(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.
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.
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)...
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a Yorktown in TVH, but it's class is unknown. But that still disqualifies it as being the renamed Enterprise, as it's not likely a ship in service during the whale crisis would be refitted so quickly.
"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.
The Yorktown thing came from Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise right? Didn't it also say the A had transwarp drive?
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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