Star Trek: stuff that grinds my gears...

The Yorktown came from Gene Roddenberry behind-the-scenes

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.
 
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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
 
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've always taken a morbid view of the Yorktown-Ent-A situation. After the entire crew of the Yorktown suffocated to death no one would want to serve on the "Death Ship". So what better time to rename a ship (something which is usually bad luck). Anyway, there is probably a couple months at least between the Bird of Prey splashdown and the unveiling of the Ent-A, plenty of time for some minor repairs and a new bridge module.
 
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.

wolf359-1-2a.jpg

wolf359-5-2a.jpg


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
 
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ALL of this can be explained via one grand unifying theory:

Trek TV shows didn’t have the budgets to create new starship models on a whim. ;)

Existing models were reworked, stuff not needed for hero shots was kitbashed, and pre-existing footage was frequently retouched and recycled.

So for most of TNG you had variants of the Miranda, the Oberth, and The Excelsior almost exclusively. The Stargazer/Constellation was a kitbash (as were most of the various graveyard/shipyard vessels). I think the only new models introduced were the Nebula and the Ambassador, because they were very on-camera and specific in their first appearances. And of course once they showed up once, became a lot more common.

The thing I hated most was the scale issues. Like the Oberth being reclassify with the exact same design only BIGGER was annoying.

DS9 used the same models, and did a lot more kitbashing. The got the runabouts and Defiant of course. After Generations all the Excelsiors suddenly looked like the E-B. Once First Contact’s budget allowed for the time to create a handful of new cgi ships, those magically started to show up on DS9 as well as the assets were made available.

The starship nerd in me always hated this even though I totally get it.
 
You know what grinds my gears? Discussions like the last couple of pages. I mean, really — who cares? These are movies and TV shows. They’re making these stories on a budget, and a timeline. I doubt many people stop and say, Woah, we can’t use that model, that class of ship wouldn’t be in operation anymore.
 
You know what grinds my gears? Discussions like the last couple of pages. I mean, really — who cares? These are movies and TV shows. They’re making these stories on a budget, and a timeline. I doubt many people stop and say, Woah, we can’t use that model, that class of ship wouldn’t be in operation anymore.

RPF is probably the last place on Earth where you should complain about fans being overly obsessed with continuity and details of a science fiction franchise.

I'm sorry but there will be no ice cream for YOU!
 
I've been re-watching TOS the last few weeks. What grinds my gears is all the earth mirroring planets. I don't mean class M, but whole societies of Romans, gangsters, Nazis, native Americans (twice!). I assume CBS had lots of props and costumes from other productions they were recycling but it's making the last season hard to watch without laughing out loud several times per episode. I'm up to episode 6 of the third season and the rest of the family is loosing patience. ;)
 
Here's one I've often thought about. It's not really a 'grind my gears' thing, though.

You always hear people talking about the technology of Star Trek and mostly its usually focused on either theoretical Warp or Transporter tech. But there is one ST tech I find that seems to be mostly overlooked. And that is Scanner technology. Being able to just point a device at something or shoot a beam at something and being able to analyze it. That is a MAJOR bit of tech!! Think about how much scanners are used in the franchise and it is hardly ever talked about.

Think of all the real world applications this technology could be used for. Imagine how much medical science could advance and improve just using those little "salt shakers" that Bones used. How much the media could advance by using "put it on screen" tech. How much the military could advance being able to detect weapons and bombs. The possibilities are endless.

Has it ever been explained how the scanner wave actually works? Because it is a damn helpful tool.
 
Here's one I've often thought about. It's not really a 'grind my gears' thing, though.

You always hear people talking about the technology of Star Trek and mostly its usually focused on either theoretical Warp or Transporter tech. But there is one ST tech I find that seems to be mostly overlooked. And that is Scanner technology. Being able to just point a device at something or shoot a beam at something and being able to analyze it. That is a MAJOR bit of tech!! Think about how much scanners are used in the franchise and it is hardly ever talked about.

Think of all the real world applications this technology could be used for. Imagine how much medical science could advance and improve just using those little "salt shakers" that Bones used. How much the media could advance by using "put it on screen" tech. How much the military could advance being able to detect weapons and bombs. The possibilities are endless.

Has it ever been explained how the scanner wave actually works? Because it is a damn helpful tool.

We are slowly, but surely getting there. People have been busy trying to replicate the diagnostic beds that have been seen in all incarnation of Trek since TOS and I believe that bomb detectors already exist to a certain extent.

As to how it all works, I think that it's a combination of passive and active tech. Some probably work by bouncing a beam or wave of a particular type of energy and details are worked out based on what the return signal looks like. Other would would certainly work by using ultra sensitive dectectors that are attuned to certain types of energies, sort of like how a geiger counter detects radiation. Life sign detectors probably work on a combination of things like detecting a pulse, heat signatures in the range of known lifeforms, heartbeats, possibly even the faint electrical impulses given off by many living things as a result of muscular or neural activity.

Given that many animals, such as sharks, can already detect things that we can't ourselves it's more than doable, the real trick is being able to detect things from a long distance away. As it stands, our current scanning tech isn't to the point that we can detect things like minute electrical impulses, or, I imagine radiation from miles away, much less from orbit.
 
We have tons of scanners and detectors in our everyday life. They are just very specific and limited in scope/range. Star Trek posits catch-all scanners. It's a thing I think we'll eventually get to in a few hundred years.
 
I've been re-watching TOS the last few weeks. What grinds my gears is all the earth mirroring planets. I don't mean class M, but whole societies of Romans, gangsters, Nazis, native Americans (twice!). I assume CBS had lots of props and costumes from other productions they were recycling but it's making the last season hard to watch without laughing out loud several times per episode. I'm up to episode 6 of the third season and the rest of the family is loosing patience. ;)

I read somewhere once (don't remember where - it was a long time ago) that CBS didn't want to renew Star Trek for a third season, but did anyway, for reasons I can't recall (fan demand?).
Anyway, the article (book?) went on to say that CBS consciously and deliberately sabotaged season three with lousy scripts and a diminished budget so that it would definitely fail in the ratings this time and they for sure wouldn't have to renew it for a fourth season.
That's why season three is dumb.
 
NBC.

And no, no company sabotages its own product deliberately. They may shortchange one product in favor of another, but pour money into something (even if it's less money than before) TO kill it? No. Much easier and cheaper just to cancel it.

Also, the network did not provide the scripts.
 
It was Gene himself who lost interest in the show after the second season and didn't really put a lot of effort into what happened during the third season.
 
In addition, let's not forget that Roddenberry thought the show was a sinking ship which he promptly abandoned. Fred Freiberger took over as the main producer for season three and had a very different approach to things.

Also, Gene ****, the producer and writer considered to be a crucial contributor to the quality of the first two season scripts, left the show at some point during the 2nd season.

edit: AjK001 beat me to it. Also, the forum filter apparently censored Gene's last name.
 
ALL of this can be explained via one grand unifying theory:

Trek TV shows didn’t have the budgets to create new starship models on a whim. ;)

Existing models were reworked, stuff not needed for hero shots was kitbashed, and pre-existing footage was frequently retouched and recycled.

So for most of TNG you had variants of the Miranda, the Oberth, and The Excelsior almost exclusively. The Stargazer/Constellation was a kitbash (as were most of the various graveyard/shipyard vessels). I think the only new models introduced were the Nebula and the Ambassador, because they were very on-camera and specific in their first appearances. And of course once they showed up once, became a lot more common.

The thing I hated most was the scale issues. Like the Oberth being reclassify with the exact same design only BIGGER was annoying.

Well, that's because the Oberth was never intended to be a re-use of the Grissom filming miniature, and -- IMO -- it isn't. Every instance of that ship model from "The Naked Now" on, I mentally treat as a placeholder for the proper design. Rick already had it designed, but Paramount didn't want to spring for it. He later thought he was going to get a chance to right the wrong with "The Pegasus", but Paramount balked again and they re-used the Grissom miniature... again. The Oberth he designed was to be a mid-century science vessel of the Ambassador design generation, analogous to the Miranda or Nebula classes: saucer with faired-in secondary, underslung warp engines coming from about the join plane. I've seen one sketch, plus the MSD he'd roughed out for "The Pegasus".

It amazes me how sloppy the re-use of the Grissom was in "The Naked Now". You can even still see the name and registry, unchanged from TSFS, painted on the hull.

The Constellation doesn't count as a kitbash, in the Trek sense. It has two movie-Enterprise AMT kit saucer tops and two sets of nacelles and impulse engines, all attached to a scratch-built main hull section and engine pylons, plus pieces of Macross kits and en entire Valkyrie Battloid slappe don for greebling. *chuckle* That... got refined a bit when they built the actual Stargazer miniature. The real kitbashes are the ones where pieces of different kits are thrown together to make new classes, like the Excelsior saucer-and-engines with the Reliant roll-bar (in different scales) to make the Centaur. By and large I like and regard as canon most of these -- with a bit of cleanup. On the other hand, I hate ships contributed by people who don't understand how they work. The Sabre and Steamrunner classes **** me off with their Bussard collectors right there next to the habitable volume of the ship. *sigh*

DS9 used the same models, and did a lot more kitbashing. The got the runabouts and Defiant of course. After Generations all the Excelsiors suddenly looked like the E-B.

Only the Lakota. All the other Excelsiors were wtill the TUC version or stock footage of the TSFS version.

Once First Contact’s budget allowed for the time to create a handful of new cgi ships, those magically started to show up on DS9 as well as the assets were made available.

The starship nerd in me always hated this even though I totally get it.

I don't get that. I love it. It expands the fleet each time. I like the New Orleans, the Centaur, the Elkins, the Cheyenne... Imagine how boring this scene would have been with only one class of ship, TOS style:


You know what grinds my gears? Discussions like the last couple of pages. I mean, really — who cares? These are movies and TV shows. They’re making these stories on a budget, and a timeline. I doubt many people stop and say, Woah, we can’t use that model, that class of ship wouldn’t be in operation anymore.

...Says the guy who's screen-name is the Captain of the Kobayashi Maru, something even most Trek fans I know don't know... We obsess over the minutiæ, because it is all those little things that add up to the one big thing. It all has to work together, just as the stuff that makes up the real world has to work together. Just because it's a fictional universe doesn't mean it deserves to be done half-assed.

And as far as budgets and time slots and who cared and who didn't... Trek was only a marginal success when it started, using the only metric around at the time -- raw numbers that the A.C. Neilson Company collected. They cancelled it after the first and second seasons, and each time got deluged by coordinated letter-writing campaigns and so brought it back. Gene got tired of the stress of that, and dealing with network heads who didn't believe in him. So, as was pointed out, he was largely already on to other things by the third season. We got a lot more "bottle shows", where they're only on the ship and can save the cost of alien planets and such. We got a lot of goofiness like "Spock's Brain" and "The Way to Eden". We got a few things that just don't make any sense to the people who actually understood the show's rules and structure.

"Day of the Dove" is a biggie. Main Engineering was always "below decks", per Gene's insistence. The set was a half-set, the starboard half, with the ceiling braces curving up to the centerline, and Scotty's second-floor office straddling the midline. The stuff out the mesh rear wall was a forced-perspective reactor farm for powering the warp engines. But watch that episode and listen to where they say stuff is happening. The interconnecting dorsal is sealed off by the Hate-Eater, so the secondary hull and everyone in it are inaccessible. The Klingons control "Main Engineering", which is at the rear of decks six and seven. Where the impulse engines are. Which isn't Main Engineering. But no one left on the show knew or cared.

Of course, a couple years after Trek got cancelled for good, Neilson started charting demographics -- what subgroups made up those raw numbers. It was discovered that, while Trek underperformed in terms of total viewers, the show was consistently #1 for the 18-35-year-old, college-educated, middle-class group who had the most buying power, and NBC realized they'd shot their golden goose. They almost immediately started talking about bringing Trek back, but it took a while to figure out how.

--Jonah
 
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You know what grinds my gears? Discussions like the last couple of pages. I mean, really — who cares? These are movies and TV shows. They’re making these stories on a budget, and a timeline. I doubt many people stop and say, Woah, we can’t use that model, that class of ship wouldn’t be in operation anymore.
Stay out of the Star Wars Rebels thread. There was a page or two of discussions and various theories over why a panel on a ship from the live movies was missing from a cartoon with mediocre graphics.

Sent from my Hewlett Packard 48G using Tapatalk
 
Well, that's because the Oberth was never intended to be a re-use of the Grissom filming miniature, and -- IMO -- it isn't. Every instance of that ship model from "The Naked Now" on, I mentally treat as a placeholder for the proper design. Rick already had it designed, but Paramount didn't want to spring for it. He later thought he was going to get a chance to right the wrong with "The Pegasus", but Paramount balked again and they re-used the Grissom miniature... again. The [Oberth[/i] he designed was to be a mid-century science vessel of the Ambassador design generation, analogous to the Miranda or Nebula classes: saucer with faired-in secondary, underslung warp engines coming from about the join plane. I've seen one sketch, plus the MSD he'd roughed out for "The Pegasus".

I don't recall where or how-- but that sounds really familiar. Did it have bussard collectors in the same sort of wedge shape as Voyager (though sans window? I would have loved to have seen this.

Maybe if they ever do a special SPECIAL edition they could replace some of those ships. Yeah-- using it as the Pegasus, made very little sense. That one could be a no brainer-- it should be either the Defiant design, or something that looks like a precursor to it.

The Constellation doesn't count as a kitbash, in the Trek sense. It has two movie-Enterprise AMT kit saucer tops and two sets of nacelles and impulse engines, all attached to a scratch-built main hull section and engine pylons, plus pieces of Macross kits and en entire Valkyrie Battloid slappe don for greebling. *chuckle* That... got refined a bit when they built the actual Stargazer miniature. The real kitbashes are the ones where pieces of different kits are thrown together to make new classes, like the Excelsior saucer-and-engines with the Reliant roll-bar (in different scales) to make the Centaur. By and large I like and regard as canon most of these -- with a bit of cleanup.

We don't need to split hairs-- but I don't think the source of the models matters much. In my book any slapping together of pre-existing model parts counts as kitbashing.

Only the Lakota. All the other Excelsiors were wtill the TUC version or stock footage of the TSFS version.

Hmm! My recall is fuzzy then!

I don't get that. I love it. It expands the fleet each time. I like the New Orleans, the Centaur, the Elkins, the Cheyenne... Imagine how boring this scene would have been with only one class of ship, TOS style:

No no-- I don't hate their re-use on other shows. I just hated that it was always really obvious that once new toys were made for a movie, they would then filter to the TV shows like they had always been there. If you were re-watcxhing DS9 it's very clear when FC happens-- because the fleet suddenly has more variety, the uniforms change, the phaser rifles are suddenly upgraded, etc.

It was just that bit of production card-showing that bugged me.

I forgot to mention too that almost every space station was a re-use of space dock or Regular 1-- though that goes all the way back to TWOK flipping over the station V-Ger nukes.
 
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