Star Trek: stuff that grinds my gears...
- Thread starter DavidS
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Because the Yorktown was around in TOS, before the Enterprise became the first ship configured in the movie style. And yes, that was a whole new thing. Kirk -- head of Starfleet Operations -- didn't know that this design powered phasers directly from the warp drive, those engines had never been tested at warp power (even if calibration is required, I doubt Scotty would be so nervous if those were standard-issue units at that point), etc., etc. The other Constitution class ships we saw in TOS all looked like the Enterprise. Except the Constellation, which looked like the inaccurate AMT model kit. The Yorktown was listed on the memo of suggested Constitution class ship names that circulated the production office prior to season 2 of TOS, and then was one of the ships name-dropped in that season ("Obsession"). Greg Jein linked the name through self-admitted "barely logical" means to the NCC-1717 on Commodore Stone's status board in "Court Martial", and that's the official registry to this day. She's a "Connie".
And yes, the refit configuration is enough of a departure from its original configuration that it became the lead ship of a new class. From TWOK:
I've seen people try to say this is the simulator assigned to the class of cadets assigned to the Enterprise, but that's not what the film-makers intended, and it's not a necessary mental contortion. For any of half a dozen explanations I could conjure, between 2285 and 2293, all remaining non-refit-spec Constitutions had been retired or refitted to Enterprise spec, and so it reverted to the original class name.
More or less. I have something of a "Grand Unified Theory" I've been poking around at over the decades, in consultation with Rick and Mike and various fandom authorities, that draws on pretty much everything that's been aired, screened, or published to generate a good organic, holistic Big Picture of pretty much everything in the Trek universe from the time their timeline split off from ours (a couple hundred years ago, minimum) up through when Picard goes into the Nexus (I hate the Enterprise-E -- it's a massive step backward in design... so I treat everything after that point as Picard's Nexus fantasy *heh*). Their early spaceflight, with six Voyager probes, interstellar sleeper ships in the 1990s, and so on... The Phoenix and the Bonaventure and the Valiant and all that from the 21st century... The formation of Starfleet, the Founding of the Federation, the development project cycle... Everything from FASA, Last Unicorn Games, Ships of the Star Fleet, Star Trek Maps, the Spaceflight Chronology, et cetera ad very nearly infinitum. So for this I'm trying to restrict things to official and nearly-official sources, such as the writers' bibles, shooting scripts, and other things not contradicted by the finished results we saw. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep...
--Jonah
And yes, the refit configuration is enough of a departure from its original configuration that it became the lead ship of a new class. From TWOK:
I've seen people try to say this is the simulator assigned to the class of cadets assigned to the Enterprise, but that's not what the film-makers intended, and it's not a necessary mental contortion. For any of half a dozen explanations I could conjure, between 2285 and 2293, all remaining non-refit-spec Constitutions had been retired or refitted to Enterprise spec, and so it reverted to the original class name.
More or less. I have something of a "Grand Unified Theory" I've been poking around at over the decades, in consultation with Rick and Mike and various fandom authorities, that draws on pretty much everything that's been aired, screened, or published to generate a good organic, holistic Big Picture of pretty much everything in the Trek universe from the time their timeline split off from ours (a couple hundred years ago, minimum) up through when Picard goes into the Nexus (I hate the Enterprise-E -- it's a massive step backward in design... so I treat everything after that point as Picard's Nexus fantasy *heh*). Their early spaceflight, with six Voyager probes, interstellar sleeper ships in the 1990s, and so on... The Phoenix and the Bonaventure and the Valiant and all that from the 21st century... The formation of Starfleet, the Founding of the Federation, the development project cycle... Everything from FASA, Last Unicorn Games, Ships of the Star Fleet, Star Trek Maps, the Spaceflight Chronology, et cetera ad very nearly infinitum. So for this I'm trying to restrict things to official and nearly-official sources, such as the writers' bibles, shooting scripts, and other things not contradicted by the finished results we saw. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep...
--Jonah
I would be careful of trying to come up with any theories about the series and movies post-Roddenberry. Maybe some of the people behind the scenes cared about this stuff, but I would bet that at least the same number wanted to "leave their mark" on the franchise. Heck, probably more.
And I don't include anything from the JJ-verse. That stuff is all "I don't care, just make it look cool. Ship somehow partially buried in a mountain, but still able to fly and save the day? That sounds totally awesome, do it! And if you can use Beasty Boys in the soundtrack I can get you a bonus."
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And I don't include anything from the JJ-verse. That stuff is all "I don't care, just make it look cool. Ship somehow partially buried in a mountain, but still able to fly and save the day? That sounds totally awesome, do it! And if you can use Beasty Boys in the soundtrack I can get you a bonus."
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Lightning
Master Member
I figure Starfleet has a complicated system of figuring out the "true age" of a ship based of the percentage of original parts vs the parts that were replaced and the relative ages of each.
Indeed, my personal version is that the 1701-A got a different and perhaps less extensive refit internally. The outside looks the same but we know the shuttlebay resembles the TOS version much more closely than the TMP version. And it has different style of warp core as well. Perhaps this version of the refit was tested on the USS Constitution, thus it retained the class name.
Riceball
Master Member
It's likely that there are differences within a class of ships in Starfleet due to new tech getting added to follow on ships of a given ship. This happens in real life where US Navy (& presumably others) are built in flights with each flight being something of a slight variant of a class. A good example of this are the LA class of attack subs, Flight I boats were the base model and all LAs were initially built to that standard. As time went on they came up with the Flight II which added vertical launch tubes and some other minor improvements to its interior, all subsequent LAs were built to the Flight II standard. Years after the Flight II came out the Navy came up with a Flight III which moved the dive planes from the sail to the nose and made further improvements to its interior and capabilities, like with the Flight II all newly built LAs were Flight IIIs. The thing is, regardless of whether the boat is a Flight I, II, or III they were still all LA class subs. The same could be the case with the Enterprise and the Enterprise A, it could be that the Enterprise was a Flight II Constitution upgrade while the A was an older Flight I having been refitted prior to the Enterprise.
It wasn't that the Enterprise was the only ship to come back relatively undamaged but that it was the FIRST starship to come back relatively undamaged. As such Starfleet was more than happy to celebrate the voyages of the Enterprise. - source novelization of ST:TMP by Gene Roddenberry
I fail to see why that matters. It might have been lost or decommissioned and they built a replacement.
Oh, absolutely. For all the praise he gets (and I acknowledge dude can write a good story), Ron Moore messed up more than I feel is balanced out by contributions. He screwed up O'Brien permanently because he couldn't tell the difference between position and rank. Brannon Braga is even worse. The continuity he so derides is essential for the internal integrity of a fictional universe.
But for all that, Rick and Mike were there throughout to quietly nudge things this way or that, even as the writers and producers came up with "great new ideas". Most of the problems come from folks on staff forgetting that the Trek future isn't our future. So as TNG gave way gradually to Voyager, the late-20th-to-mid-21st-century period shifted to more resemble projections from our (at the time) present, rather than what Trek had already established. But even then, most of that I can work with. Even all the time-travel stuff. It all works together better than one might think.
That's actually a pretty good idea, there, and about where my thinking had been trending, without having actually gotten there yet. Thanks.
I dunno about that last bit, but you're right about the rest. The ship had TMP engines, TMP phasers, TMP torpedo launchers, TMP impulse drive, TMP hull plating and shield grid, TMP self-illumination system, TMP botanical section, TMP bridge module (cosmetic changes aside). Plus, as you said, an even more advanced warp core. I doubt less work going into the shuttlebay would have been the dividing line in classification...
Oh, exactly. I hadn't wanted to get into the gritty of the nitty that I've kludged together from various sources, but my take is that, by TMP, there were only maybe a couple un-modified as-launched, original-spec Constitution class ships around. That's what I ascribe Kirk's "only a dozen like her in the fleet" line as referring to. Attrition we saw in TOS would indicate that there used to be more. Figure maybe twenty as the original order (unsure how many ultimately were built -- Defiant was NCC-1764, for what that's worth). Nice round number. Then after that, on-the-fly advances got incorporated and updated engines were installed with only minor differences, or a new bridge module, or a more compact main sensor dish. What fandom has as the Bonhomme Richard or Achernar "classes" I just consider second flight Constitutions, with the "Achernar" (really, the model kit version that appeared as the Constellation and in FJ's Technical Manual) being further uprates to existing ships. And the Endeavour and Constitution [II] classes are just even later uprates and refits, not too long before the Enterprise put in after Kirk's FYM. So, basically, by the time the Enterprise got so drastically rebuilt by Scotty that it warranted a new class designation, I figure the actual range of "spec" for the Constitution class was all over the place, spanning the forty years prior to the new flagship class' launch (Excelsior). I can post up some thumbnails of all those "classes" to show that rough progression/evolution.
But, basically... Yeah. No two alike after forty years, even though many would be superficially similar from being tweaked and uprated at around the same times.
Just pulled it out and flipped through to refresh my memory of the wording. Yeah, that's in Kirk's forward. The editor's note on Kirk's bemused observation at Starfleet celebrating the Enterprise's return. More specifically, it's noted that Kirk was the first Starfleet Captain in history to bring back both ship and crew "relatively intact" at the end of such a mission...
...I honestly feel stuff Gene said should have about as much weight as stuff George says about Star Wars. By the time he got to TMP, he had grown and changed as a person. His memory of Star Trek wasn't as immediate as it might have been. He didn't refresh himself by watching the films of the original episodes (or, rather, some but not all). He pulled the lamest explanation out of his butt for how stardates work to account for NBC airing the episodes out of production order... rather than just saying "they're sequential, NBC just aired them out of order". I couldn't ask him (he died while I was still in high school), but I'd wager good money he'd utterly forgotten how many perfectly-intact Constitutions we saw less than five years prior to TMP.
But an editor's note on a fictional forward separate from the main story, and thus not part of the on-screen narrative is pretty easy to be fudged. A subjective interpretation of a subjective interpretation of facts not explicitly shown, but implied. It's something I haven't applied myself to, but I feel there's a more objective-ish middle ground that can be reached between "first ship to come back relatively intact" over more than a hundred years (depending on how many "such missions" starships had been sent out on) and what we saw in TOS.
Might have. But, per the official line, wasn't. Until something changes that, it was NCC-1717 in TOS, it was NCC-1717 in TVH (up until the coda). The entry in the Encyclopedia for the ship Tuvok's parents served on -- after the Constitution-class one had been renamed -- included the line "second starship to bear the name". So that's where things stand, and are likely to remain.
--Jonah
(I hope my end of this debate is not coming across as anything but friendly. Gotta love geek minutia!
)So if a Miranda(ish?) class Yorktown in TVH has the same NCC number as the TOS Constitution class, that means the C-class one became Enterprise A? I don't see the logic of that conclusion.
There IS no official line on what the E-A was. It being Yorktown or anything else is all from ancillary material that could be contradicted at any time by first-tier canon, on the screen. The complication of Yorktown in TVH just shows what a mess it is trying to shoehorn a Yorktown (refit or no) into an origin story for E-A.
So I guess we're both wasting our time. LOL
Kingmob, yeah, Gene's inspiration was the Royal Navy, plus the show airing in America. Even canon examples like the Zhukov, Potemkin, Akagi, or Yangtzee Kiang are laid out in latin letters, rather than the native alphabet of the name. I have one ship in my personal list -- a Nebula class from the Dominion War, named the Chung Kuo whose crew took it upon themselves to paint the zhongguo calligraphic characters along the spine of the weapons pod. And Thomas Sasser, one of the giants of the Trek modeling community, gave us the Abbé, complete with accent mark.
In universe, I see it as a sort of extension of what we see in civil aviation today. For pedantic real-world reasons, the lingua franca (language of trade) of an era tends to show who the dominant global (to whatever extent) culture is in that period -- currently or on the way out. Greek and Latin all over the Mediterranean world, German in its time, French in its time, and English for about the last hundred years -- th eperiod when we started flying and going to space. International air traffic control is all in English, the tail numbers are in Latin letters and Arabic numerals, communication from the ISS to the ground is in English, regardless of what the crews speak to each other off-mic.
We have hazy reference for the 21st through 22nd centuries, but... Somewhere between 2038 (Jacob, follow-up mission to explore the heliopause and try to find trace of the Charybdis, likely would not have been launched in wartime) and 2063 (many references and background details in First Contact that nuclear exchange has already taken place) World War III happened. After the treaty/cease-fire was brokered (the quiet but tense period we see in FC), Colonel Green broke the peace by taking unilateral action. There's a lot of stuff from TOS' "The Savage Curtain", Enterprise's "Demons", and a whole raft of behind-the-scenes stuff that I treat as valid unless and until it might someday be overwritten that indicates he may have been involved in the Eugenics War, or was otherwise inspired by Khan and was one of the major exacerbants that led to WWIII. He was originally American, but by 2079 he either may have been forced out for his breaking of the ceasefire or had conquered territory in Eurasia, as the troops shown in Q's court in "Encounter at Farpoint" were going to be shown as his troops, and that being his insignia, in planned episodes for the next season of Enterprise that never was.
Yes, I know I insist Enterprise takes place in an divergent timeline, but since First Contact is the fission point, I treat the stuff that takes place over the next couple decades on Earth as being largely the same. Not enough time for the differences to propagate.
But anyway... Before and after those disruptions we were active in space, locally (insystem and the closest stars), and, as we established extrasolar colonies and eventually Starfleet formed from those respective planetary and system fleets, a commonly-agreed-upon communications mode would be kinda necessary. TOS showed us that even a century-plus after the Federation was founded, Humans remained the predominant species in Starfleet and it was perceived as a Human/Terran organization by a lot of non-Humans. Dunno how hard it would be to alter establushed traditions or conventions. I mean, stardates have changed at least once or twice. *shrug*
--Jonah
In universe, I see it as a sort of extension of what we see in civil aviation today. For pedantic real-world reasons, the lingua franca (language of trade) of an era tends to show who the dominant global (to whatever extent) culture is in that period -- currently or on the way out. Greek and Latin all over the Mediterranean world, German in its time, French in its time, and English for about the last hundred years -- th eperiod when we started flying and going to space. International air traffic control is all in English, the tail numbers are in Latin letters and Arabic numerals, communication from the ISS to the ground is in English, regardless of what the crews speak to each other off-mic.
We have hazy reference for the 21st through 22nd centuries, but... Somewhere between 2038 (Jacob, follow-up mission to explore the heliopause and try to find trace of the Charybdis, likely would not have been launched in wartime) and 2063 (many references and background details in First Contact that nuclear exchange has already taken place) World War III happened. After the treaty/cease-fire was brokered (the quiet but tense period we see in FC), Colonel Green broke the peace by taking unilateral action. There's a lot of stuff from TOS' "The Savage Curtain", Enterprise's "Demons", and a whole raft of behind-the-scenes stuff that I treat as valid unless and until it might someday be overwritten that indicates he may have been involved in the Eugenics War, or was otherwise inspired by Khan and was one of the major exacerbants that led to WWIII. He was originally American, but by 2079 he either may have been forced out for his breaking of the ceasefire or had conquered territory in Eurasia, as the troops shown in Q's court in "Encounter at Farpoint" were going to be shown as his troops, and that being his insignia, in planned episodes for the next season of Enterprise that never was.
Yes, I know I insist Enterprise takes place in an divergent timeline, but since First Contact is the fission point, I treat the stuff that takes place over the next couple decades on Earth as being largely the same. Not enough time for the differences to propagate.
But anyway... Before and after those disruptions we were active in space, locally (insystem and the closest stars), and, as we established extrasolar colonies and eventually Starfleet formed from those respective planetary and system fleets, a commonly-agreed-upon communications mode would be kinda necessary. TOS showed us that even a century-plus after the Federation was founded, Humans remained the predominant species in Starfleet and it was perceived as a Human/Terran organization by a lot of non-Humans. Dunno how hard it would be to alter establushed traditions or conventions. I mean, stardates have changed at least once or twice. *shrug*
--Jonah
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Riceball
Master Member
I don't see why not, 2 different classes of ship, although there's no precedence for 2 ships of a different class sharing the same registry number. Granted that I don't think that it's something normally done in real navies but it's not like Starfleet has a naming convention each ship class like the USN does, or follows a of the same conventions that real life navies do either.
As a kid I always just assumed that the Constitution class was still in production, and nothing to do with Kirk or his actions, the latest one off the production line was named in honor of the fallen Enterprise. The idea to give it to Kirk could have come later. Despite TWOK, TSFS, and TVH being consecutive there is a small gap of time between 3 and 4, and possibly even a bit between the crew returning to the 23rd century and their trial.
If the probe had jacked up a lot of the fleet it would make sense that once it was gone any untouched ship, or ships close to being done would be pressed into service. The all-white bridge looked like it was unfinished to me.
The Yorktown thing came from Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise right? Didn't it also say the A had transwarp drive?
At the end of the day, you just can't expect the Okudas and Sternbach to be able to make everything make sense behind the scenes with 30 years worth of writers, production designers, and FX houses adding to the work.
All that said, WHAT GRIND MY GEARS is that while this work was subtle-- the common design schemes and talk of how Starfleet was structured was one of the things that made the universe seem whole and well-rounded and it's something super lacking in the JJverse movies and Discovery.
If the probe had jacked up a lot of the fleet it would make sense that once it was gone any untouched ship, or ships close to being done would be pressed into service. The all-white bridge looked like it was unfinished to me.
The Yorktown thing came from Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise right? Didn't it also say the A had transwarp drive?
At the end of the day, you just can't expect the Okudas and Sternbach to be able to make everything make sense behind the scenes with 30 years worth of writers, production designers, and FX houses adding to the work.
All that said, WHAT GRIND MY GEARS is that while this work was subtle-- the common design schemes and talk of how Starfleet was structured was one of the things that made the universe seem whole and well-rounded and it's something super lacking in the JJverse movies and Discovery.
(I hope my end of this debate is not coming across as anything but friendly. Gotta love geek minutia!
Specifically, Trek minutiæ has been coursing through my veins since age 12 or so. I cannot overstate how much the technical integrity of the Trek universe matters to me and has mattered to me over the years.
I have no idea what you're saying here... We did not see the exterior of the Yorktown in TVH. The ship we saw disabled in the beginning was, as mentioned above, the Saratoga. Different Captain and everything, name and registry clearly visible on the hull, etc. The Yorktown being Constitution class was implied in TOS, and tacitly accepted by production and fans alike. It was name-dropped in TOS, and name-dropped in TVH. A production memo prior to its mention in TOS listed it among potential names for "Starship Class Vessels" (meaning ships like the Enterprise)...
...And Gene said the E-A was the renamed Yorktown, and for the following quarter-century that has been what the people working on the shows and movies have stuck with, that's what's in the official reference books, that's what people have grown to accept as "truth" (while not fact), and it is unlikely to be contradicted, despite lack of on-screen confirmation. It's not a mess, as the movie Yorktown wasn't a Miranda class ship.
Yeah, but a lot of folks figure that by the time of the movies, the ships that looked like the TOS Enterprise were no longer being built -- but somewhere between that and the TMP refit (as I mentioned to Riceball, I can post thumbnails to illustrate this design evolution). And after TMP, any further newbuilds would likely be based on the new standard set by Enterprise's refit. The E-A being a decades-old refit or a newbuild both work -- at the time -- but the limited longevity TUC gave us skews things toward old ship, IMO. Given an Enterprise class ship fighting at Wolf 359, however long they were still being built, they were at least still relevant more than half a century later, so it wasn't a blanket retiring of the class. It makes no sense to me that Starfleet would retire a ship that was only seven years old or so.
"Two Starhsips, and three smaller vessels, have been neutralized." Per Admiral Cartwright. The two Starships were Yorktown and Saratoga. This means the message from Jane Wiedlin aboard the Shepard -- a Grissom-style ship -- is from one of those "smaller vessels", a useful tidbit for classifying that design. I'll extend that to include all ships in Spacedock, as it lost power shortly after. The implication from all the power coming back online as the Probe left is that most ships would have suffered minimal actual damage. Depending on how long the outer-lying ships were without power, I can see casualties, but all we saw was some panels shorting out.
MSG gave us the Ti-Ho. The Yorktown came from Gene Roddenberry behind-the-scenes and has been in the Star Trek Encyclopedias and other reference books since 1994. And yes, Shane said the E-A had transwarp (old meaning). A lot of people over the years have figured that once they fixed the computer Scotty sabotaged, the improvements to the drive tech was what spurred the recalibration of the warp scale. I have no problem with the E-A having that upgraded drive system (the warp core shown in TUC would support this)... But not as early as Shane has it, in MSG.
Sure they can. I do that well enough, and they have more clout than I do.
I do have issues with the Okudas' research methods, though. For all that they use uncontradicted material from scripts all over the place elsewhere, they miss one crucial dating referent that would eliminate a lot of their arbitrary speculation. The TWOK script points out it's Kirk's fiftieth birthday. Their reasoning for the placement of that film, in 2285, works with the Romulan ale bottle having a date of 2283 on it and McCoy acknowledging it "takes the stuff a while to ferment", implying it is no longer that calendar year. Given Kirk's birthday has traditionally been held to be in late March since the '70s (I need to run down where this first appears, but it got propagated), 2285 makes good sense.But that means Kirk was born in 2235, not the currently-official 2233. This works better with other ancillary material and "official assumptions", lending both more credence. The novel Final Frontier (nothing to do with the later film of same name) has Kirk being ten years old when the Enterprise is launched (2245). Official sources have the Enterprise being launched in 2245. Agreement, yay.
But this -- and restoring stardates to what was originally intended during production -- messes up the official TOS/TMP timeline. Stardates were inspired by nineteenth-century ships' logs, started from day 1 of the voyage and counting from there. In the Trek version, the first two digits were originally indicating months into the FYM, and the second two, days. The number of >30 numbers in that latter category, though, forced a revision to, basically, "percentage of the month completed". Many arguments as to why Earth months, is it standard 28-day lunar months or something else, etc. But if the FYM starts about a year into Kirk's command (production comment on why the first stardate is in the 1300s), having 1,200 units a year makes TOS and TAS almost entirely fit within the stardate range (up to about 6800, with one oddball TAS episode that I have no problem ignoring -- "Bem"). From there, there are two data points. One: The seaon two writers' bible indicates Kirk is "about thirty-four", putting it in the neighborhood of 2269. Two: "Charlie X" encompasses (American) Thanksgiving, pinning it to a specific day that we can calculate. Using "Charlie X"'s stardate to indicate late November roughly counting a hundred units to sketch in the timeline, season one spans three different calendar years, season two straddles two, season three straddles two, and TAS is mostly interspersed throughout TOS, with only a couple episodes set after "All Our Yesterdays", and only the very last of those set in the following calendar year.
So if Kirk is "about 34" in season two, from the stardate spread, he turns 34 fairly early in the season (where March falls). Some math later, and "Charlie X" is even more specifically nailed down to November 21, 2267. The portion of the FYM we saw runs from approximately September 2267 (TAS "The Magicks of Megas-Tu") through approximately April 2272 (TAS "The Counter-Clock Incident"). After that, movie stardates blow everything to hell. By this progression, TMP only takes place six months later. Dialogue says it's been two-and-a-half years.
It's the same problem faced when trying to make sense of the TNG stardates. If you count back a thousand units per year, you hit zero point in 2323. Best working theory I can offer is that whenever they changed to the TMP uniforms, they changed how stardates are calculated, but over the next forty years it didn't work as well as hoped, or failed to catch on, or some external factor warranted changing it again. So, with that as an acceptable placeholder, and going by other references, TMP's revised spot in the timeline is late Spring of 2275.
That's just one example of what happens when one actually does proper research -- read the scripts, the making-of books, interviews with people like Matt Jeffries or Franz Joseph Schnaubelt's daughter or Herb Solow or Bob Justman or... You get the idea. All the lore is a data-miner's dream, and I love this stuff.
+1 I loved the original teaser for Trek09 until I saw the warp engines looming in the background. Never mind the lore that only the saucer was built on the ground (then boosted to the synchronously-orbiting drydocks to be joined up to the warp engines), it makes no sense from a practical standpoint. The pylons aren't meant to bear that load under planetary gravity. And boosting the whole thing to space will be a massive, massive waste of energy. Either build the whole thing in space, or do it the way the lore has maintained for decades -- half and half. All the practical, scientific thinking that went into the older stuff makes me that much more disappointed in the later stuff (even before Trek09).
--Jonah
robn1
Master Member
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).
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.
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.
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