Why does the Enterprise always get destroyed?

[GalaxyClass1701]

I am currently reading One Constant Star that features the Enterprise B. So I was curious what eventually happens to the ship and all the research I see says it was lost most likely destroyed. That would mean the only Enterprises that were decommissioned instead of destroyed are NX-01 and the Enterprise A. Also we don't know what will become of E.

Seems weird that the Flagship of the Federation would constantly be destroyed its a death ship!

 

[Jinn]

I am currently reading One Constant Star that features the Enterprise B. So I was curious what eventually happens to the ship and all the research I see says it was lost most likely destroyed. That would mean the only Enterprises that were decommissioned instead of destroyed are NX-01 and the Enterprise A. Also we don't know what will become of E.

Seems weird that the Flagship of the Federation would constantly be destroyed its a death ship!

Since it is the flagship it may be involved in battle more often than other ships, or at least be a main target for an enemy force.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

There isn't any canon info on the actual fates of the NX, A, or B. (IIRC, there's at least one novel where the A is destroyed, by whom I don't remember.) So that's three of seven ships canonically destroyed. Given the amount of battles the Federation seems to have, and the fact that the Enterprise is usually one of the most important/significant ships of whatever timeframe it's in and would often be expected to be on the front lines of combat, that doesn't seem like too high a number.

 

[Kemaiku]

NX-01: Retired 2160 after Columbia Class refit during the Romulan War
1701: Self destructed, not destroyed by attacker
1701-A: Decommissioned at Starfleet dockyards (whether she was scraped or mothballed we don't know)
1701-B: Nothing official
1701-C: First Enterprise actually destroyed by an attacker
1701-D: Destroyed
1701-E: "MIA" 2400 (Star Trek: Online)
1701-F: Currently in service 2402 (Star Trek: Online)
1701-J: Currently in service 2556 (relative)

So...2 were destroyed, out of 9 we know of.

 

[feek61]

And apparently the Enterprise gets destroyed in the forth-coming movie and severely damaged in the two previous outings. Not sure why the powers that be feel the need to have these sort of plots but it goes completely against the episodic nature of Star Trek to have the ship damaged/destroyed nearly every movie. Honestly it drives me crazy and I never consider the movies the same Trek as the series because of it.

 

[Kemaiku]

They're metal constructs, the Federation has endless material resources, enough to make over 80,000 starships in the Prime universe.

They can build them a dozen to replace it. Stop fretting. Shit happens to technology, it's people that matter, unless you value metal over humans.

 

[JD]

The galaxy is a dangerous place, so it's not surprising that a lot of ships get destroyed.

 

[Christopher]

Seems weird that the Flagship of the Federation would constantly be destroyed its a death ship!

Contrary to popular belief, the only ships named Enterprise that have ever been canonically referred to as "the flagship" are the Enterprise-D and the Mirror NX-01. Memory Beta's "Flagship" article lists all the Enterprises as flagships, but there's no factual basis for that as far as I know. And "the flagship of the Federation," despite being repeatedly used in TNG, is a term that makes no sense. A flagship is either the command ship of a specific task force or group, or the ship on which an admiral's flag (command post) is based -- for instance, the Commander's ship in "The Enterprise Incident." Sure, it is often informally used to mean the pride and joy of a fleet, the most prestigious member, but that's basically just PR. And I never cared for the elitism of treating one ship as superior to all the others. How stupid is it to deliberately concentrate all your best people on one ship and leave your other ships with less capable crews?

 

[Kemaiku]

A flagship means an Admiral is aboard or the ship is on a specific diplomatic errand with a literal flag aboard.

The ship cannot always be the "flagship", Trek got that, among many other borrowed Naval terms, wrong for the sake of creating an Uberstarship that always has to be make other species kneel and praise it. All bullshit of course, she's always just been another hull frame of an existing class with obnoxious people running it.

 

[Christopher]

A flagship means an Admiral is aboard or the ship is on a specific diplomatic errand with a literal flag aboard.

Hm... Come to think of it, maybe that was the meaning of "flagship of the Federation" for the E-D. After all, it was conceived by TNG's developers as a vessel on a primarily diplomatic and scientific mission -- the ship that would probe the frontier, make first contact with new civilizations, and represent the Federation as a whole and its ideals to the galaxy at large. So it would be a flagship in that diplomatic sense, of carrying the (figurative) standard of the Federation, but in general rather than on a specific mission. Of course, TNG pretty quickly abandoned the whole "probing the frontier" business and generally kept the E-D closer to home, but it did tend to be used as the UFP's primary diplomatic vessel.

 

[RandyS]

Real world answer: it makes for good Drama.

 

[Idran]

Real world answer: it makes for good Drama.

Isn't the real world answer, based on what's been posted so far, "it doesn't"?

 

[C.E. Evans]

If nothing ever happened to ships called Enterprise, then we'd have a thread about "Why does the Enterprise never get destroyed?"

 

[Christopher]

I believe the Enterprise was destroyed in The Search for Spock so that the heroes would have to sacrifice something precious in order to get Spock back. The E-D was destroyed in Generations because the producers wanted to start over with a new ship and sets that would be designed for the big screen instead of the small. As for why the current Enterprise is being trashed in Beyond... Well, I can only speculate, but its design was not universally loved, so maybe this is another case where they want an excuse to start fresh and design a new ship?

Or maybe it's just because lots of movies have action sequences based on destruction. We've seen the Xavier Mansion trashed at least a couple of times in the X-Men movies. The Helicarrier was badly damaged in The Avengers, several of them were trashed in The Winter Soldier, Stark's Malibu home was destroyed in Iron Man 3, and Avengers Tower got pretty well wrecked in Age of Ultron. And so on.

Part of it is the difference between movies and series television. A TV series needs to keep its sets and models intact for ongoing use, but movie sets are generally built only for the duration of the shoot and then torn down, so there's a greater willingness to tell stories involving the destruction of the heroes' headquarters. Also, movies are designed to be bigger, more self-contained stories with bigger stakes, and at least the appearance of major change even when they're parts of an ongoing series.

 

[F. King Daniel]

1701-A: Decommissioned at Starfleet dockyards (whether she was scraped or mothballed we don't know)

Destroyed in The Ashes of Eden, which I think is referenced in a recent-ish novel.

 

[Christopher]

Destroyed in The Ashes of Eden, which I think is referenced in a recent-ish novel.

That's one interpretation. There was a DC comic that had Scotty visit the E-A in a museum and encounter Koloth shortly before "Blood Oath" (although it was also supposed to be shortly after "Relics," and the timing doesn't quite work out there).

 

[Stephen!]

1701-E: "MIA" 2400 (Star Trek: Online)

Was Picard still in command of the Enterprise-E at this point?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Mr. Bennett is correct in terms of the literal definition of flagship (no, Chemahkuu, it makes no difference whether the errand is diplomatic or otherwise).

Which is to say, yes, damn near everybody who refers to any Enterprise as a "flagship" is getting it wrong, at least in literal terms.

Mr. Bennett is also correct about why the original 1701, after multiple refits, was sacrificed: We got Spock back, but it cost us the Enterprise, and it cost us David Marcus.

David Gerrold did a whole column in Starlog about how killing off a character and then bringing that character back gets really old, really fast, and trivializes both life and death. It's fine for Bugs Bunny, at the end of What's Opera, Doc, but this isn't a Warner Bros. cartoon, and it's not being played for laughs. Tasha Yar is still dead, at least in the Prime Universe, and so are Lee Kelso, Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and Chancellor Gorkon. Even M*A*S*H, although it was nominally a sitcom, did not bring back Henry Blake after killing him off.

And count me among those who were not particularly happy about the Abramsverse 1701. The exterior, the interiors, and the whole business of building it intact in the middle of Iowa, while Kirk is a juvenile delinquent teen because his father wasn't around even to write him letters, instead of assembling it in orbit, from pieces constructed in the Bay Area. (As far as I'm concerned, the only plausible backstory for building a ship in a cornfield is that the Kelvin incident scared the living crap out of the Federation, causing them to react by delaying the Constitution class, building it bigger, building it more heavily armed, and building it on the ground, where it might be slightly easier to hide.)

 

[Destructor]

Does the trailer for Beyond definitively show the Enterprise being destroyed, or does it just show it being heavily damaged, as it was in the previous two Trek films? I think this kind of hearkens back to the naval warfare tradition depicted in Master & Commander, where ships could hammer away at each other for quite some time without 'destroying' the other boat- just rendering it useless for combat to such a point where you could take it for your own.

 

[Christopher]

Does the trailer for Beyond definitively show the Enterprise being destroyed, or does it just show it being heavily damaged, as it was in the previous two Trek films?

The recent trailer mainly concentrates on the front of the secondary hull being smashed, but the earlier teaser trailer showed the nacelles coming off and the ship falling out of orbit. And there's a shot in the second trailer of a crashed saucer hull on the planet surface, possibly that of the Enterprise.

So if it's not completely destroyed, it's certainly gonna need to be massively rebuilt.