I have. Some years ago. The Cliff's Notes version is, more or less...
Sadly, as with Star Wars, the problem lies with Trek's creator, his ego, and the slavish adoration of those working for him in latter years. I adore Gene Roddenberry, but I also acknowledge his faults. Do you know about Franz Joseph's Technical Manual and Constitution Class booklet of plans from the 1970s? If not, do a quick Google search. He was an aerospace engineer, much like Matt Jeffries, whose daughter (and her friends) was a Trekkie. He never really watched the show, but caught enough of it in the background when his daughter was watching that the engineer in him began pondering how the Enterprise might actually work. He read "The Making of Star Trek" and ordered photos from Lincoln Enterprises (the Roddenberrys' merchandising company). A few years later, he was selling the blueprints from a table at one of the early Star Trek conventions and Gene saw the finished result. He offered to have them published, with his signature granting them official weight. FJ chatted a bit about the notions he'd had percolating since the blueprint project about the sort of organization that would have to exist to support such ships, and the result was the Technical Manual. They became friends, and many bridge inserts in TMP, TWOK, and TSFS were taken from both works.
Meanwhile, Gene offered FJ a job helping him do conceptual art for a new project he was working on. Problem is, FJ was from the world of engineering, where he was used to contractors giving precise parameters and deadlines. Gene was used to the world of television, and was used to people understanding that when he said he wanted something he expected them to have it to him by last week. A minor communications breakdown escalated due to their individual egos and stubbornness to the point that Gene not only fired FJ, not only never talked to him again for the rest of their lives, he declared the blueprints and Technical Manual non-canon, unofficial, and any other tem you want for utter blacklisting. So when FASA was developing their Star Trek role-playing game in the latter half of the '80s, and preproduction started on TNG in 1986, the dictate from above was "ignore FJ for starship designs, names, or registry numbers". Gene even came up with "Roddenberry's Rules of Starship Design" which, between them, invalidated each of the unique (non-Constitution) designs FJ had created.
So FASA and Mike (who was tasked with coming up with ship names and registries for TNG, TVH, TFF, TUC, DS9, and VOY) had to resort to other sources. Both ended up using an article Greg Jein had written for the fan magazine "T-Negative" back in the '70s wherein he laid out how he had used -- in his own words -- a barely-logical method to match up the known Constitution-class ships as of TOS' first sesason (from the memos reproduced in "The Making of Star Trek") with the chart of registry numbers in the episode "Court Martial". This, unfortunately, while placing the Constitution herself at NCC-1700, assigned several Constitution-class ships sub-1700 registries. This in contradiction to what Matt Jeffries had intended when he created that chart, but no one interviewed him until later on, so they didn't know at the time that he had reasoned out the meaning of the Enterprise's registry...
In the early '60s, America's Civil Aviation prefix was NC. He tacked another 'C' onto it to give it a bit of a remove (he found out some years later that the Soviet Union's Civil Aviation prefix was CC, and he like the notion of a symbolic joining of the two big 20th century adversaries in the future setting of Star Trek). Later, as he continued working on the show, he decided that it echoed the wet navy hull codes -- CC for cruisers, and, by extension, DD for destroyers, FF for frigates, etc. The 'N' would be an interstellar-agreed-upon prefix indicating a Federation-registered craft. For the number, he had to exclude anything that would be unclear on the TV screens of the time, and, as he put it, "out of what was left, '1701' was as good as anything". Same after-the-fact rumination. He decided the '17' indicated the Federation's 17th cruiser design, and the '01' the first production hull after the prototype (1700). So when he made that wall chart, the 16xx registries were intended to be cruisers of the class immediately preceding the Constitutions.
So, because Gene got his feathers ruffled over a misunderstanding, everything got borked. And yes, this really is the short version.
--Jonah
