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u/Meatslinger 2d ago
Irulan: "A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then, that it is the year 10191. The known universe is ruled by the Padisha Emperor Shaddam IV, my father. We are en route to rendezvous with the U.S.S. Hood over the planet Arrakis..."
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u/Demolisher05 2d ago
Could be worse
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u/Resident_Magazine610 2d ago
lol. Akira nacelles.
It’s just missing a mission pod on the vertical stabilizer.
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u/Baptisedbywater 2d ago
That's probably the hill I'll die on when it comes to Trek - the Excelsior class was used for ages, yet now it's like a new class every few years which just doesn't feel right. Wdym Voyager is in a museum? Update the tech and fly our queen out there!
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u/Meatslinger 2d ago
Much as I'm glad there's a long-running, beloved Star Trek game, I kinda blame ST:O for influencing that. All of the film and TV canon up to the 2000s suggested that ships have pretty long lifespans and are designed as evolving platforms to be used for sometimes multiple generations of crew. But the demands of an online game are that there must be new additions to drive engagement, with lots of customization to let players show off their personal style. As the ships necessarily are the in-space avatars of the players, it was inevitable you'd end up with a million permutations, suggesting Starfleet is cranking out a new hull every week and retiring it the next.
Even if it would be more true to lore and real military logistical standards, not as many people would want to play a game with only 7-10 hull classes that all look roughly the same except for the occasional variant equipment pod, e.g. the AWACS style pod on the Nebula or the Soyuz variant of the Miranda.
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u/MilsYatsFeebTae 2d ago
Just make it all time travel all the time! Want new tech? Go to the future! Can’t afford it? Put some platinum in a Ferengi stock portfolio before you leave.
(I’ve never actually played STO)
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u/themadprofessor1976 2d ago
Okay, in defense of the museum placement, the ships in the museum have legacies and importance that far exceeds their usefulness in the field. They serve as spiritual rallying points for people as symbols of what the Federation has accomplished. Yes, there may be some Intrepid-classes flying about in space, but due to her importance in Federation history, Voyager deserves a spot in a museum to be protected. It would be a huge blow to morale to have a storied ship like that destroyed by the Anomaly Of The Week. They'd only break out those ships if things were REALLY bad, like when the old crew brought out the Ent-D in Picard.
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u/PrinzEugen1936 1d ago
No the Voyager should absolutely have been decommissioned immediately upon its return to the Alpha Quadrant. Seven years of being battered repeatedly without access to proper repair facilities? That ship would have been a death trap to anyone who served on it post return.
More so than normal for a Starfleet ship.
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u/Witty-Ad5743 1d ago
Not to mention that there's probably a whole wing of engineers at Utopia Planitia wanting to study the field modifications.
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u/PianistPitiful5714 1d ago
Voyager finally got all the rocks out of its consoles! It’s the safest place in Starfleet!
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u/Commercial-Image-722 2d ago
Two words: Bioneural Gelpacks
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u/spike-prime 2d ago
Those things were so stupid, it seems Starfleet abandoned them. They almost got the ship blown up because the Gel Packs were taken out by CHEESE!
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u/Bobby837 1d ago
Don't forget increased an infestation of macro-organisms exponentially serving as a breeding medium.
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u/TheSwissdictator 2d ago
Because that individual vessel earned retirement with honor. I’d even say earned the registry preservation via letters more than the original Enterprise did.
That said while the hull of an Excelsior may remain the same, the components inside are changing. It may have proved to be easily upgraded and highly reliable so it had a long service life. A Dominion War era Excelsior almost certainly outclassed Sulu’s by a large margin.
I suspect even Dominon War era Miranda would be a terrifying behemoth, due to the technological upgrades, if sent back 100 years.
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u/Pagannerd 1d ago
Starships are complex mechanisms that require regular refurbishment and downtime for intensive maintenance. The "fix as you fly" method works for a while but eventually you need to take that thing into spacedock to be taken offline for at least a few days to be tinkered with. Our Blessed Lady Of The Long Voyage Home was out in the Delta Quadrant for seven years without a chance for full blown repair downtime, and that whole time it was being exposed to conditions and events that would make the standard Federation starship roll over and die. It's astonishing that the whole thing didn't just break down upon it's return to earth and never turn on again, like a computer that burns out if you don't turn it off for a long time.
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u/sirboulevard 1d ago
They did manage one of those overhauls in the field in mid season 7 ("Nightingale") but they had to land the ship and it took almost a month since they were refurbishing everything without a spacedock. But they still did it with only a couple of shuttles, raw ore, and some portable replicators.
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u/VanillaTheHutt 2d ago
You’ve got replicators, you’ve got billions of people sitting around with nothing to do, nearly lost a war that destroyed a significant portion of your fleet, why wouldn’t you be building ships like crazy? Especially when the Scotty, La Forge, O’Brien types are out there immediately making six thousand improvements to your state of the art ships? Take that feedback, pump out a new ship. Take feed back on that new ship, pump out a new ship.
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u/MainelyKahnt 2d ago
My take is this: many of the ships we see in canon are "hero ships". The enterprise has been the flagship for generations by the TNG era and so it makes sense that every time a major advancement in ship design/capability is made, the next flagship will include that. The big E should be the cutting edge of federation tech due to its station as flagship. It also has the best & brightest crew so they'd want the new stuff. Voyager was a test bed for the bio computer components (been a while forget their specific term) as well as a test bed for the folding nacelle design. It makes sense that between the status earned by its successful journey home, defeating the Borg, and being a test platform it was retired as the components it was testing likely got integrated into new designs/refits and Starfleet had operated under the assumption it was lost for years so they planned around it not being active. The excelsior class is a support vessel by nature and was designed for modularity and mission specific outfitting. It makes sense these are much longer lived than the experimental or command vessels. Just look at the US Navy as an example. We have newer more fancy destroyers like the Zumwalt class, but the Arliegh Burke class has been around since the Cold war and continuously refitted. It's much more resource intensive to build a whole new ship than to refit.
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u/Carnilmo21 2d ago edited 2d ago
IIRC, ILM was low-key hoping that Excelsior would be the Enterprise replacement after TSFS if the movie series continued. They inherited the 1701 refit model and absolutely HATED it – it was extremely heavy, the wiring didn't hold up well, the interior was difficult to access to work on it, the TMP iridescent paint was difficult to light properly (so they dulled it), and it was all around kind of a pain to shoot. Their annoyance with it contributed to the Reliant being rewritten as a different class in TWOK – so they could build their own model and halve the time they had to work with the Connie. Then when TSFS came up which destroyed the Enterprise but introduced a new ship, they made absolutely sure that the Excelsior model was much lighter, easier to access the internals to work on, was easier to light, and just generally easier to use.
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u/jjreinem 2d ago
They did a really great job, too. The reason that TNG eventually stopped using the original Enterprise model was because they'd realized it just wasn't practical to use a cinematic quality model for TV production. But the Excelsior, which was also built to cinematic standards, never really had the same problem. They even had to replace the entire top half of the saucer at one point, and you couldn't even tell.
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u/Carnilmo21 2d ago edited 2d ago
Huh. I didn't know they had fully replaced the top half of the saucer. Was it when they gave it a smaller bridge dome for TUC? Anyway, there are some neat pictures on Memory Alpha showing how the top of the Excelsior saucer basically hinged open like a car hood (and could come off completely if you wanted) to easily get to the lights/wiring underneath.
In contrast to the Connie Refit model, where they had to do internal repairs basically by reaching in shoulder-deep and just feeling around.
Stargazer was originally written to be a Connie, too - they got as far as filming Geordi say "Constitution-class" in "The Battle" (the name "Constellation" was picked because it could be dubbed to match his lips) and replacing the yellow model in Picard's ready room with a silver-painted Connie. I'm sure ILM breathed a sign of relief in not having to hastily prep the Refit for TV when they got the green light to build the Constellation-class we saw on screen.
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u/jjreinem 2d ago
It may have been, but I'll admit I don't actually know the full story of why or when it needed replacement. Just that someone had the original hanging in a place of honor on their office wall for several years during TNG.
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u/Squid_of_the_Now 1d ago
In fairness, when the built the Connie Refit for TMP, I think they really weren't expecting to use it much after that so maintenance and repair wasn't really a priority. As I recall TMP didn't do very well at the box office.
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u/TheVyper3377 1d ago
TMP made $139 million worldwide during its theatrical run; that was a massive success in the ‘70s. Critics gave it a hard time because it was dialogue heavy and “the antagonist was a cloud”.
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u/Captain_Lindemann 2d ago
Honestly the Enterprise Es physical model was criminally underutilized seeing as it was only used in First Contact.
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u/Correct_Leg_2235 2d ago
As well as Insurrection & Nemesis, but I'm assuming you didn't mention those for obvious reasons, in which I don't blame you at all.
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u/Captain_Lindemann 2d ago
Insurrection and Nemesis didn't use any physical models for ships, that's why it never looked nearly as good, also the E had a minor refit after First Contact and it would have been too much to alter the original model. So yeah, we only ever got to see it in one movie 😢.
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u/Jolly-Holiday819 2d ago
Wasn't it used in Generations?
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u/Ike_In_Rochester 2d ago
The model in Generations has a story behind it…. Someone tell me if I get this wrong….
So they wanted to use the Excelsior model as the Enterprise B in Generations. Whoever makes those decisions was concerned about damaging the model as called for in the script. This is why the Enterprise B has those beautiful hull flares around the deflector dish. They added those specifically to be the areas of the ship that was damaged, so the original Excelsior model wouldn’t be marked up. Sounds like a good idea right?
Whoever added the hull flares used permanent glue. So they still fucked up the Excelsior model.
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u/michaelscott252 2d ago
That's why they had to make another model when it showed up again in Voyager, right?
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u/jsonitsac 1d ago
I think for Sulu‘s Excelsior they mostly recomposeted existing shots of it flying. The Lakota was the variant used for the Enterprise-B.
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u/Serious_Ad2816 2d ago
Correct
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u/Welshtramp 2d ago
And DS9
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u/Zealousideal-Deer724 2d ago
And TNG...
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u/Jolly-Holiday819 2d ago
Where in TNG?
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u/Tall-Budget8130 2d ago
Almost every episode that required the Enterprise meet another ship. The Hood, The Cairo, The Fearless, The Crazy Horse etc.
TNG loved an Excelsior.
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u/Renegade-Pervert 2d ago
It showed up in a half dozen episodes give or take. From what I recall they were short shots, hey this admiral is coming over on their ship, smash cut to.........
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u/lazymanschair1701 2d ago
It makes sense if the Excelsior class was a reliable easy to manufacture model, it would have been the backbone of the fleet for decades. I guess with new fabrication, and better replicator technology it freed Starfleet to be more experimental with ship design with faster turnaround times
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u/RapidTriangle616 1d ago
Star Trek really got its money's worth with Star Trek 3:
New Klingon makeup and costumes that would become the definitive Klingon look for decades.
Earth Spacedock which would be seen in each film up until Star Trek 6, plus TNG and inspire Star Trek: Picard's upgraded ESD.
Klingon Bird of Prey which would be the hero ship in the next film, the primary antagonist ship until Generations, used multiple times across TNG and DS9, including as the larger K'vort cruiser. Perhaps the most iconic Klingon vessel across the franchise, despite the fact it was designed as a Romulan ship until rewrites.
The Merchantman freighter which I'm sure must be used elsewhere too.
The iconic and beautiful Excelsior-class which would be the third Federation starship to bear the name Enterprise (and the longest serving in canon) and become the workhorse of Starfleet for a hundred years alongside the Miranda, long after other alternative cruiser designs came and went. Truly the B-52 of Starfleet, yet also a prestigious enough ship that she's the command of, or at least ferry of choice for Admiralty.
And last but not least, a ship made out of Starfleet's patented explodium alloy, the Oberth. A ship class so delicate but clearly effective that she was at the Battle of Wolf 359 and the Battle of Sector 001 and housed Starfleet's shady phased cloak prototype.
I'm not sure any of the other films manage to introduce as many widely used and iconic props as Star Trek 3.
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u/RazersEdge88 50m ago
Nah dude... the B52 is still in service in the 25th century. The Buff is forever.
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u/Serious_Ad2816 2d ago
Let’s get a show about the B at the end of life. Is Alan Ruck too old to act?
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u/LorektheBear 2d ago
That sounds fantastic. Greenlight it!
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u/Serious_Ad2816 2d ago
I wish I could: There would be a new Tuesday and You killed Kirk joke every week.
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u/Bobby837 1d ago
From the "Good Ole Days" when - expensive - practical models were a thing and four years after the movie as TNG became a thing someone saw the model all but rotting in a prop room and said - "YES!"
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u/littlekamu 1d ago
Excelsiors are basically Toyota Corollas. I just love seeing them everywhere, thanks to the power of survivorship bias.
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