Kurt Russell is really interesting casting, tho. (Like him, too.;)) I've never seen him to something light, but dramatic, myself, so no comment on him as Solo. (I don't see him doing O'Neil{l:p} per "SG-1".)
Check out the link of the casting footage--the dialogue is astoundingly rough, but that's what we used to decide they could pull it off.

I take no objection with your build rate. With your "survival" rate, assuming the ships aren't destroyed, I'd count 50yr too short, actually: these could conceivably be re-engined & retrofitted with new sensors & computers & such (think SLEP/FRAM) for a century or more--presuming they're built strong to begin with.
Sure, they can be refit and rebuilt, but they also have some interesting loss rates--of the two years of TTL show that are relatively similar to OTL we have the following from the 12 ships of Enterprise's class:
USS Intrepid: Lost with all hands
USS Excalibur: Heavily damaged in M-5 excercises, all hands lost, ship potentially repairable, but may have been retired.
In addition, the Hood, Lexington, and Potemkin are all severely damaged in the M-5 exercises.
USS Constellation: Lost with all hands.

Outside of these two seasons, we also see USS Defiant lost with all hands in season three IOTL, though I cannot recall if Brainbin hasn't said if "The Tholian Web" is butterflied (I hope not, it's one of my favorites). So while the upper lifespan of a ship may be much more than 45 years, perhaps more like before it needs to be retired, the average service life of the fleet may be dragged down by such losses--if they're of the Constitution class, these ships would have been roughly 10-15 years old at their loss. It takes a lot of ships surviving into their 60s to pull up an average like that to 45--and this is two year's worth of losses! :eek:

That depends IMO on which ships we're counting... Is that just the warships? Just the Fleet? Or is it counting all the *USNS/*Liberty ship/*Victory ship hulls, too?
I'm planning on it just counting the Fleet ships. No merchant ships. None of the "system fleet" (coast guard/home fleet sort of thing). They'd have their own registry systems.

Tho the obvious question is, what happens when new members join & already have "blue water" ships? Given we accept "Enterprise" as TTL canon, & only warp-capable species are admitted to begin with.
Well, Enterprise is about as far from canon ITTL as it's possible to be--it's about 35 years after the PoD, and it's based on decades worth of canon that won't exist ITTL--not likely to be a TNG quite as we know it, nor DS9, nor VOY, so certainly not ENT. Anyway, if new members have existing "blue water" ships, what I'd say is that based on their relative strength, they'd either be commissioned into Starfleet (if they're roughly at tech parity, or can easily be made to be) or otherwise make them the core of the new member's "system guard."
 
Great update! Hmm, between a far more successful Star Trek and a Star Wars that seems to be even more successful than OTL as well, special effects have got to be going places. What's Douglas Trumbull up to at this time? He's easily one of the best special effects supervisors around, and would have gone a lot farther were it not for his self-imposed exile from Hollywood...

Also, I wonder if Desilu (or anyone) has any desire to approach computer effects earlier than OTL. With all the other associated special effects technologies further along...
 
e of pi said:
Check out the link of the casting footage--the dialogue is astoundingly rough, but that's what we used to decide they could pull it off.
Not doubting he can so much as not seeing it.
e of pi said:
Sure, they can be refit and rebuilt, but they also have some interesting loss rates--of the two years of TTL show that are relatively similar to OTL we have the following from the 12 ships of Enterprise's class:
USS Intrepid: Lost with all hands
USS Excalibur: Heavily damaged in M-5 excercises, all hands lost, ship potentially repairable, but may have been retired.
In addition, the Hood, Lexington, and Potemkin are all severely damaged in the M-5 exercises.
USS Constellation: Lost with all hands.

Outside of these two seasons, we also see USS Defiant lost with all hands
Notice, tho, those are all Enterprises. I take them to be at most hazard, since they're the top rank: MCU, MCTF, whatever.:p What the losses look like for the more "junior" ships is unclear: of those, I only recall loss of Reliant & Langtree OTL (& I frankly don't count Langtree).
e of pi said:
if they're of the Constitution class, these ships would have been roughly 10-15 years old at their loss
Looking at Matt Decker's Connie, your loss rates are off more than a little, somewhere: she's seen 684 ships built since she launched:eek:...or at least 40yr in service. Also, since we really don't know how large the pool of ships of this type is, we really don't know the measure of how hazardous average duty is; these losses are probably not everyday occurrences. (One would hope not.:eek:)

Also, it's not clear over how long those losses take place in-universe: we can presume a period of under 5yr, from Kirk's assignment to EOM, but we don't really know as a fact. IDK if it's (TTL) canon Enterprise was the only one to survive 5yr, which Gene says in the novelization for "STTMP", so...
e of pi said:
It takes a lot of ships surviving into their 60s to pull up an average like that to 45--and this is two year's worth of losses! :eek:
I'm not saying the average would be that high, just that the hulls are good for much more (if they don't get blown up:rolleyes:).
e of pi said:
I'm planning on it just counting the Fleet ships. No merchant ships. None of the "system fleet" (coast guard/home fleet sort of thing). They'd have their own registry systems.
Works. That still means, out of 1700 ships, you need a lot of support craft, & that eats up the numbers pretty quickly.
e of pi said:
Well, Enterprise is about as far from canon ITTL as it's possible to be--it's about 35 years after the PoD, and it's based on decades worth of canon that won't exist ITTL--not likely to be a TNG quite as we know it, nor DS9, nor VOY, so certainly not ENT. Anyway, if new members have existing "blue water" ships, what I'd say is that based on their relative strength, they'd either be commissioned into Starfleet (if they're roughly at tech parity, or can easily be made to be) or otherwise make them the core of the new member's "system guard."
I'm leaving off if it's strictly canon TTL or not for sake of discussion. My thinking follows your last: they'd be commissioned in; question then is, do they get registry numbers? To an extent, they'd need them, for record keeping if nothing else, but it could be there's a different list for "Fed-built". (How that works is a big can of worms I don't even want to think about.:eek:)

In a lot of cases (judging by Earth in "ST:E" & Bajor in "DS9"), most "local" ships wouldn't be "blue water" to begin with, so not an issue. The Andorians would've. Obviously Vulcan. (The founding species, it seems, would all have their own "blue water" capability.) Could be there's a "security council" status, for which having such is a requirement? For which the registry numbers are reserved? So the registry number doesn't reflect total number of ships at all...? Which falls foul of "ST:V" & "DS9"...:rolleyes: (Yes, this is a real fandom question:;) the real answer is, "the writers were stupid".:rolleyes::p)
 
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Looking at Matt Decker's Connie, your loss rates are off more than a little, somewhere: she's seen 684 ships built since she launched:eek:...or at least 40yr in service. Also, since we really don't know how large the pool of ships of this type is, we really don't know the measure of how hazardous average duty is; these losses are probably not everyday occurrences. (One would hope not.:eek:)
Ah, clearly you're working off the OTL screenshots. ;) This is what they see ITTL:

tumblr_mh8pe159XO1qlz9dno1_500.png


The same labels are re-arranged from the Enteprise AMT model, but they're a little more careful in what they re-arrange to.
 
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Brainbin, casting William Katt as Skywalker is genius, except, of course, that you've killed yet another of my favorite TV shows from my childhood in The Greatest American Hero!

I loved the focus on Marcia; that's the sort of research and deep thinking that really makes this timeline one of the very best anywhere. (If I could stuff the Turtledove ballot boxes over the next 12 hours, I would!)

Keep up the great work!
 
Total size depends on the annual build rate and average lifespan.... So Starfleet's a bit thin on the ground--but that matches canon evidence from the Enterprise routinely being out on its own, so...it might not make sense, but it fits the facts. In canon, that's sometimes the best you can get...
Seems reasonable to me.
...The notion of Starfleet as the only space force of the Federation is a bit of a TNG/movie thing. There's some implications in the TOS canon that can be read to support each Federation member having a kind of "home fleet," which would stay pretty close to home or established spacelanes. I'm basically going to have these be adopted ITTL's fanon as explanation for some of why Starfleet seems spread so thin and so small for its role--it's not having to carry out some of the traditional roles of a Navy, such as protecting merchant traffic, or defending home ports, as those tasks fall to the "home fleets" or "defense forces" or whatever fandom settles on. In a war, of course, you'd see these used as a sort of reserve, which could increase Starfleet's size to maybe twice its existing size, or something like that....

I don't know why I never considered the idea that the member planets/species might have their own auxiliaries. I suppose because 1) they weren't shown in the OTL movies or later TV shows; 2) Roddenberry might have frowned on the idea since the Federation is supposed to be all idealistic and retaining separate forces might suggest a lack of confidence in its unity and a potential basis for civil wars and the collapse of the Federation; 3) I do think in some later OTL canon, DS9 in particular, the matter comes up regarding Bajor; if Bajor joins the Federation then it seems to be assumed as a matter of course that its own militia will immediately be either absorbed into Starfleet or retired; no one seems to think it's OK for the militia to just keep on going under Bajorian local control.

But now that you're injecting it into the ATL Fanon, where it might conceivably become canon if there are more projects after the miniseries that explicitly show local forces in action alongside Starfleet, or filling their separate roles on their own, I guess it makes a lot of sense.

Sort of. I'd add that the civil spacecraft, that aren't commissioned in anyone's militaries, are probably not as useless in a space battle as OTL supertankers or cruise shups would be in a modern knock-down fight between blue water navies that somehow avoid going nuclear on each other. It would be a bit more like before the 19th century, when the line between a "merchant" and a man-of-war might be kind of blurry. I figure that the basic structural demands of any warpship whatsoever take one a fair way toward having something that can survive for a while when someone with a lot of firepower is trying to blow it up. So even in an unexpected emergency like a surprise mass invasion, civil ships caught completely unprepared might, if there is an understanding in the Federation that civil ships might get militiaized on sudden notice and a certain amount of training and design for that, have the ability to at least have a chance of getting out of a firefight alive. Phaser banks might have legitimate peaceful purposes (like vaporizing space debris that might otherise collide, for instance) and give them a bit of punch if they get jumped. So emergency drafting the civil ships into a defensive militia under Starfleet command might be another hidden reserve of Starfleet's military power; presumably if this happens, the ships get weapons and shield upgrades.

Another notion--not all Federation members have "home fleets" in proportion to their population/economic importance. Earth for instance wouldn't have one, Earth just doubles down on its assessed share of the cost of Starfleet and uses Starfleet exclusively, and would probably have a policy of urging all Terran colonies to do the same. The Vulcans wouldn't want to maintain a separate fleet either I wouldn't think. OTOH, I'd think that the Andorians probably do have a Home Fleet, and that Tellarite merchant ships are pretty scrappy in a fight and have a routine militia status too. So, it's at the discretion of the various worlds.

....
No, it depends on the size of the mission & the amount of territory you have to cover.
This strikes me as an alternate approach; e of pi is drawing inferences based on canon information that yield an estimate of the number of Starfleet registered ships, and that in turn can be extrapolated to figure how big the Federation is; your approach, if we had a canon declaration how much volume the Federation occuplies, would indicate how many ships they need, if we have idea of just what the missions are and how fast the ships go.

Which one works better depends on the nature of canon evidence.
Ships require support of all kinds: a single Enterprise, operating alone, needs many supply ships to keep her running. In company, or in action, it takes many, many more....:eek:
Now here is where the analogy with modern day navies, and indeed any sort of fleet that has existed in history, might break down. It is a over a century in our future, and we know the ships use matter/antimatter tech. In canon, Scotty can whip up all kinds of diverse things real quick in Engineering.

I'd suggest that cruisers don't need nearly as much infrastructure as you assume. Using onboard facilities and given simply access to reliable supplies of antimatter and dilithium, they can fabricate pretty much everything else they need on the fly.

I don't know if you might be referring instead to tactical auxiliaries, the way that aircraft carriers need to have destroyers in their task forces to operate as any kind of effective warship; I'd suggest as I did way upthread, the cruisers don't need them; when they need strength in numbers, just banding together with other cruisers and the other, smaller but not tiny ship classes gets the job done.
...Is that just the warships? Just the Fleet? Or is it counting all the *USNS/*Liberty ship/*Victory ship hulls, too? If it does, 1700 is absurdly small a number.:eek: ...

I don't think the cruisers and Miranda-class smaller ships need this sort of auxiliary tail. But if I'm wrong about that, it still might make sense to have an alternate set of registry sequence, with the ships that are in Starfleet dedicated service but filling these auxiliary roles in a separate registry. The NCC numbers are for the cruiser and destroyer/scout level ships--these are the classes that in the founding days had to operate years away from any support whatsoever, back in the pioneering days. That would establish the tradition.

And that's because we almost never saw the routine missions (despite the "cavalry patrol" attitude "TOS" fell into:rolleyes:): we don't see the courier duty, the supply runs, the mundane stuff keeping a Fed, or Fleet, running.
In TOS canon we never see your oilers, machine ships, ammo ships, supply ships in general--but we do see space stations and Starbases. We know these exist. Presumably what stocks and mechanical parts the Connies can't fabricate for themselves are picked up on these visits.
...(Fanon suggests merchant navy had a kind of British East Indiaman vibe: armed merchants, for defense against varieties of pirates. I'd go with that, myself.)

This is what I was getting at by suggesting that civil ships in general can serve as useful third-class warships in a pinch, or second-class with suitable upgrades for the duration.

...I'm planning on it just counting the Fleet ships. No merchant ships. None of the "system fleet" (coast guard/home fleet sort of thing). They'd have their own registry systems.....

...I'm not saying the average would be that high, just that the hulls are good for much more (if they don't get blown up:rolleyes:).
But they do get shot up quite a lot!

...That still means, out of 1700 ships, you need a lot of support craft, & that eats up the numbers pretty quickly....

By this point e of pi had already clarified that any such craft, whose numbers I think you are overestimating anyway, are indeed registered but on a different list.
 

Thande

Donor
The same labels are re-arranged from the Enteprise AMT model, but they're a little more careful in what they re-arrange to.

I never understood why they didn't do that. Even if you're not really thinking about the background to it, it just seems like you would want a number close to the Enterprise's.
 
I never understood why they didn't do that. Even if you're not really thinking about the background to it, it just seems like you would want a number close to the Enterprise's.

Unless they wanted a number distinctively different from the Enterprise's so that viewers wouldn't confuse the two ships.

Cheers,
Nigel.
 
It could also be that those ships with registry numbers not beginning with 17 are of a different (but similiar looking) class.

That's an interesting idea--implying that the Enterprise is the second of her class, NCC-1700 being presumably the Constitution, the class-namer, and Starfleet commissioned 16 classes before the Connies, and developed a numbering system permitting them to construct up to 100 of a given class before something has to give somewhere.

Too bad "NCC" occurs on all the types, or I might think "CC" stood for "Cruiser class" and then just be stuck for what "N" stands for!

That would get us out of the box--such a system would allow for much, but it wouldn't help much in the case involved here--it seems unlikely class 10 would be so very similar to class 17 even if we suppose there was a big flurry of destroyer/scout Miranda types between two back to back cruiser designs. (IIRC in OTL canon the Constellation had number NCC-1017?) Meanwhile, the number of ships accepted into Starfleet's "capital ship" league with Enterprise's commissioning is no 1701, but some number less than, and probably much less than, 1701, since 100 is the maximum number a given class could have whereas many classes must have been tapered off long before reaching that. So either e of pi's estimate of the capital fleet size and th rate of new construction, meager as they looked before, are both too optimistic, or the fleet size at the moment is less tiny because the attrition rate overall, despite the evidence of the canon aired years of peace and the fact that we know there was one knock-down fight war in there (the Romulan war, unless Starfleet didn't start counting ships in this series until after the war that forged it) and probably some other times of serious unpeace, is not as bad as canon makes it look and ships are kept in commission a very long time.

Indeed, if that were the case, then it seems fair to say Starfleet never decommissions any model, there might be surviving examples of ships made for the Romulan war, much upgraded and patched up, with registry numbers like NCC-323, still in service. Because now in this timeline, as in OTL canon, it's been just a century since the Federation was founded, and unlike OTL, there's scarcely any time before that for Earth to have had precursor ships to whatever they had on hand when the Romulans came a-calling.

No, while I suppose while enough fancy dancing might save the idea that some of the digits refer to design series and only the last couple refer to their place in the series, I think e of pi's system of a straight numbering of ships commissioned in the capital ship series, with other series for non-capital ships and Starfleet relying heavily on both local and civil ships for backup, has to make more sense.

And aside from attrition due to destruction, there has to come a time when a design made a good fraction of a century ago, however advanced it was at the time and however ruthlessly upgraded and lovingly refurbished, has to be deemed too ancient and quaint to serve in any but ceremonial roles, as cadet training ships perhaps. There might be some three and even 2 digit NCCs still on the list and flying, as memorials of the foundational Romulan war and the history that gives the Federation solidarity, but they'd be toast in a real modern war and everyone knows it.

I do like the rather Soviet idea of keeping them in service in some role or other as long as damn possible, but if they do that, everyone has in the back of their minds the idea that the real Starfleet is smaller than the numbers of ships still operating would suggest.;)
 
I checked "The Tholian Web" and (though we don't get a clear shot of any mission patches on the crew of the Defiant, which I'm sure is no coincidence) they do appear to be re-using those of the Enterprise. IOTL, the Defiant was given a distinct mission patch by a later spin-off - the exact shape of the insignia pointed out by Thande:

There's also Court Martial in season 1 where a number of crewmen in the bar on Starbase 11 are shown wearing Enterprise insignia, in spite of the fact that most if not all of them would be from other ships.

Cheers,
Nigel.
 
According to fanon NCC stands for Naval Construction Contract and all (and only) Starfleet vessels have registry numbers beginning with NCC. Even the registry number of shuttles begin with NCC.
 
According to fanon NCC stands for Naval Construction Contract and all (and only) Starfleet vessels have registry numbers beginning with NCC.
I seem to recall seeing NCC defined as such in Whitfield, quoting the Great Bird himself. As for "all Starfleet vessels", that's the problem: if it's including the fleet train....
Shevek23 said:
in some later OTL canon, DS9 in particular, the matter comes up regarding Bajor; if Bajor joins the Federation then it seems to be assumed as a matter of course that its own militia will immediately be either absorbed into Starfleet or retired; no one seems to think it's OK for the militia to just keep on going under Bajorian local control.
I never got that sense at all. There may've been an expectation they'd have to meet a higher standard of service, but not "join or die" (in effect). I pictured the militia remaining as a strictly local force, not authorized for use off-world. (In the fashion of U.S. state militias, or National Guard.)
Shevek23 said:
I'd add that the civil spacecraft, that aren't commissioned in anyone's militaries, are probably not as useless in a space battle as OTL supertankers or cruise shups would be in a modern knock-down fight between blue water navies that somehow avoid going nuclear on each other. It would be a bit more like before the 19th century, when the line between a "merchant" and a man-of-war might be kind of blurry.
IMO, you need to go back a bit farther, into age of sail. That's why I mention the East Indiamen: armed merchants were OTL pretty common, since piracy was, too. Then RN came along & owned the oceans, & made them safe for Brit trade--& by default, everybody else's, too.

Seeing how common raiding was made out, by Orions, Klingons, & Romulans (at least...) OTL, the armed merchant model follows.
Shevek23 said:
an understanding in the Federation that civil ships might get militiaized on sudden notice and a certain amount of training and design for that...So emergency drafting the civil ships into a defensive militia
I'm seeing them more in the way of the convoyed merchants of WW2, if there's a war. I don't see the Fed going in for commerce raiders.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of merchants were built to "Fleet standard" so they could be impressed as fleet train in wartime, so with room for upgrades to weaps & bigger crew quarters, & more powerful engines than strictly needed. Maybe (probably?) an operating subsidy, too.

Since AFAIR we never saw a merchantman, there's no way to know if they fall under the NCC scheme, but I'd say not.
Shevek23 said:
Another notion--not all Federation members have "home fleets" in proportion to their population/economic importance. Earth for instance wouldn't have one, Earth just doubles down on its assessed share of the cost of Starfleet and uses Starfleet exclusively, and would probably have a policy of urging all Terran colonies to do the same. The Vulcans wouldn't want to maintain a separate fleet either I wouldn't think. OTOH, I'd think that the Andorians probably do have a Home Fleet, and that Tellarite merchant ships are pretty scrappy in a fight and have a routine militia status too. So, it's at the discretion of the various worlds.
Possible, but we don't really know. Intrepid AFAIR was never actually seen in "TOS" OTL; "ST:E" suggests there were distinct designs, & the ones we saw were all human-built/-crewed (in the main).

Come to think of it, that might explain everything: the NCCs are the human ships. Did we ever see a Vulcan-built ship in "TOS" OTL?
Shevek23 said:
This strikes me as an alternate approach; e of pi is drawing inferences based on canon information that yield an estimate of the number of Starfleet registered ships, and that in turn can be extrapolated to figure how big the Federation is
That makes sense, too...until you start looking at the canon evidence for trip times even excluding "TNG" & such (which changed the warp speed ratings).

I'm judging, in part, on the number of Fed members, less on volume; just the distance between Earth & 61 Cygni (Vulcan) is a hell of a lot of space.:eek::eek:
Shevek23 said:
I'd suggest that cruisers don't need nearly as much infrastructure as you assume. Using onboard facilities and given simply access to reliable supplies of antimatter and dilithium, they can fabricate pretty much everything else they need on the fly.
You're right, the fleet train wouldn't be as extensive as it is now; the antimatter drive & protein synthesizers (even pre-replicator) reduces needs a lot, putting them much nearer age of sail demand.

That said, spares of all kinds are going to be needed eventually, & the more complicated the ship is, the more spares she needs. Unless you mean she's got onboard engineering shops, more like a modern tender, so she only needs spares for really major items, like driver coils. If so, the demand on the train goes way, way down. (Until now, I hadn't considered that option.:eek:)
Shevek23 said:
I don't know if you might be referring instead to tactical auxiliaries, the way that aircraft carriers need to have destroyers in their task forces to operate as any kind of effective warship; I'd suggest as I did way upthread, the cruisers don't need them; when they need strength in numbers, just banding together with other cruisers and the other, smaller but not tiny ship classes gets the job done.
There's that, too, but also, as said upthread, I see smaller, DD/frigate-size ships for routine duties where a cruiser is overkill, if only for cost of operation.
Shevek23 said:
I don't think the cruisers and Miranda-class smaller ships need this sort of auxiliary tail.
For their normal operations, maybe not: those are probably *USNS, so not in the NCC sequence to begin with. (Unless you mean "task force escort", which would be.)
Shevek23 said:
it still might make sense to have an alternate set of registry sequence, with the ships that are in Starfleet dedicated service but filling these auxiliary roles in a separate registry. The NCC numbers are for the cruiser and destroyer/scout level ships
That's essentially what I'm saying: warships are NCCs. 1700 is still a pretty small number, ISTM...but it's looking less small, now.:eek:
Shevek23 said:
In TOS canon we never see your oilers, machine ships, ammo ships, supply ships in general--but we do see space stations and Starbases. We know these exist. Presumably what stocks and mechanical parts the Connies can't fabricate for themselves are picked up on these visits.
That fits with my above notion. It's also something that should have occurred to me before...:eek: Especially since Gene imagined "Hornblower in space": the sail frigates would have made their own masts at need & done routine hull maintenance themselves. And even wartime sub crews could make & apply watertight patches without aid or recourse to a tender...:eek:
Shevek23 said:
This is what I was getting at by suggesting that civil ships in general can serve as useful third-class warships in a pinch, or second-class with suitable upgrades for the duration.
They'd take a lot of strain off the Fleet for convoy escort, true, but I don't think you'd free the Fleet from that entirely. Convoys might get as little as one ship (Defiant in "DS9" comes to mind...), but more probably you get a handful of Reliants or something, unless HQ is expecting a real fight. Which fits the OTL model: BBs weren't assigned unless encounters with the likes of Scharnhorst were expected; for Starfleet, the number of cruisers would be even thinner.:eek:
Shevek23 said:
But they do get shot up quite a lot!
:) That means they get relegated to training, or ferry duty, or sold off to "minor powers"...;)
Shevek23 said:
By this point e of pi had already clarified that any such craft, whose numbers I think you are overestimating anyway, are indeed registered but on a different list.
Fair enough. I may've misunderstood.:eek:
Shevek23 said:
ships are kept in commission a very long time....
it seems fair to say Starfleet never decommissions any model, there might be surviving examples of ships made for the Romulan war
As complex & hideously expensive as I expect the cruisers to be, efforts to keep them in service til they simply fall apart from old age would be no surprise to me.

Neither do we know, really, how much effort goes into a *FRAM. OTL the "TMP" Enterprise was visibly different in a few ways; how much re-engineering did that take? How "rebuilt" was she in ways not visible? How common is that kind of thing in service? So, was NCC-1017 Connie only different mainly in her internal layout, skin thickness, hull framing, assembly techniques, computers? That is, was she a Salmon to a Gato? Or was Enterprise a Guppy? Were the antimatter engine, driver coils, & phasers so totally different, Connie couldn't even operate them? And is that why Enterprise was ultimately on the "retired" list?

Thinking of that, if it is canon Enterprise was the only ship to survive her 5-yr mission, how do you explain a 40yr old ship still in service...?:confused::confused: Or why she's retired, but Decker's ship wasn't?;)
Shevek23 said:
I think e of pi's system of a straight numbering of ships commissioned in the capital ship series
I simply can't believe there's a demand for 1700 ships with as much power as Enterprise.:eek::eek::eek: Not unless they're being destroyed a lot more frequently than OTL "TOS" suggests.:eek:

That implies, to me, an attrition approaching 50% over the lifetime of the Fleet.:eek::eek: (Build 17/yr for about 100yr, & end up with around 500 in service.) Those are staggering losses of ships & crews, with astounding implications for the Fleet & Fed culture at large. What does that say about a Fleet so willing to expend its ships & crews?:eek::eek: Or to the quality of ship design?:eek: Or the callousness of the Fed Council?:eek:

It also implies space being way, way more dangerous than I've always believed from "TOS" OTL.:eek::eek: 1700 ships with 1000x the power of 5th Fleet is a hell of a lot of firepower.:eek::eek: Losing half of them means an astounding degree of hazard.:eek::eek::eek:

So, put it in perspective: "TOS" OTL, there were, what, 5 or 6 cruisers known lost in 5yr? Out of how many in service? 20? 30? That loss rate itself is mightily steep...:eek: It does mean a build rate of 17 cruisers/year would cope with replacement, as well as turn over the fleet's cruiser strength & allow expansion in fairly short order... And we're back to why Connie is still in service, 40yr later...
Shevek23 said:
has to be deemed too ancient and quaint to serve in any but ceremonial roles, as cadet training ships perhaps. There might be some three and even 2 digit NCCs still on the list and flying, as memorials of the foundational Romulan war and the history that gives the Federation solidarity, but they'd be toast in a real modern war and everyone knows it.
Agreed. The thing is, & this may be something Gene intended, sail ships of the line changed mighty little for more than 300yr. So it may be the Enterprise design is the "perfect" design, & it's now just a matter of new "guts", in the fashion of the fleet sub.

I don't mean NCC-701, or -501, or -51, would still be on front-line duty, but she might still be on the registry of active ships. (We don't know what happens to retired ships: mothballs? "Military assistance"? Or the breakers?)
Shevek23 said:
I do like the rather Soviet idea of keeping them in service in some role or other as long as damn possible, but if they do that, everyone has in the back of their minds the idea that the real Starfleet is smaller than the numbers of ships still operating would suggest.;)
I do, too, & it fits the "age of sail" model. (It almost explains the thousands of ships in the "DS9" battles: most of them old junkers & virtual deathtraps...? If so::eek::eek: And see "callous" above.)
 
The number of vessel were always on the lower side in Star Trek. If you scale it down, it would be similiar to the US Navy having only a couple of destroyers (and nothing else).

I believe that the system/planetary defence forces are not part of Starfleet (except those of Earth and its pre-Federation colonies). This would be similiar to a local police that is not part of the military (as it is the US, UK, Germany etc.)

The whole registry number system went out of the window with the introduction of the Enterprise-A (if you follow the number of vessels system) or Enterprise-D (if you follow the class system).
 
Barbarossa Rotbart said:
The number of vessel were always on the lower side in Star Trek. If you scale it down, it would be similiar to the US Navy having only a couple of destroyers (and nothing else).
...
The whole registry number system went out of the window with the introduction of the Enterprise-A (if you follow the number of vessels system) or Enterprise-D (if you follow the class system).
Some of that OTL was governed by production constraints: every new ship needs a new model...

That said, the writers bungled by having these big, expensive ships doing trivial tasks, rather than realize the flaw...

The Enterprise "alphabet ships" was sheer stupidity.:rolleyes: The writers, fairly obviously, didn't understand how ships reuse old names, nor, fairly obviously, that registry numbers are meaningless. (Unless it's simply pandering to the fanbase...:rolleyes:)
 
Some of that OTL was governed by production constraints: every new ship needs a new model...

That said, the writers bungled by having these big, expensive ships doing trivial tasks, rather than realize the flaw...
That's not what I meant. I meant that the number of vessels (and not classes or types) was much too small. Even the Fleet of the later DS9 seasons are too small. 100 ships of different classes in one fleet and only a couple of those for the whole Federation is not much.

The Enterprise "alphabet ships" was sheer stupidity.:rolleyes: The writers, fairly obviously, didn't understand how ships reuse old names, nor, fairly obviously, that registry numbers are meaningless. (Unless it's simply pandering to the fanbase...:rolleyes:)

The pennant number (that's the correct name) should be similiar to this:
(T(T)(T)-)CCNN(N)
T = Letter based on type of ship (or NCC if you want to keep this)
C = Number based on class
N = individual number of the ship
The brackets enclose optional elements.

So the Enterprise-A should have had a registry number which differs from the registry number of the original Enterprise in the last two or three digits (e.g. NCC-17563).
The Enterprise-B should have has a registry number which starts with NCC-20 (e.g. NCC-20103).
 
Barbarossa Rotbart said:
That's not what I meant. I meant that the number of vessels (and not classes or types) was much too small. Even the Fleet of the later DS9 seasons are too small. 100 ships of different classes in one fleet and only a couple of those for the whole Federation is not much.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing, here. I meant, the ships we saw were of limited number & variety. IDK if the actual number (in-universe:rolleyes:) was that small, but it might also have been.
Barbarossa Rotbart said:
The pennant number (that's the correct name) should be similiar to this:
(T(T)(T)-)CCNN(N)
T = Letter based on type of ship (or NCC if you want to keep this)
C = Number based on class
N = individual number of the ship
The brackets enclose optional elements.

So the Enterprise-A should have had a registry number which differs from the registry number of the original Enterprise in the last two or three digits (e.g. NCC-17563).
The Enterprise-B should have has a registry number which starts with NCC-20 (e.g. NCC-20103).
Limiting by number is an interesting way to distinguish classes. Unfortunately, there's not a shred of canon evidence for it...
 
I don't think we're actually disagreeing, here. I meant, the ships we saw were of limited number & variety. IDK if the actual number (in-universe:rolleyes:) was that small, but it might also have been.
Well, we had scenes with at least four starships flying in formation and there were those three D7s encircling the Enterprise.

Limiting by number is an interesting way to distinguish classes. Unfortunately, there's not a shred of canon evidence for it...
There is (but not in the later series (TNG etc.).
Reliant, Saratoga both had registry numbers starting with 18.
All known Constitution-class vessels had registry numbers starting with either 16 or 17.
Grissom and Copernicus (both Obert-class) had registry numbers starting with 6.
But after TVH you can really forget all registry numbers. This also applies to the remastered TOS episodes (because Okuda was responsible for the registry numbers there, and his work was not very good). (My low opinion of Okuda comers from his very bad (= unprofessional) work on the Star Trek Chronology (and the Star Trek Encyclopaedia). In cases when exact dates were given in an episode or movie, he sometimes considered them being approximate dates and vice versa. This lead to a wrong placement of three of the first four Star trek movies.)
 
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Sheesh, I kind of regret bringing the whole issue of registries and fleet size up. Anyway, I wanted to just thank Brainbin for letting me help with this update. Basically, he linked me that article on Marcia Lucas when he discussed what he wanted to draw on for this, and I...kind of hounded him until he let me toss in a few ideas. :D Brainbin may have given me a co-writer credit on this, but I mainly helped with originating the content and structure, he did all the writing, so I'd consider my role more of an editorial one. That said, it was a really fun experience and made a nice change from working on Eyes, and I wanted to do a bit of "editor's commentary" on this. Here's a few of the things I thought were really important in this update:

George, for his part, was not finding himself doing all that much better. Spielberg and Coppola were both establishing proven track records by this point, but Lucas had Graffiti and nothing else. His half-baked ideas weren’t coming any closer to fruition, forcing him to take time off and nurse his bruised ego in between working on various pet projects. Even Graffiti had owed much of its success to the good people at Desilu Post-Production, including but not limited to his wife, Marcia. In some ways a very traditional man with equally traditional ideas of a woman’s place in the household, George was deeply uncomfortable with his wife enjoying greater notoriety and acclaim than he was, in his profession. He could no longer ignore the suggestions of his friends, that Marcia was a better editor than he was; in fact, it seemed increasingly likely that she was a better at her job than he was at his. George had always wanted to be the provider, to take care of her, but he was obviously going to have to do it on her terms, and not on his alone. But he didn’t mind; he always loved a good challenge, and would surely find a way to rise to meet this one. Because George was an “idea man” and Marcia could bring ideas to life like nobody else in the business, he decided to put his nose to the grindstone with a renewed passion.
This, to me, was the key of why I was interested in this update and wanted to work on it--the notion of whether it was possible for George, in spite of his (unarguably) massive ego, to deal both with Marcia's greater success and recognition in a way that would let them be the creative powerhouse they could be when they worked together smoothly, as opposed to viewing it as an imposition. Part of that is Marcia's consistent and recognized work at Desilu as George's ideas go nowhere--IOTL, they were both sort of drifting from job to job, so I think George might have had a slight self-deception about how his skills compared to Marcia's and where their respective talents lay.

This then leads them to become stereotypical Miniboom parents--and in the partnership of raising Amber, I think George could find a model for accepting Marcia's proven talent as a partner in more than parenthood--accepting that she could have the key role she did in making his projects more than abstract pet concepts but rather solid smash hits. He didn't get jealous or envious, instead when his ego is challenged, he seems to have always wanted to rise to match the person who had overshadowed him, and in this new model as a "visionary" who works with others like Marcia to make his visions the reality they can be instead of the lone auter, he has ITTL something he didn't have OTL--a way he can rationalize working with others as equals. This is key to giving George an escape from his....well, frankly, from a cycle that OTL reads like a tragic hero of Shakespearean or Greek mold.

The other key event is here:
Lucas was willing to work for scale rates wearing each and every one of his many hats, in exchange for some future concessions from the revenues of the film. Merchandising rights seemed an obvious compromise to him, but surprisingly, Bluhdorn immediately balked at this notion. “Are you kidding? After all the money Lucy made on the whiz-bang and starships and alien worlds? Money that could have been mine. That’s our insurance policy for when this movie flops.” [10] Lucas eventually agreed to accept a share of the profits
With That Wacky Redhead's model from Star Trek, there's no way an operator as canny with money as Bluhdorn (something of a foil to Lucy ITTL, if you want to be literary about this) was going to miss this trick--and then Hollywood accounting bites:
Charles Bluhdorn couldn’t be happier; his cash cow had finally come home, and thanks to the insidious Hollywood Accounting practices of the entertainment industry, Paramount – and, therefore, Gulf+Western – didn’t have to show a penny in profits. This was unfortunate for Lucas, who had only received scale wages from Paramount in exchange for profit participation, which would naturally never come. This was a truly meagre arrangement, considering the grosses that Journey of the Force was bringing in for Paramount.
So, ITTL, George doesn't strike it rich on Journey of the Force, instead he's screwed by the studio--and with Marcia at his back, George isn't the type to suffer quietly. Ego and pride, recall? He's creatively vindicated, too, so he's going to be riding high, and this all adds up to a story the media will love. Journey is a smash hit, selling thousands upon thousands (heck, maybe even hundreds of thousands) of tickets even months and months after release, numbers that would be impressive for a first weekend, not nearly a year after one, and yet it's making...no money? And the oscar-lauded director and his also oscar-recognized chief creative partner (who happens to be his wife, you know) are screaming and suing the studio for profits they swear don't exist? Gentlemen, I smell a scandal. And scandals sell papers.
 
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Barbarossa Rotbart said:
Well, we had scenes with at least four starships flying in formation and there were those three D7s encircling the Enterprise.
Which doesn't indicate huge numbers...
Barbarossa Rotbart said:
There is (but not in the later series (TNG etc.).
Reliant, Saratoga both had registry numbers starting with 18.
All known Constitution-class vessels had registry numbers starting with either 16 or 17.
Well, no. Reliant & Sara aren't in the same class (AFAIK), & you're forgetting Decker's Constellation...
 
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