Revised USS Enterprise numbers

[regemet]

Here I have written revised numbers foe the various Enterprises

USS Enterprise NCC 01 Nx Class
USS Enterprise NCC 1701 Constitution Class
USS Enterprise NCC 1771 Constitution class (Enterprise A) Originally USS Yorktown NCC 1717
USS Enterprise NCC 3701 Excelsior Class (Enterprise B)
USS Enterprise NCC 11701 Ambassador Class (Enterprise C)
USS Enterprise NCC 61701 Galaxy Class (Enterpriss D)
USS Enterprise NCC 71701 Sovereign Class (Enterprise E)

 

[GodThingFormerly]

Shouldn't this thread have been posted in FanFic or something?

TGT

 

[DRMidnite]

Um...huh?

 

[regemet]

I think it is in the right place as it is never going to be a fan fic. Its just something I was tossing around at the time.

 

[FalTorPan]

In a similar vein, all stardates should now have the word "etadrats" ("stardate" spelled backward) preprended to them. For example, "41153.7" is now "etadrats41153.7."

So cool.

 

[Forbin]

Here I have written a short sentence with no point.

 

[aridas sofia]

I think the OP makes a good point. The notion that successive Enterprises would not only be named but numbered to honor an earlier ship is absurd, puts a wide dent in the logic of any registry list, goes against what the designer intended, goes against military practice, and in short, sucks.

By insisting that the ship is numbered to show a relationship to an earlier, otherwise unrelated ship, the opportunity for the number to show a relationship to earlier iterations of that ship is missed. The name is there to show the relationship to tradition and history. The number is there to give the ship an individual identity, and at most identify it as having been a modification of an existing ship.

Andrew Probert believed the refit Enterprise from TMP was so substantially overhauled that he wanted the number revised to NCC-1800. The numbers of that registry wouldn't have been as distinct from one another as "1," "7" and "0" are, but it would have made it clear that this ship, and not Constitution, was the prototype. As was the intention ("Constitution-refit class" being another bit of foolishness, unless we are to believe Enterprise wasn't the first ship to receive the TMP overhaul).

if one thinks that the refit should have been 1800, then the question of the other ships never even comes up. If we insist that the refit was substantially the original ship, and that military practice be followed, then the refit should have been "1701-A" and that would have been the end of it. In any event, at the very most we should have seen 1701-A and the other ships should have had new, unrelated numbers.

 

[Unicron]

Wasn't it Gene who was concerned about changing the number, in terms of people not "remembering" the original ship as well then? Personally I've always preferred to call the movie design "Enterprise Class" myself, as it's easier on the ears and the USS Enterprise could certainly have become the lead ship of a new class to succeed the Constitution class.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Emphasis mine
If we insist that the refit was substantially the original ship, and that military practice be followed, then the refit should have been "1701-A" and that would have been the end of it. In any event, at the very most we should have seen 1701-A and the other ships should have had new, unrelated numbers.

Wasn't that Matt Jefferies preferred numbering system as well? I recall that he said in an interview that the first modification or upgrade would be 1701A. Moreover, some of his Phase II modification sketches being labeled with that serial number.

 

[aridas sofia]

Wasn't it Gene who was concerned about changing the number, in terms of people not "remembering" the original ship as well then? Personally I've always preferred to call the movie design "Enterprise Class" myself, as it's easier on the ears and the USS Enterprise could certainly have become the lead ship of a new class to succeed the Constitution class.

Yep. This was one case where I believe he screwed up.

 

[aridas sofia]

Emphasis mine
If we insist that the refit was substantially the original ship, and that military practice be followed, then the refit should have been "1701-A" and that would have been the end of it. In any event, at the very most we should have seen 1701-A and the other ships should have had new, unrelated numbers.

Wasn't that Matt Jefferies preferred numbering system as well? I recall that he said in an interview that the first modification or upgrade would be 1701A. Moreover, some of his Phase II modification sketches being labeled with that serial number.

Absolutely. Either Roddenberry was misremembering what Jefferies had recommended (which would be very odd since he had as much familiarity with the Air Force way of numbering planes) or he was simplifying it from "1701-A" to merely "1701" on the hull. I know he was insistent that the new ship was the old ship, not a new ship named for her. He would have known that a refit like that would logically have resulted in a revised number.

 

[ancient]

Meh, whatever. Starfleet. Go figure. There's nothing wrong with how the ships are numbered. So they don't do it exactly the way the modern navy does.

Was it CLB who suggested that the ship might be almost totally new but kept the old number for political reasons? (Such as agreeing to limit the number of new cruisers built in a Klingon treaty)

That kinda makes sense.

 

[Captain Robert April]

It's not like the numbers are going to change if I throw in a DVD featuring some later incarnation of the Enterprise. It's still gonna be "NCC-1701-(pick a letter)", no matter how much it rankles some folks' sensibilities.

 

[JNG]

I see absolutely no reason why Starfleet registries should bear any resemblance to current military practice, or why we can conclude the letter suffixes are somehow illogical within the fictional registry scheme as presented when we know jack about that system other than what's been shown. They set the hero ship and its name apart, and are a much more subtle way to do that than painting neon green racing stripes on the ships or whatever the hell Hollywood hacks might have come up with if they'd gotten the chance.

Here I have written revised numbers foe the various Enterprises

Yes you have.

 

[Christopher]

Here I have written revised numbers foe the various Enterprises

USS Enterprise NCC 01 Nx Class
USS Enterprise NCC 1701 Constitution Class
USS Enterprise NCC 1771 Constitution class (Enterprise A) Originally USS Yorktown NCC 1717
USS Enterprise NCC 3701 Excelsior Class (Enterprise B)
USS Enterprise NCC 11701 Ambassador Class (Enterprise C)
USS Enterprise NCC 61701 Galaxy Class (Enterpriss D)
USS Enterprise NCC 71701 Sovereign Class (Enterprise E)

Interesting suggestions. Not sure it's feasible, though. It's still somewhat contrived to insist on ending in "701," since that would be unlikely to reflect the actual numerical order of the ships and might conflict with earlier vessels of the same registries. Also, I'd think the Excelsior-class one would be 2701, or maybe 2017, since the original Excelsior was 2000.

Was it CLB who suggested that the ship might be almost totally new but kept the old number for political reasons? (Such as agreeing to limit the number of new cruisers built in a Klingon treaty)

Definitely not me. I'm one of the ones who say that keeping the same number was a silly idea. I don't understand the suggestion that there could be some political reason for keeping a registration number, since registration numbers are fairly obscure bits of trivia.

I see absolutely no reason why Starfleet registries should bear any resemblance to current military practice, or why we can conclude the letter suffixes are somehow illogical within the fictional registry scheme as presented when we know jack about that system other than what's been shown. They set the hero ship and its name apart, and are a much more subtle way to do that than painting neon green racing stripes on the ships or whatever the hell Hollywood hacks might have come up with if they'd gotten the chance.

It's not about conformity to current practice, it's about whether it makes sense in-universe. The whole idea of "setting the hero ship apart" doesn't make sense from an in-universe perspective, because in-universe, there is no single "hero ship" that's more important than the rest of the fleet put together. We've seen ships named Enterprise save the Earth or the galaxy a few times, but what about all the adventures we haven't seen, all the other starships that have saved planets or the galaxy or the universe while Captain Kirk was busy escaping from space gangsters or Captain Picard was trapped in a holodeck? Or what about all the ships that saved the Earth during the years between TOS and TNG? What about all the Vulcan ships that saved Vulcan from cosmic menaces over the centuries? There can't realistically be only one "hero ship" in the entire Federation.

Then there's the fundamental question: What are registration numbers for? They're for the purpose of formally identifying, classifying, cataloguing, and tracking ships as unique entities. They're meant to provide specific and meaningful information about each distinct vessel. So it makes no sense to give the same registration number to two different ships. That just creates confusion. Granted, it would create less confusion if the ships didn't exist at the same time, but still, giving a ship a "vanity plate" registry gets in the way of providing further specific information that a number might convey. For instance, in Starfleet ships, the first two digits of a ship number designate its class (theoretically). So giving a Constitution-class registry to ships of the Excelsior, Ambassador, Galaxy, and Sovereign classes obscures their actual class information. And giving it a number ending in 01 regardless of when in the sequence it was built obscures information about its place in the series, its level of advancement relative to the rest of its class, etc.

 

[ancient]

Was it CLB who suggested that the ship might be almost totally new but kept the old number for political reasons? (Such as agreeing to limit the number of new cruisers built in a Klingon treaty)

Definitely not me. I'm one of the ones who say that keeping the same number was a silly idea. I don't understand the suggestion that there could be some political reason for keeping a registration number, since registration numbers are fairly obscure bits of trivia.

Actually, I meant Cary L. Brown. Whoops, I forgot you two have the same initials.

Anyway, it's never been too important that the registry system be 100% logical. As far as I'm concerned, there may be plenty of other ships using the A/B/C/etc system. Despite that not being what the rule was behind the scenes.

If we take the Enterprises from TVH onward to be 'flagships' then maybe only flagships have the letter. If there are, say, twelve fleets, then maybe the twelve lead ships use that system to set them apart from the others. That would mean the Enterprise, Yamato, and Relativity are the only OS examples.

There could be any number of justifications though. Not that I'm terribly concerned with coming up with them.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Wasn't it Gene who was concerned about changing the number, in terms of people not "remembering" the original ship as well then? Personally I've always preferred to call the movie design "Enterprise Class" myself, as it's easier on the ears and the USS Enterprise could certainly have become the lead ship of a new class to succeed the Constitution class.

Yes, it was... of course, by that point, Gene wasn't "all there" anymore (as we know, he was suffering a degenerative neurological condition which eventually led to his death).

I suspect that he was underestimating the audience pretty dramatically there, in large part because of his own situation. As time went on, he made even worse calls which complicated matters tremendously, the most egregious was his dictate that "warp 10 equals infinity" but there were certainly others. The "Warp 10" thing was, in his mind, going to prevent the audience from being confused by ever-larger numbers. Of course, the end result was quite the opposite... who can really envision the difference between "warp factor 9.999994" and "warp factor 9.999995?" Yet that's a HUGE difference in speed... more significant than the difference between WF1 and WF7, by large measure, on the "old scale."

I'd have loved to have seen the TMP Enterprise be NCC-1801 (having it be a new registration since it's really a new ship), and have the next one be (which we now know as the 1701-A) be, say, NCC-2101, and so on.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Meh, whatever. Starfleet. Go figure. There's nothing wrong with how the ships are numbered. So they don't do it exactly the way the modern navy does.

Was it CLB who suggested that the ship might be almost totally new but kept the old number for political reasons? (Such as agreeing to limit the number of new cruisers built in a Klingon treaty)

That kinda makes sense.

Yep, that was me. I thought that maybe there was some clause in the Organian Peace Treaty (or the Romulan treaty or whatever else) which limited the number of "new hulls" which could be built. But both sides got around that by "modifying" existing ships to the extent that virtually nothing remained of the original.

That sort of political gamesmanship is common in the real world, and I doubt it will have gone out of practice within the next couple of hundred years.

 

[Timo]

Heartily seconded.

Just out of curiosity, I checked out a real-world example of extreme refitting: HMS Tiger, laid down as a Minotaur class WWII cruiser originally (and under the tentative names Bellerophon, Blake and again Bellerophon), completed as a substantially different Tiger class cruiser postwar, and then completely revamped into a helicopter cruiser. Her pennant number never wavered from C20, though.

If a pennant number can endure twists and turns like that, there's no particular reason to assume that the ST:TMP refit should have affected the registry number of Kirk's ship, either. Assuming, of course, that Starfleet is the Royal Navy under disguise.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JNG]

Wasn't it Gene who was concerned about changing the number, in terms of people not "remembering" the original ship as well then? Personally I've always preferred to call the movie design "Enterprise Class" myself, as it's easier on the ears and the USS Enterprise could certainly have become the lead ship of a new class to succeed the Constitution class.

Yes, it was... of course, by that point, Gene wasn't "all there" anymore (as we know, he was suffering a degenerative neurological condition which eventually led to his death).

I suspect that he was underestimating the audience pretty dramatically there, in large part because of his own situation. As time went on, he made even worse calls which complicated matters tremendously, the most egregious was his dictate that "warp 10 equals infinity" but there were certainly others. The "Warp 10" thing was, in his mind, going to prevent the audience from being confused by ever-larger numbers. Of course, the end result was quite the opposite... who can really envision the difference between "warp factor 9.999994" and "warp factor 9.999995?" Yet that's a HUGE difference in speed... more significant than the difference between WF1 and WF7, by large measure, on the "old scale."

I'd have loved to have seen the TMP Enterprise be NCC-1801 (having it be a new registration since it's really a new ship), and have the next one be (which we now know as the 1701-A) be, say, NCC-2101, and so on.

All Roddenberry said was that he wanted to avoid the cheap, artificial drama of the ship flying at ever higher warp factors and the false danger that she might fall apart or something from doing so. Everything else about topping the scale and what lay there came from David Gerrold.