I was thinking of that too. I feel like they stuck to that for awhile, maybe that season, but soon dropped it.
Star Trek: stuff that grinds my gears...
- Thread starter DavidS
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I was thinking of that too. I feel like they stuck to that for awhile, maybe that season, but soon dropped it.
Mara Jade's Father
Master Member
Riceball
Master Member
They also had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of photon torpedoes as well, despite stating early on that they only a finite amount available to them.
Mara Jade's Father
Master Member
Here is an interesting piece of info regarding the Starfleet Logo:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Starfleet_insignia
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Starfleet_insignia
Lightning
Master Member
This recent and well researched article covers the internal logic behind the various insignia in the original series, barring production mistakes. Everything makes sense except the Exeter, which was what the memo was about.
http://www.startrek.com/article/starfleet-insignia-explained
http://www.startrek.com/article/starfleet-insignia-explained
Yep... it was from "Federation"... it's probably one of my favourite ST novelizations....
As explained from a website I found:
Cochrane draws a diagram to try and explain warp drive to Thorsen, showing the speed of light as a star, the energy required under Einsteinian relativity to reach lightspeed being a parabolic curve to infinity over the top, and the energy required by warp drive to be a smaller asymmetric curve beneath it. When he finishes drawing the diagram, the result looks like the Starfleet arrowhead symbol, suggesting this is where it comes from.
I get a very slight sense of "revisionist" off of that article, but the logic seems to hold up. I just wish there was a document that spelled all of that out instead of have to piece it together from a document and screenshots.
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That's actually a pretty cool explanation!
somerset fox
Sr Member
Has anyone mentioned the turbolift conversations that seem to take place, passing dozens of decks, before reaching their destination? If you take the light bars that scroll past in the walls as a deck, each lift has dozens of more decks than each ship ought to have, just to allow for a conversation to take place. Just feels like the director doesn't have an understanding of the supposid environment of the ship they are shooting on.
SmilingOtter
Master Member
The article about the insignia makes sense (especially given that most of the other options didn't allow for the command/science/engineering/etc division symbols. That said, I also like it being different fleet emblems. THAT said, I'd heard or read at some point that Starfleet adopted the Enterprise's emblem, not so much because of all its successes, but the fact that it was the only one of the 12 Constitution class ships to survive its 5-year mission...
Lightning
Master Member
I've never been a fan of any theory that has the Enterprise insignia adopted fleetwide for any reason. Not only is it not supported by anything onscreen, but the audience is the only ones who think the Enterprise is special. They didn't save the Earth until TMP, up till then the Enterprise was just another ship. No military organization would insult the rest of it's members that way, by calling out one ship as special. Really detrimental to fleet unity/morale.
Also, the Yorktown survived to be turned into the Enterprise-A, the Merrimac was communicating with/through the Epsilon IX station two and a half years after the Enterprise's FYM ended and she put in for refit. At least one un-refitted Constitution class survived into the 24th century to be in the Starfleet Museum. And as of a year or two before the end of the FYM, the Lexington, Hood, Potemkin, Excalibur, and Exeter were around, at least (even if the crews of the latter two ships were wiped out). Something catastrophic had to have have happened between then and TMP for all of them to have been destroyed in such a short span, but there's no indication of that. A bit before that, the Constitution was shown as active, and I don't like thinking anything happened to the class lead ship in that time, either.
Regardless, I've rolled my eyes at the "Enterprise was the only ship to come back" thing since I first saw it in the '80s.
--Jonah
Regardless, I've rolled my eyes at the "Enterprise was the only ship to come back" thing since I first saw it in the '80s.
--Jonah
Riceball
Master Member
Oh, I don't know. The US Army came real close when they took away the Ranger's black berets, giving them tan berets, and then gave all of the regular Army the black berets. That really didn't sit very well with the Rangers and even some regular Army thought that it was kind of embarrassing and insulting to the Rangers.
Axlotl
Master Member
Also in the '50s when Paratrooper boots became standard issue for all GIs.
@Mara Jade's Father -- Yep, I know. Everything is conjecture, with varying amounts of "weight". The Atlantis version came first, from FASA, in their Star Trek IV Update supplement, in 1986. At the time, they were considered official sources of information, being as they held license from Paramount and everything they published had to be vetted and approved. The Ti-Ho came next, in 1987. I know Shane. He'd been working on Mr. Scott's Guide in his spare time, pretty much since TMP came out. He and Andy Probert had a somewhat fricative relationship. Shane noticed all the things wrong with the refit design*, and kept poking Andy about them, even after Andy had pointed out that those all preceded his involvement, he'd noticed them, too, and he wasn't allowed to fix them. There are many things that I like about Shane's work, and many things that just don't fit. He hadn't known about the Atlantis when he determined that Starfleet couldn't have built a new ship so quickly, so he used the name of a ship a friend of his who was dying of cancer had come up with as a tribute.
[*That corridor leading into Engineering would stick out into space, the torpedo bay wouldn't fit in the space allowed, the rec deck was never properly reconfigured to account for its move from centerline just below and aft of the bridge superstructure to the saucer rim (those two turboshafts were supposed to be the ones coming down from the bridge, but in the final location they come from nowhere and go to nowhere), and the fact that the turbolift cars themselves couldn't physically fit in the horizontal shafts...]
The other big fandom publication of the time, Ships of the Star Fleet, published in 1988, had the new Enterprise as a newbuild. The author's contributions over the years carry a lot of weight in fan circles, so even though it isn't official, a nonzero portion of the fanbase swears by it.
The first mention of the Yorktown being a contender is in 1994 in that ship's entry in the Encyclopedia. Same reason -- The Powers That Be recognized there hadn't been enough time to build a new ship. The Yorktown was mentioned but not seen both about halfway through the FYM and in TVH. There was no supplemental information, beyond behind-the-scenes info of production intention, that it was Constitution class of any configuration. Gene was the one who decided it would be appropriate for it to be the new Enterprise as Yorktown had been the original name for the hero ship in early treatments. Given that the people who were responsible for making such decisions for the production tended to go with what Gene said as gospel, that's the official unofficial fact now, unless and until something specifically overwrites it.
And it is supported by the later canon. At the end of TVH, it's back in dock and freshly repaired after its encounter with the Whalesong Probe. "Let's see what she's got," from Kirk. But there were problems. Scotty's line does refer to her as a new ship, but there's a track record for that. Decker referring to the refit original as an "almost totally new Enterprise". Morrow referred to her as being "twenty years old" when she was actually forty, suggesting an at-least-equally extensive refit around the time Kirk took command, and potentially indicating estimates of a ship's age date more from keel-up rebuilds than original construction. If, after TMP, more Constitution-class ships got refitted to or past the Enterprise's specs, the Yorktown might have had the bad luck to have been out on its first shakedown when the Probe came along, prompting immediate repairs to untested systems. Further evidence of this being the intention of the creative team is where she is to be decommissioned in 2293, at the end of TUC -- only about six and a half years after being launched under her new name. In-universe, the Enterprise-B was launched only three months later, suggesting she was already under construction at the time, and the Enterprise-A was only ever intended to be a placeholder for a few years until Kirk retired.
There's a bunch of additional behind-the-scenes and ancillary material to support this. From the Fact Files and his Encyclopedias through Mike Okuda, from FASA in their TNG Officer's Manual, from "Flashback" where Tuvok's parents are mentioned contemporaneously... There was a new Excelsior-class Yorktown in service by 2293, registry NCC-2033. Going by precedent both in-universe and real-world, it was probably already under construction when Starfleet decided to decommission the Constitution-class ship and put it into semi-retirement under a new name.
So what I originally posted was the non-tl;dr summation of all of this.
This is what happens when I don't write out a full essay to give context and reasoning...
--Jonah
[*That corridor leading into Engineering would stick out into space, the torpedo bay wouldn't fit in the space allowed, the rec deck was never properly reconfigured to account for its move from centerline just below and aft of the bridge superstructure to the saucer rim (those two turboshafts were supposed to be the ones coming down from the bridge, but in the final location they come from nowhere and go to nowhere), and the fact that the turbolift cars themselves couldn't physically fit in the horizontal shafts...]
The other big fandom publication of the time, Ships of the Star Fleet, published in 1988, had the new Enterprise as a newbuild. The author's contributions over the years carry a lot of weight in fan circles, so even though it isn't official, a nonzero portion of the fanbase swears by it.
The first mention of the Yorktown being a contender is in 1994 in that ship's entry in the Encyclopedia. Same reason -- The Powers That Be recognized there hadn't been enough time to build a new ship. The Yorktown was mentioned but not seen both about halfway through the FYM and in TVH. There was no supplemental information, beyond behind-the-scenes info of production intention, that it was Constitution class of any configuration. Gene was the one who decided it would be appropriate for it to be the new Enterprise as Yorktown had been the original name for the hero ship in early treatments. Given that the people who were responsible for making such decisions for the production tended to go with what Gene said as gospel, that's the official unofficial fact now, unless and until something specifically overwrites it.
And it is supported by the later canon. At the end of TVH, it's back in dock and freshly repaired after its encounter with the Whalesong Probe. "Let's see what she's got," from Kirk. But there were problems. Scotty's line does refer to her as a new ship, but there's a track record for that. Decker referring to the refit original as an "almost totally new Enterprise". Morrow referred to her as being "twenty years old" when she was actually forty, suggesting an at-least-equally extensive refit around the time Kirk took command, and potentially indicating estimates of a ship's age date more from keel-up rebuilds than original construction. If, after TMP, more Constitution-class ships got refitted to or past the Enterprise's specs, the Yorktown might have had the bad luck to have been out on its first shakedown when the Probe came along, prompting immediate repairs to untested systems. Further evidence of this being the intention of the creative team is where she is to be decommissioned in 2293, at the end of TUC -- only about six and a half years after being launched under her new name. In-universe, the Enterprise-B was launched only three months later, suggesting she was already under construction at the time, and the Enterprise-A was only ever intended to be a placeholder for a few years until Kirk retired.
There's a bunch of additional behind-the-scenes and ancillary material to support this. From the Fact Files and his Encyclopedias through Mike Okuda, from FASA in their TNG Officer's Manual, from "Flashback" where Tuvok's parents are mentioned contemporaneously... There was a new Excelsior-class Yorktown in service by 2293, registry NCC-2033. Going by precedent both in-universe and real-world, it was probably already under construction when Starfleet decided to decommission the Constitution-class ship and put it into semi-retirement under a new name.
So what I originally posted was the non-tl;dr summation of all of this.
This is what happens when I don't write out a full essay to give context and reasoning... --Jonah
The Rangers were issued jump boots on D-Day to help keep sand out. The U.S. Army paratroopers were not happy about it and it led to some conflict I guess. I remember one story (maybe from the Band of Brothers book?) where a group of paratroopers found a regular Army guy wearing jump boots to impress girls and they forcibly removed his boots and told him what would happen if they saw that again. :lol
Heck of a repair job. I seem to recall it being self destucted in The Search for Spock.
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Speaking of blowing up ships, that reminds me of something else they did that really annoyed me: 1701-__. Stop adding letters and just use new numbers already. It's stupid. It's the crew we were watching not a specific number. Heck, use different names even and make them plank owners or whatever the Starfleet version is called.
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The Yorktown. :behave
As for the whole suffixed-registry thing... A friend of mine summed it up nicely back in the '90s. The Enterprise-A was designated such as a specific honor for Kirk -- a special dispensation to give him a replica of the ship he'd lost as he finished out his last few years before retirement. A way for the Federation Council to say "thanks for saving the planet". Starfleet would have had to come up with a way to replicate the registry without conflicting with the NCC-1701 that was already on the books. So it's a replica registry, too, if you will. They tacked the "-A" on to avoid bookkeeping confusion. The hull is probably still on file as NCC-1717, despite what's painted on the outside.
Then there was the whole hoopla with the modified Excelsior design that Kirk helped them work out -- taking what had originally been conceived of as a battleship at a time of high tensions with the Klingons and giving it more exploration clout. Restoring the nacelle hydrogen collectors after they'd been phased out for a good twenty years, loading more long-range and lateral sensor equipment into specially-designed hull extensions, adding a couple saucer shuttlebays (in the conflicting data of what those new boxes are on the saucer, I come down on the shuttlebays-not-impulse-engines camp)... With all of that, Starfleet wanted to capitalize on the PR spin of exploration over combat, plus the fame of Kirk's involvement. They decided to call the first ship of the variant type Enterprise, and carry forward the registry again, this time bumping the letter to a "B".
Then, as he put it, like all other silly military traditions, it didn't die the death it may have so richly deserved. As Picard put it: Plenty of letters left in the alphabet.
--Jonah
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