek 6 for which the FX shots rendered the Excelsior larger compared with the Galaxy, and then later the Excelsior looks smaller, even the same shots were sometimes re-composited, so I'm not sure what was intended.
I tired to work it out one time and had the Oberth at 360 meters. That seems very big compared to what was intended, but then the rows of lights that look like windows on other ships work out better.
the bridge looked amazing in V, myer really went toi far in my opinion to achieve is horatio hornblower in space motif for VI. The metal grate flooring, the galley, all felt wrong to me.
That makes more sense now, thank you.
I always found it odd how at the end of IV:TVH, the bridge looked one way (with the TMP/TWOK/TSFS layout still in place) and then when we got V:TFF, it looked totally different. And yet no indication of time and yet another refit was mentioned in Scotty's monologue.
The TFF bridge was the appropriate evolution between TOS and TNG, so Meyers' new TUC layout seemed totally out of whack, and an unnecessary reinvention. Plus its location of the turboshafts didnt make sense with the filming models bridge proportions. I vote that TUC was the mistake in the design process... should have left for that a different type of ship.
The TFF bridge was the appropriate evolution between TOS and TNG, so Meyers' new TUC layout seemed totally out of whack, and an unnecessary reinvention. Plus its location of the turboshafts didnt make sense with the filming models bridge proportions. I vote that TUC was the mistake in the design process... should have left for that a different type of ship.
In-universe, we can always rationalize. Perhaps the -A was a ship already refitted to TMP specs and found surplus to requirement or hopelessly outdated for her day? Once given over to Kirk as a symbolic gesture, she finally broke down, much as described by Scotty, and requiring actual repairs with modern hardware: no sense in digging out outdated 2270s consoles when there were modern ones in stock.
The turbolift stations never made sense vis-á-vis the exterior. Even in TMP, we'd do best to assume that the bridge was actually lower down than Probert thought, at a depth where the turbolift stations could comfortably be mounted anywhere on the rim of the facility. That way, the ride from the upper docking port to the bridge also makes sense: the port is one deck higher than the bridge and for that reason requires the lift. We could then both forget about the idiotic idea of the lift merely rotating to let Spock through, and accept that since the ride takes a finite amount of time, Chekov could precede Spock to the bridge via competing lift or staircase or whatever.
Moving from the upholstered ST5 look to the bare ST6 one is a sensible one IMHO: Starfleet no longer cares about making the old and high-maintenance ship look respectable, and rips out the vanity covers and carpeting to facilitate practical ops and repairs.
Timo Saloniemi
The turbolift stations never made sense vis-á-vis the exterior. Even in TMP, we'd do best to assume that the bridge was actually lower down than Probert thought, at a depth where the turbolift stations could comfortably be mounted anywhere on the rim of the facility. That way, the ride from the upper docking port to the bridge also makes sense: the port is one deck higher than the bridge and for that reason requires the lift. We could then both forget about the idiotic idea of the lift merely rotating to let Spock through, and accept that since the ride takes a finite amount of time, Chekov could precede Spock to the bridge via competing lift or staircase or whatever.
Moving from the upholstered ST5 look to the bare ST6 one is a sensible one IMHO: Starfleet no longer cares about making the old and high-maintenance ship look respectable, and rips out the vanity covers and carpeting to facilitate practical ops and repairs.
Timo Saloniemi
It's like the Klingon ship bridge completely changing between III and IV, or the Enterprise itself changing shape subtly in Nemesis and Star Trek Beyond.
Or for a bigger example, the Enterprise in Discovery and Strange New Worlds vs TOS.
Sometimes you've just gotta pretend it always looked the way it did in whatever adventure you're currently watching.
I was sorry to see the cool pivoting gunner's chair go. But what we got became the iconic Klingon look, and closer to the TMP "original", which is a plus. Although of course the TOS and TAS "originals" were a different matter.
The E-E kept changing all the time, which goes well with the idea that she faced hardships and needed repairs. Many a real-world warship has done that, too. It's just uncommon for the curvature of the hull to change, instead of mere details such as the number of smokestacks or gun turrets or the mission of the ship changing.
(It was something of a running joke for nuKirk to utterly thrash his ship in each movie, so the above goes double for the JJship.)
Not all that often, though. Change isn't forbidden either in-universe or ITRW. And it's sorta hilarious that Klingons are defined by constant change!
Timo Saloniemi
See and that's been one of my issues with Meyer. I love II and VI and I like him as a director. He's very smart and very thoughtful. But his wanting to change the look of his films screws with the inconsistency of the world. V had Herman Zimmerman as production designer and since he was working on TNG, he was able to establish a, sort of, visual continuity. Though that's just with the bridge. You could argue that since the TOS films and TNG both utilized the same sets for everything else ti represent the Enterprise, there's plenty of visual continuity. But, V started to at least drift into the "comfortable" look that TNG had.
Which is a good thing, how? Supposedly the distinct branches of Star Trek, few in number back then, deserved to be treated as distinct.
Although of course the current branching out and broadening would not have been anticipated, and perhaps blending it all into one homogeneous glop of goo was still considered worthwhile.
Timo Saloniemi
Although of course the current branching out and broadening would not have been anticipated, and perhaps blending it all into one homogeneous glop of goo was still considered worthwhile.
Timo Saloniemi
The problem is that there's zero information about what qualities a starship has that makes it be classified as a light cruiser, heavy cruiser, medium cruiser, frigate, (insert naval term here), etc. The Constitution class, the Ambassador class, and the Curiosity class were all referred to as heavy cruisers, but there's no indication as to why this is so, or why, say, the Galaxy class is not classified as a heavy cruiser.
Yes, the changes made to the model did seem to indicate that they were trying to scale the ship up. However, because of other factors (the changes made were to the same specific ship; the use of stock footage would flip-flop the two variants; the original configuration appeared larger in the 1st season than later; the MSD of the Enterprise-B seems to indicate a huge ship, even longer than the Enterprise-D, etc.) , there's no definitive proof of the ship's true size. And although I hear your idea that there are two separate sub-classes based on size, I again am not a fan of scaling a model up or down without making clear modifications that this is so. To this day it still bugs me that they scaled up the BoP to ridiculous proportions without bothering to make any changes to the model whatsoever, all to save money.
I'm curious how you came to that conclusion.
Last edited:
Same here. I use to watch Generations over and again but that scene still was stupid. But, "gut punched?" "Slap in the face?" Hardly.
Also, as many here no doubt very well know already, "heavy cruiser" and "light cruiser" in particular don't really mean what one might expect them to mean. Instead, they are poster children of the fundamental arbitrariness of naval designations, and perhaps a good argument for extending such arbitrariness to Starfleet as well.
Heavy cruisers don't weigh more than light ones. They just happen to have guns bigger than 6.1 inches in barrel diameter. In quite a few cases, the two are in fact the same ship, only with interchangeable gun turrets.
The designations only ever existed for two brief decades leading to and covering WWII, and only made any sense during the first of those two. They are free for creative reusing nowadays, and probably in the 2360s as well. Likewise, words like "dreadnought" or "frigate" no doubt will change meaning; the latter has done so half a dozen times already.
No contest. But here again reality can come to our rescue: ships out there on the seas indeed tend to be scale models of each other, only porthole rows helping distinguish scale, and even then only in the superstructure which has less excuse for unevenly spaced decks than the hull proper. Anything from smokestacks to cranes to lifeboats can be arbitrarily scaled, and is.
Hulls in particular enjoy scaling up and down, within limits, because a hydrodynamical solution found for one shape often scales up and down, within limits. Perhaps ships intended to operate within atmospheres, with blatant wings, are much the same?
Indeed, the rows of lights on top of the Oberth saucer are so closely spaced that the ship might be kilometers long if two rows represented two adjacent decks!
Nothing wrong with ships kilometers long. All the more reason for Starfleet to put a four-pipper in charge, and it's consistent that BoPs eat those for breakfast... But not my personal favorite among possible scalings.
Timo Saloniemi
