I meant it was unlikely that the Yorktown would be refitted as the Enterprise within the span of the film. They would have to take the ship away from the Indian captain (assuming he survived the whale crisis) "Great job holding things together captain, but we're giving your ship to Kirk", repair any damage, install a new bridge, etc. It makes more sense for the E-A to be another ship (I assume Gene didn't notice that there was a Yorktown in the film when he made his suggestion regarding the E-A).
As I said a bit above, I can come up with several scenarios. As @
Lightning said, maybe the solar sail was unsuccessful and they all died. Maybe he was promoted and some of his crew sent on the new
Excelsior-class
Yorktown. Maybe they barely survived and were given extended medical leave to get over the trauma and Starfleet chose to rename the ship rather than reawaken bad memories.
There are two approaches to problematic data in the Trek milieu. On the one hand, it can be dismissed outright as erroneous in favor of the preponderance of other data. On the other hand, things can be massaged "from a certain point of view", fudged here, tweaked there, and otherwise put through some mental gymnastics to find a way to make it all work together. Since enough things in the actual aired canon contradict blatantly or implicitly, I'm already primed to try to find ways to lubricate otherwise-contradictory facts to make it internally consistent. I hate having to admit defeat and reject something as "unworkable". So I have an easy time extending my reach to the ancillary material to fill in the gaps, where it fits rather than make something up out of whole cloth, unsupported by anything. Ironically, as in cases like the timeline issues I mentioned above, sometimes putting together all these canon and officially sanctioned sources results in an overall Big Picture that conflicts with the official party line (seriously, why the Okudas arbitrarily just added 300 to the original airdates to date TOS rather than actually do any actual proper research and calculation, I do not know...).
On the subject of when the Constitution ceased production, I always assumed the Excelsior class was its replacement. Given how they talk about it in TSFS and the fact it seems to be one of the most common ships in use in the 24th century at any rate.
Once “the great experiment” was done it went into production as a class and the Connie’s were cycled out- as evidenced by the end of TUC.
The
Excelsior class and her stablemates
do come into their ascendancy after Scotty's sabotage is repaired, yes. But
Constitution-generation ships remain viable well into the Voyager era -- the
Miranda class especially. And, as I said, an
Enterprise class ship was in the fleet that fought the Borg at Wolf 359. They didn't have time to reactivate something in mothballs -- it had to have been active to get there in time.
None of the other ships besides the new
Saratoga Sisko was on were of the
Constitution/
Enterprise era, but we only have about 15/16 ships out of the 40 that were there shown and identified.
I take the comments at the end of TUC as indicating just that particular ship, not the whole class.
Regarding the whole
Yorktown thing...
Just curious where that information comes from. As his involvement with the films was in effect honorary post-TMP, and TNG being foremost on his mind shortly after TVH, I can't see GR giving a flying flip about a backstory to a TOS movie ship change he hadn't creatively contributed to in the first place. Why would the TNG production (the only one during that time he was in charge of) need to know such a detail?
If it was supported by (to use the SW term) the Expanded Universe, then fine, if that's all we have to go on*. But I can't imagine GR knowing or caring about it. He wasn't approving every little trivial detail in tie-in books.
*...it originated with Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, right? I've heard repeatedly over the years that that book was apocryphal. But I don't know the source of THAT information, either.
Some of the better reference sites say the Yorktown info is non canon sources such as from the model kits. Nothing about Gene. I made a post about it earlier.
https://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=212149&page=10&p=4343451&viewfull=1#post4343451
First edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia has this under "
Yorktown, U.S.S.":
Roddenberry reportedly suggested that the second Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701-A, launched at the end of Star Trek IV, had previously been named the Yorktown, since it seems unlikely that Starfleet could have built an all-new ship so quickly. If this was the case, the Yorktown may have made it safely back to Earth and been repaired and renamed, or perhaps there was a newer, replacement Yorktown already under construction at the time of the probe crisis.
That gets carried forward with a bit more detail in the Second Edition, with the addition of two further
Yorktown entries, ships not yet in existence at the time of the First Edition -- the
Zodiac-class ship, NCC-61137, referenced in the alternate future of "All Good Things...", and --
The second Federation starship to bear the name. Tuvok's father served aboard the Starship Yorktown in 2293.
I'd have to go back through my Starlogs and various other Trek publications of the late '80s and early '90s, but I think that's probably the first time I saw that version mentioned.
As far as "apocryphal"...? *sigh* That is a very fraught word. Heck, Gene considered some parts of Star Trek V and Star Trek VI apocryphal, just because he disagreed with plot points. Official standing is a long and messy thing. Gene was friendly with Franz Joseph Schnaubelt, so signed off on and worked with the current Trek publishing house at the time (Ballantine) to have his Star Fleet Technical Manual and his U.S.S.
Constitution Booklet of General Plans published. Stuff from both of those showed up in TMP and TWOK. When Gene fell out with FJ, he worked to discredit all of that material, calling it "unofficial" and him just a "fan kook".
Around this time, FASA got the license to do the Star Trek RPG, and asked if those works were good references for their writers. They were emphatically told 'no'. The only other source of information they found was
this article, in a fan magazine published in 1975 -- a year after FJ's Technical Manual. FASA incorporated it with one or two typos, plus the erroneous "1631" registry (actually 1831, in the clearer BluRay release). When Mike Okuda went to work for the Star Trek offices in '85, he was also on the receiving end of Gene's anti-FJ diatribe, with the addition of "Roddenberry's Rules of Starship Design", all of which serve to block all of FJ's original designs in the Technical Manual. The only data source he was told was valid was the licensed FASA RPG. It's wonderfully circular, and more than a little flimsy. I will perpetually despise this for giving us the two <1700
Constitutions that are currently official (not getting into the
Constellation mess right now), the
Excalibur and
Exeter.
There are things FJ got wrong. There are things Greg Jein (and thus FASA and Mike Okuda) got wrong. I'm annoyed that, nowhere in any of this, did anyone think to talk to Matt Jeffries. A lot of registry matters would be very different, and I subscribe to Jeffries' intentions when fiddling around with the era. He was the one who came up with the registry prefix and number, he was the one who created that wall chart Greg Jein referenced to reach his conclusions. Consulting with him would be, in my opinion, an important first step.
Be that as it may. By the time Shane Johnson came on the scene, Trek publishing had shifted to Pocket Books, who published Shane's two official works, Mister Scott's Guide and Worlds of the Federation. He also published a couple other, smaller books through fandom publishers. On the one hand, he referenced the canon material for a lot of his working data. On the other hand, his dates derive from the fandom theory that the "two hundred years" quoted in "Space Seed" was accurate (
Enterprise launched in the 2190s, for instance), he gets a lot of prop details wrong, he's an adherent of the individual-ship-insignia model, complete with inventing his own to fill in the missing ones. While he did try to fix a lot of problems with the sets shown in the movies, reconciling them with the model exterior, he also made up a lot of stuff from nowhere, such as the
Ti-Ho/
Enterprise-A having Transwarp, how Transwarp works, where Transwarp comes from, the new shields being based on the force fields they found in "That Which Survives", and so on.
All official at one time or another. Almost all of it contradicting some to most of what's in the others, none completely meshing with what was on-screen -- which conflicts with itself, for that matter. So I care more about what works than what's most official.
--Jonah