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.
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.
)
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...?
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.
Not unless they're being destroyed a
lot more frequently than OTL "TOS" suggests.
That implies, to me, an attrition approaching 50% over the lifetime of the Fleet.
(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?
Or to the quality of ship design?
Or the callousness of the Fed Council?
It also implies space being way, way more dangerous than I've always believed from "TOS" OTL.
1700 ships with 1000x the power of 5th Fleet is a
hell of a lot of firepower.
Losing half of them means an
astounding degree of hazard.
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...
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:
And see "callous" above.)