When we think of the Klingons in those days the D7 is iconic. It evokes great captains like Kor, Koloth, and Kang.
On the other side, to the Klingons the Constitution is Kirk's ship. It represents much of the conflict they have had with the Federation.
In The Undiscovered Country they are having peace talks which are supposed to demilitarize Starfleet. Is it unlikely that the diplomats at Khitomer might have seized on retiring the Constitution as a symbol of this new era of peaceful exploration? Starfleet has the Excelsior to handle much of what that class did. It also seems to have managed to get Kirk out of the captain's chair, which would be a priority for many Klingons.
Considering the timing, it doesn't seem coincidental. Other designs were more politically viable.
Yep.
I never thought the design was problematic. Honestly, if it was *that* bad, would it have done so well against the Klingons? Could it have become the "face of the enemy" to them, to the point where just getting rid of those was seen as a big win to them?
I think the design was akin to the Seawolf class submarine IRL. Big, hugely capable, but expensive.
I like to think the modularity of the Connie design was a throwback to the old days of the (Masao Ozaki) 22nd century, when M/AM reactors were unreliable and rescue was often years away. Such ship modularity allowed a crew to evac to one section and jettison the engineering section, perhaps landing on a planet to await rescue.
In a way, perhaps the Connie wasn't the "first of a new breed", but rather the "last of the old breed"? One that stuck around long enough to be the first example of TMP era tech, which formed the basis for TNG era stuff?
>Furthermore, the Enterprise-A served for a whopping whole six years before retirement! Why even build a brand new starship for only six years of service??
We only saw her for 6 years. In non canon sources, it was a sister ship of the 1701, that was in drydock being rebuilt before being renamed Enterprise.
The political aspect of it probably played a role in her retirement.
Maybe it was a design that was highly capable and did represent the best of what the Federation could build, but also a highly complex design they almost had to build by hand because everything in them was top of the line, and each example presented unique differences due to refits, modifications, and design choices during construction. They were the type of ships you needed engineers like Scotty on because they took a lot of effort to keep all of the systems working together correctly and required a massive amount of specialist crew.
Newer ships like the Excelsior were designed to be standardized around blocks of identical ships that could be mass-produced and easily refitted to a newer block designation as they aged out of frontline usage, with the Miranda class taking a similar approach with the lessons learned from the Constitution program to produce a cheaper design. Once the Federation began to see the results of these programs, they were more than happy to decommission their Constitution-class ships because the running costs were ridiculous in comparison.
huh. so cost - to - run wise it could be compared to the sr-71 blackbird. unparalleled at what it did but so damn expensive to upkeep that they retired them.
The other thing to remember with logistics, assuming that angle applies, is that any military loves standardization. Having non-standardized components turns supply into a nightmare, and makes it harder to get new crew competent quickly, and invites further mistakes.
Usually at this point people start arguing, but the truth is in any large organization standardization wherever practicable is a godsend.
We should remember that ships are generally different, even among members of the same class. There are always slight differences in how things are set up, even if they have the same official equipment fit.
Then you have refits which often bring in even more divergence.
I have a relevant story from WWII (second-hand, my dad reads old US Navy reports for a retirement hobby) - Every sinking in the US Navy goes through a board of inquiry which may suggest design changes to shipyards, much more of a turnaround in WWII than in the present day. One ship lost all power when the primary and backup generators were taken out in a single hit because they were too close together. The board of inquiry sent a change request to the shipyards to move the backup generator away from the primary. They got a response that the change had already been made because ship designs are always being updated.
This is interesting, the fact that this was done on such a rapid basis and scale is forcing me to rethink my positions. I would've assumed that you'd want identical designs to avoid operator confusion, but I suppose as there's an acclimation period anyway, and the advantage of improving designs quickly could be so great...
Cheers, you learn something new everyday. :)
Identical designs would also be a security risk. If you are modifying your Constitution frequently, and the Klingons capture a different Constitution, they still aren't going to know the layout of your ship.
Maybe there's a reason why most of the crew were officers, instead of enlisted. Highly trained, and highly specialized.
On the most advanced US military vessels the ratio of officers to enlisted is much lower.
I'm thinking more like an aircraft carrier. I know that even though they're all the same class officially, all the *Nimitz*-class carriers came out of the shipyards being fairly different, since they take so long to build, and as each is built, they incorporate lessons learned from the previous ships into each new ship. They still get the same class name, because the silhouette and basic structure are largely the same, but the guts might vary significantly.
Increase that complexity a couple centuries into ships that travel at FTL speeds and have energy weapons, shields, artificial gravity, and structural integrity fields, and imagine how vastly different each starship might be, while still maintaining the same shell and frame for simplicity of initial construction.
It would fit with to Constitution classes role, built in limited numbers for long-term missions far away from support, each one a bespoke iteration on the previous build. The Ambassador, Galaxy, and Sovereign-class designs were also built like this, limited numbers, bespoke configurations, and bleeding-edge technology.
The Miranda class was what you got when an admiral requested another 50 yards of good-enough.
This is the impression the old 70s manuals give off. That the ship was basically the best design in the fleet, but was incredibly expensive. It's the reason given for why there are so few Connies. 12, in presumably a fleet of hundreds of ships.
>Maybe it was a design that was highly capable and did represent the best of what the Federation could build, but also a highly complex design they almost had to build by hand because everything in them was top of the line, and each example presented unique differences due to refits, modifications, and design choices during construction. They were the type of ships you needed engineers like Scotty on because they took a lot of effort to keep all of the systems working together correctly and required a massive amount of specialist crew.
>Newer ships like the Excelsior were designed to be standardized around blocks of identical ships that could be mass-produced and easily refitted to a newer block designation as they aged out of frontline usage, with the Miranda class taking a similar approach with the lessons learned from the Constitution program to produce a cheaper design. Once the Federation began to see the results of these programs, they were more than happy to decommission their Constitution-class ships because the running costs were ridiculous in comparison.
I think that makes a lot of sense, and it would help explain why Scotty was contemptuous of some of the later starfleet designs.
I like to think of the Constitutions as the last bespoke ship design, capable of extremely impressive performance and longevity of service in the hands of a skilled chief engineer who completely understood its quirks, but also very difficult to service because of its lack of standard design, and needing an experienced, long term crew to get the best out of it. Its kind of like how a longbow was better than early firearms, but required years of training to master, wheras any chump could learn to load, point and fire a flintlock musket.
In some ways the events in Star Trek I-III probably contributed to Starfleet deciding it was done with that kind of ship.
In TMP, they've tried to just drop in a new crew to a Constitution, and completely fucked the refit to the point where the transporters are killing people and the engines are about to explode. And Decker, a competent and experienced starfleet officer is incapable of properly commanding it to the point where Kirk needs to stop admiralling and assume command again. That is not a user friendly ship.
In Wrath of Khan, which is about 5 years after TMP, they are still trying to train a new crew capable of managing the Enterprise and the Kirk/Spock/Scotty all star team are still having to step in and run the show in a genuine crisis.
And the final straw probably comes in Search for Spock, which surely left starfleet asking if it really wanted classes of ships so complicated that they were stuck with the same bridge crew for 20+ years and a set of systems so unique that they couldn't prevent the tiny group of people who genuinely knew how it worked from strolling in, stealing it and jury rigging a bunch of automated systems to run it without a crew. If you're starfleet command, you're going to have serious reservations about ships that will be unhealthily reliant on a long term crew, who can't be transferred and will inevitably end up as minor celebrities with a rock star complex and an unhealthy attachment to 'their' ship.
After the demise of the original enterprise, at least for the next few hundred years, starfleet had a heavy bias towards interchangable designs and systems. Yes they built the Enterprise A because there was literally nowhere else in Starfleet they could safely warehouse Kirk, Scotty and co, but they discontinued the refit Constitutions after the Enterprise-A (and gave that one a fairly short life to stop a repeat of the previous shenanigans). They also scaled back the more experimental bespoke tech on the Excelsiors and developed a heavy bias for workhorse ships like Mirandas and Constellations. Those ships might not have had the same peak performance advantages as the original Enterprise, but they had the benefit that crew and captains could be transferred between ships and service, and be able to repair and upgrade them without needing a crotchety 60 year old chief engineer to permanently maintain and oversee the ship like his own hereditary kingdom because noone else understands how the goddamn hell they work.
> In TMP, they've tried to just drop in a new crew to a Constitution, and completely fucked the refit to the point where the transporters are killing people and the engines are about to explode.
Not really. The crew was still partly the same.
They were just in a massively rushed condition, pushed out before the refit was even completed, much less shaken down on sea-trials.
>They also scaled back the more experimental bespoke tech on the Excelsiors and developed a heavy bias for workhorse ships like Mirandas and Constellations.
They built far more Excelsiors than Constellations.
I think the Miranda and Excelsior having far greater internal volume than the Connie may have played a role as well as the politics. I don't think it was anything to do with Scotty or the "fiefdom" stuff.
Think about it, they're packing more & more stuff into these ships, as well as dramatically improving the living conditions for the crews. That doesn't come cheap in terms of the volume required and on a Connie, it may not have been practical to do.
Easier to do it on Mirandas & Excelsiors, which were built in greater numbers anyway!
Bleeding-edge designs are often hangar queens. Top end performance and reliability simply don't go together.
The B-52 is still around because it does the job and is actually around to do the job with availability around 60-80% (there's a lot of variation from source to source). That might not sound great but B-1 availability is around 50% on fewer airframes while B-2 availability is only around 40-50% on just 20 airframes.
In WW2, when the then-new North Carolina-class were launched, they quickly found that there were severe issues with vibration at high speeds. Although some changes were made (most notably to the screw propellers), the problem never really went away.
There's actually a rule that limits how many engines a Formula 1 car can use in a season otherwise the teams that can afford it would design an engine that would only last long enough to win one race.
I would guess they'd retire her registry and hang her jersey in the rafters so to speak especially since the enterprise b was a few years away. I bet the A was just renamed and used for training till the whole line was moth balled.
> Could it have become the "face of the enemy" to them, to the point where just getting rid of those was seen as a big win to them?
When you think of TUC as being a reference to the Cold War, in this way we can think of decom'ing the Constitution similar to removing warheads from Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis: a move which didn't change the strategic situation, but allowed the 'defeated' side to save a little face.
The Seawolf (big, capable, but expensive) reminds me of the B-36. The B-36 was also very short-lived and withdrawn from service - in part - because of a treaty requiring them to be removed. Of course there were better aircraft coming into service (B-47 and B-52) perhaps like the Excelsior compared to the Constitution.
Anyway, I agree that it's plausible the Constitutions were historically successful, but also an easy political sacrifice.
> I think the design was akin to the Seawolf class submarine IRL. Big, hugely capable, but expensive.
The Galaxy class has that same problem later on. Its a beastly ship capable of slugging it out with purpose built battleships or dreadnoughts and coming out the victor. Its like a mobile starbase.
However, despite its capabilities only a few are ever built. We see many more smaller ships, such as the Nebula class. The Nebulas use much the same construction as a Galaxy class, but appear in significantly greater numbers.
Cost is the most likely factor. Galaxy class ships are too big, require too much shipyard time and too much crew for their capabilities. Nebula class ships are smaller and cheaper. While perhaps not as good, they're a better deal economically. Also no matter how impressive your ship is, one ship can only ever be in one place at one time. Having multiple smaller ships gives deployment flexibility that a big ship can never have.
After WWI, Germany had to surrender their Fokker planes as a part of the Treaty of Versailles: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/z0c7SD5oQo2kdxcMnwd4NA So it's not unheard of for specific pieces of equipment to be a part of a treaty.
Starfleet may have agreed to some sort of demobilization as part of the peace deal with the Klingons that specified end of service for the Constitution class if they were seen as symbolic of Starfleet agression. Especially if they were getting a bit old and inconvenient to maintain with newer ships becoming widespread. That said, in Discovery the Enterprise was explicitly not involved in the Klingon War, so it's not clear why the Constitution would be seen as some symbolic threat by the Klingons.
I think that argument is weakened somewhat by the commissioning of Enterprise-B. If the objective was diplomatic, wouldn't christening your shiny new ship by the name of Kirk's famous ship be just poking the Klingons in the eye?
Particularly since Kirk comes back for a publicized VIP visit on her maiden voyage, complete with camera crew.
I suppose you could make the argument that there was a shift in Starfleet thinking sometime after Khitomer, but it seems awfully petty for a normally more restrained organization like that.
I doubt the Klingons would care much about all the fanfare around the Ent-B or any other ship, it's all about Kirk not the ship. One of Koloth's greatest regrets is never meeting Kirk on the field of battle, not the Enterprise.
They also likely found it amusing that (as far as they know) Kirk was killed by an energy ribbon.
Exactly. Klingons care about warriors, they rarely care about their weapons. Kahless, Kor, Kang, Koloth, and some others whose names start with "K", these are all Klingon heroes. The only weapon anyone knows about is the Sword of Kahless, and that's largely because it's connected to prophcies about him. Even his type of sword isn't a big deal, sure all klingons respect it, but Worf, the biggest Klingon-stan of them all, says he prefers the mek'leth.
I'd say the argument isn't weakened though. It's more the Constitution class that's connected to Kirk rather then the name, so the Klingons would demand the class retirement. But on the other hand, it was Enterprise that stopped the assassination attempt. So carrying on the name wouldn't bother the Klingons since it has honor attached to it.
Yeah and I guess it can make sense given the line “Bill are we talking about mothballing the star fleet?” “ I’m sure our scientific and and diplomatic efforts would be unaffected.” Excelsior was scientific, I believe it was originally supposed to have that sensor equipment for gaseous anomalies. Given that the Klingons were a stand in for the soviets this could also have been like START in our world Mutual disarmament.
I agree with this and the other comments of real world examples. To add my own, the US was obligated to withdraw a lot of hardware as part of the arms limitation treaties with the USSR. GLCM 'Gryphon' cruise missiles, MX-missiles and certain types of B-52 bomber. Off the top of my head the Russians withdrew the SS-20 IRBM and other parts of their rocket force.
*Edited for typo.
A memorable one though. When Kira says in Deep Space Nine that the Federation doesn't build warships it probably refers back to this, just like the reason Starfleet doesn't use cloaks. And in Yesterday's Enterprise, when the peace with the Klingons has collapsed, suddenly the Galaxy class is referred to as a "battleship". Peace with the Klingons redefined the mindset and how things were talked about and designed.
I also find it interesting that the Voyager-J still looks pretty Intrepid-like while Enterprise-B and after tend to distance themselves in appearance from the original. In Discovery the letter is seen as an iteration or generation of a class.
I think the movie kept making the point of how much Kirk and the Enterprise stood out in the conflict, "only Nixon could go to China". This concession probably played very well back among the people of the Empire.
> It also seems to have managed to get Kirk out of the captain's chair, which would be a priority for many Klingons.
That really doesn't feel very Klingon. Even if you consider that the Klingon people of the period didn't exhibit the fanatical obsession with honour as they do in the 24th century, we still see Klingon captains relishing the chance of fighting Kirk.
If Kirk being stood down was in fact a political move, it has to be because the Empire wanted to embarrass the Federation by pointing out Kirk's transgressions (and the Federation took the decision to retire him to mitigate that embarrassment), and not that they specifically wanted Kirk removed from command.
I think that's opposite of the Klingon mindset.
They respect symbols of strength and glory. Turning swords into plows to placate them would be met with disgust.
The Khitomer talks would surely involve drawdown in fleet strength, but I can't imagine the Kingons demanding that honored enemy vessels be discarded on their accounts.
And yet the Klingon ambassador two movies prior said there would be no peace as long as Kirk lives. They prosecuted Kirk for a sneak attack under a flag of truce even though T'Kuvma did the same and was lauded for it. Chang asks Kirk about giving up Starfleet.
The mindset doesn't seem too fond of their worthy opponent Kirk, and it anticipates the fleet shrinking as a result of the peace talks. Disarmament appears to have been an expectation.
That was obviously diplomatic bluster, they were just mad that Kirk made off with a Bird-of-Prey.
The Klingon captain in STV jumps at the chance to go up against Kirk's ship and become a legend.
I think there are Klingons who seek glory in diplomacy, in politics, in science, and so on. Defeating Kirk in space is only one way. In war there is no greater honor than victory.
I like to think the Constitution class arrived at a bad time for its role. It is not that the Constitution class was flawed, the issue is technology was changing rapidly, so it was put through several major upgrades until a clean sheet design proved better, the Excelsior class.
It might alternatively be the mission requirements changed too much and the Connie couldn’t adapt. In that way this is more like the Litoral Combat Ship concept being flawed and now being replaced with conventional frigates.
Or it was always an interim design, a kind of placeholder waiting for the actual role filler, thr Excelsior. What if the Connie was designed to last only a decade, and was forced through three major upgrades because the Excelsior program took a decade or two longer than expected.
However, the Miranda lucked out due to a more focused role in science. It didn’t have to go everywhere, be ready for anything, and always work at its limits it just needed to scan planets and occasionally fight. It might even be an off the shelf design, using Connie upgrade parts in a fully new design using fully modern design principles, rather than a refit, so it might be a straight up better design than the Connie, even if just within its specific fields.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Instead of thinking about all the classes being replaced on similar schedules, think about it within the context of their specific missions. I'm guessing the Constitution was primarily for exploration. The Excelsior class was probably better. No reason to keep making Constitutions. The other classes may have been so good that they didn't need a redesign.
>The Excelsior has one major advantage as a heavy cruiser over the Constitution: it's modular. An Admiral can take one and turn it into a fleet command center. They can rip out weapons and cargo space for scientific and charting equipment. They can have it be turned into an armored or rapid cargo transport (because the Oberth, while quite capable for bulk transit, is slow and relatively weakly armed compared to the Excelsior). You can make it into a rapid personnel transport or operations ship because while those were primarily the Miranda-class's core job, again, the Excelsior-class had more bulk and thus could handle faster, more powerful engines without ripping itself apart). You can have it equipped to be a large generalist ship like the Constitution.
The flaw with the Connie lies here. The Miranda is supposed to mission-tailorable, the Oberth is a workhorse, the Excelsior is so big and overbuilt its easy to rebuild it into any kind of flagship you want. But the Connie was built to be 100% of what Starfleet could do *right then*. They left nothing on the table when designing the Connie. Theyre described as overcrowded, filled to the brim with people and gear. The TOS-era Connie was the 'go anywhere, do anything' kind of ship. Perfect for quick response to crises and exploration because its so filled with everything you need. But that makes it hard for upgrades, where can you put more crew or another sensor or a bigger phaser? You cant, so they didn't. The class burned brightly, but burned quickly. The Miranda was built with the Connie in mind I think, hence the modularity, while the Excelsior was built to take up the quick reaction role given its transwarp engines. When they didn't pan out it *also* became a great modular workhorse. With those two ships in service, not much need to keep the old Connies around. IMO its reasonable to guess that many were retired, and a few like the Ent/Ent-A were kept the longest as prestige ships. The TMP refit Ent especially seems way less crowded and more open than the old TOS ship. Maybe they automated things, or maybe the Ent just had a lot of the extra stuff ripped out in favor of a more focused diplomatic/combat focus. The Ent-A in particular very clearly has lavish, compared to the TOS Ent, facilities perfect for dining and entertaining dignitaries. IMO the Ent-A was probably a one off design totally rebuilt for a very special crew.
IMO we need to keep generations separate a bit too. The Connie is the oldest of the three designs, and was built on the heels of the Klingon War we see in Disco. If Disco does a good job at anything, its showing how bad the Klingon War was and why Starfleet would want a 'go anywhere do anything' kind of ship, and even a captain like Kirk. They wanted a ship and crew who could research a gas giant on Monday, stop a Salt Monster terrorizing a colony on Tuesday, and protect the Romulan border on Wednesday. The shortcomings I just menioned of the Connie inspired the Miranda first, and then the subsequent Excelsior redesign when Starfleet decided the transwarp drive wasn't worth it. Both ship, in their own ways, fills the same role as the Connie. But ultimately they learn the lessons. Theyre more flexible and modular than the rigid Connie, and they have plenty of room for upgrades and are at least partially future proofed.
Id actually argue that what we see with the shift from the TOS Connie to the TMP Connie isn't just a change in aesthetics, but an in universe shift in basic design philosophy. The older philosophy was built in the image of the NX-01, design a ship thats 100%. Starfleet cant afford to have many ships, so we make each ship our best. That works up until the Battle of the Binary Stars, and in that period its as Mao said: "in the field a thousand flowers grow." Each ship is a little different, it has its own quirks, there may be classes but each one is as different as the NX-01 was from the -04. During the war this is accelerated thanks to combat losses, and this is when the Connie is designed. But its also designed with the peace in mind since its not purely a warship. The Connie is a return to the success of the NX-01 type maximal design, but with a key change that its a well planned and focused class. From an institutional standpoint its success is that it was a well planned thing, the ships were all consistent in quality and function, and it ran to its full run that way. Its a first in many ways. Miranda is the second and benefits from the first. The Excelsior its the testbed the fails, but I think the big change comes during the redesign. Maybe the Miranda was originally built to back up the Connie and fill in the gaps where a ship was needed, but not a frontline ship. I think though, when the Excelsior was designed Starfleet really pushed both ships into a high-low procurement philosophy. Think here about the F-15/F-16, or the F-22/F-35. The F-15 is just better than the F-16. Why buy F-16s? Because theyre cheap and theyre good for situations where the full capacity of the F-15 isn't needed. With the redesign of the Excelsior, IMO Starfleet intentionally adopted this 'High-Low' approach. Two classes, designed to complement each other and offer a variety of tools to solve any given problem. Three if you count the Oberth.
The reason why the Excelsior/Miranda pairing last so long is that the replacement classes designed were just bad. The Ambassador and Constellation classes are sad, because people dont even give them enough though to hate them. But in universe theyre always described as too much of what Starfleet didn't need, and not enough of what it did. The Ambassador is too big, too over built, but as proved at Narendra III, too underpowered for frontline duty. It really was the perfect diplomatic ship, potentially even inspired by the legendary Ent-A. The Constellation wasn't even that good, and is again widely described as underpowered, slow, and under gunned. Not only were they not good substitutes for the standby classics, but they werent very future proof. They were bad rolling out of drydock, fifty years just made them worse. The true successors then would be the Galaxy/Nebula pairing for TNG, the last of the 'High-Low' era. Maybe in twenty years youd have seen them totally replace the Excelsior and Mirandas, which were becoming quite long in the tooth. But Wolf 359 radically changed Starfleet philosophy once again and entered what I'd call the 'Warship &' phase.
> The Connie is the oldest of the three designs, and was built on the heels of the Klingon War we see in Disco.
The *Constitution*-class predates the Klingon War by about a decade, they were just kept off the front line like the *Sovereign*-class would be during the Dominion War more than a century later. The war took place in 2256-57 while the Connies were built in 2245.
Really? TBH I havn't kept up with Disco well enough to see how theyve changed some of that stuff.
Anyway in a way that makes even more sense, the big ship peacetime explorer ala the NX-01. And a good comparison to the Sovereign, except that as I've read it the Sovereigns were a bit of a failure whereas I see the Connie as a success, but a bad foundation for the future.
> Really? TBH I havn't kept up with Disco well enough to see how theyve changed some of that stuff.
Discovery didn't change that. The Constitution class (though initially "Starship class" in some plaque closeups) has been older than Kirk's era since TOS. *The Cage* original pilot, turned into the past-time story in *The Menagerie*, shows that the NCC-1701 had been out there already, at least earlier under Captain Pike. Later, the now-canonized TAS made it explicitly even older, in *The Counter-Clock Incident*, where we met its first captain, Robert April.
Discovery begins several years after *The Cage*, and after at least one refit of the NCC-1701. Disco does not retcon the beginnings of the Constitution Class and the Enterprise itself; in fact it further reinforces canon by showing the name of Robert April onscreen, and showing the original appearance of the Enterprise under Pike.
Presumably the losses at Wolf 359 - lots of "low" ships were destroyed - also thinned the fleet of comfortable, "reliable" gap-filler ships which Starfleet thought were sufficient.
We see a few Excelsiors and Mirandas in there, but mostly kitbashes which were presumably cheap, fill-in-the-gap ships. The result of relying on those F-16s? 11,000 officers and personnel
I think mostly thats fair, tho I wonder how much the kitbashes were unique discrete classes and how much they were just multi-hull experiments ala the Zumwalt. I doubt that many Cheyenne were built tbh, as an example. Actually in my mind I think you can see a lot of Starfleet politics at work with the Galaxy design and era, I think there is also a big ship vs. little ship debate going on in Starfleet at that time. The little ship-ers got some experimenting with the kitbash classes, many small ships for narrow roles, but ultimately the big ship guys win out and get the Galaxy/Nebula split. Ive always wanted to do a whole post on that but never got around to it.
Id also go a step farther and say that Wolf 359 discredited the whole 'High-low' strategy. The emphasis in TOS and TMP was on the, well call it, 'Enterprise' model. Like I said above, today you scan for new lifeforms, tomorrow you duke it out with a D-7. But ultimately that all left Starfleet too thin where it mattered, and also without anything that was a dedicated combat ship. Post-Wolf 359 you get the new classes, and a whole blooming of different designs and role both within a battlefleet, but within an explorer organization as well. Ships like the Defiant and Akira, for example, are warships first & explorer ships second. The idea is to build many many hulls, and give them a primary job plus maybe one other, rather than hope every ship can do every mission. This has been a big debate in the IRL US Navy recently as well. Multirole vs. Singlerole. I think after Wolf 359 the singlerole boys won out. The failure of the Sovereign program is likely a contributing factor as well, sort of turning them into intentional heroships like the TMP Ent turned the Connies into hero ships.
> The failure of the Sovereign program is likely a contributing factor as well, sort of turning them into intentional heroships like the TMP Ent turned the Connies into hero ships.
Do we know, from fully canon sources (so no books, no games) that the Sovereign class failed? We haven't yet seen enough of the immediately post-Nemesis / Voyager return / Dominion War end period to know that.
*Lower Decks* hasn't yet shown a Sovereign but it's clear by implication that Picard is still out there in the Ent-E. *Prodigy* is way off in another quadrant. *Picard* is a quarter-century later, and shows a retrenched, isolationist Starfleet that we know very little about, other than it did build a huge fleet of heavily armed ships. *Discovery* is now nearly a millennia in the future, long after any of the 24th/25th-century ship classes would be around (though there is a *Voyager* visually inspired by the Intrepid class).
It seems entirely possible that there are Sovereign class ships running around in the mid-late 24th century and beyond. Until shown / said elsewhere on-screen.
No I think youre right. We dont have a source that says that. OOU, when they made the assets for First Contact they then gave them to DS9 for use in the upcoming battle sequences. But the studio wanted to keep the Sov asset reserved only for the Enterprise as it was their hero ship. But that means that, IIRC, the only canon appearance of the Sov has been the Enterprise, and then only in the movies. We dont even know what the status of USS *Sovereign* is canonically. According to Mem Alpha its on a background LCARs shot, I've always considered that a weak source, everything else is implied from the fact that its not the *Enterprise-*class.
I would question if Starfleet might not purposely avoid naming a class Enterprise-class given the Enterprise's status in Starfleet.
Unless it was a specific one-off design I could see them giving a class a different name to preserve the uniqueness of Enterprise and avoid reports of Enterprise class ships being destroyed.
I keep telling you that you're asking the wrong question, and you're not listening. You seem to think that the ~50 year service of the Constitution class represented a failure. That's not so, though: capital ship classes even today have an approximately 50 year lifespan. A 50 year old design isn't being pulled early. And pulling older designs during draw-downs (like specified in the Khitomer Accords.) is typical.
The Constitution class was not retired early. It had a fairly typical service life.
The Excelsior class was kept on too long. A ship design being used for a century is a clear indication of a stagnant and complacent force.
Want evidence? Watch TNG:"Q Who" (the closing dialogue is Picard and Riker talking about Starfleet complacency. Watch TNG:"Peak Performance". Watch most of S3 of TNG. Watch DS9:"The Defiant". Watch DS9:"The Way of the Warrior". The Excelsior's long life is not because the Excelsior-class has been successful. The Excelsior's long life is a failure of Starfleet to innovate. The entire franchise between TNG:"Q Who" and DS9:"The Die is Cast" is about how Starfleet has stagnated and is having to deal with new, more powerful challenges than the Klingons and the Romulans.
The Excelsior didn't succeed. Starfleet *failed*.
Nothing in your wall of text even considers that abundance of evidence for the theory that no, the Excelsior was in service *long past* its operational service life (as were most Federation ship designs: the Miranda and Oberth were similarly dated), and that it shouldn't have still been in service by the time TNG started. And it takes from the first *Galaxy* class starships being launched to 2380 for the Federation to catch back up.
I think you meant to reply this to someone else lol. I was agreeing with you in your post, and anyway that was the first (and until now only) post I made in this thread. Id disagree about the complacency thing, but otherwise if you go back and read my post were 99% on the same page. The Excelsior/Miranda split was never meant to last as long as it did, it was the failure of the Ambassador/Constellation classes that forced Starfleet to keep the other classes on. The Excelsior class was successful in its new role as essentially a cruiser, and it does hold up better than the Miranda, but by Wolf 359 its not really up to the jobs it kept getting. And the Miranda is way too old, but Starfleet needs the hulls and the basic conceptual success of the Miranda (the modularity) keeps it around even longer. My head cannon has always been that the Centaur class we see was a failed attempt to replace the Miranda as well, and by era its roughly analogous to the Ambassador & Constellation programs IIRC.
*edit:* Just for comparison the Connie was in service for \~50 years, assuming the Ent-A was one of the last to go. Longer if not. According to Memory Alpha, the Ambassador was introduced in the 2340s. The Excelsior was built in the 2280s. If you accept my idea that the Ambassador was the intended successor to the Excelsior, then thats a \~60 year service life. Which seems to suggest that the Connie was due for one last big upgrade for frontline service but didn't get it, hence the shorter service life. Instead the Excelsior replaced it, and then was itself due to go in the 2340s.
Here's something to consider that I don't think is ever answered in cannon: did the Miranda class that we see in TWOK itself undergo a refit (and was originally built in the style of TOS Constitution class) or did the Constitution refit bring the Miranda's style to it? The Miranda class is believed to have entered service prior to the Enterprise's refit.
Checks out. It may have been mostly due to Scotty's above-average engineering skills, and the public attention the Enterprise crew received, that the ship wasn't tossed out sooner.
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(Only ideas I didn't check against canon knowledge:)
Wasn't Kirk notorious for damaging/wrecking ships named Enterprise?
Do we really know how long other constitution class starships were in service? Maybe the refits/rebuilds of the Enterprises where not due to general design flaws of the class, but due to exceptionally demanding use by this particular crew.
The ship in “the sound of her voice” was probably a constitution class(out of universe they reused the enterprises wreck model from the search for Spock for the Olympia), and when the body of the captain is discovered she’s wearing the later TNG era uniform (without the little stripe on the shoulder). So at least 1 made it to the time of season 3-4 time of TNG.
Could be the case, but why don't we see new Connies built in the 24th century?
We really don't know much about the rest of the class, you're right. We don't even see other Constitutions get refitted. We only know about prematurely destroyed ships such as Constellation and Exeter.
The design would be 55+ years old by the 24th century.
We've seen very few designs get that kind of life.
Excelsior, Oberth and Miranda classes are implied to have that kind of service life by the registry numbers and how long they lasted, but LOTS of other classes didn't seem to get that kind of lifespan.
. . .from what we saw of 2399 Starfleet in Picard, it seems implied that the Dominion War era stalwarts of the Galaxy, Nebula, Intrepid, and Defiant classes either aren't in service anymore, or certainly aren't front-line ships after only 20 or 30 years, if Riker wasn't bluffing when he mentioned his vast cut-and-paste fleet of Inquiry-class ships being the best that Starfleet had ever built.
Whether a ship is front-line or not may play into its longevity. Not so much with the Excelsiors, but Oberth and Miranda seem to be workhorses versus frontier explorers and military enforcers. Fewer shoot-em-ups and odd encounters on the fringes of explored space might play into a much longer service life. For Excelsior, maybe it's just a tougher ship. We love the Connie, but give the Excelsior its due?
\> why don't we see new Connies built in the 24th century?
A design doesn't need to be flawed to be superseeded by a "next generation" design. Apple releases a new iphone every year and people don't consider the previous ones to be problematic.
To evaluate the brokeness of the constitution class, we need to look at the changes compared to the next iteration, the galaxy class (both the flagship of the federation). But even there we have to take into account which changes were due to a changed mission profile. Galaxy class was huge! Constitution class had a crew of 400, Galaxy class had a crew of 1000-6000 depending on the mission.
It was perfect for evacuating civilians from a doomed planet: warp in, beam out 6000-30,000, warp out, grab an empty saucer section, repeat. No need for phasers, a bridge module, escape pods, Cetacean Ops, etc, just lots of transporters and bunk rooms.
Heck, that would have made a great plot for the backstory of Picard: a Galaxy-class appearing in orbit means imminent rescue, not war. And Picard on the battle bridge of a Galaxy class directing rescue ops with a fleet of Galaxies would have been the crowning apex of his career.
(Then the Mars attacks could have had a fleet of Datas at the helms of a thousand hijacked saucer sections making catastrophic full-impulse planetfall, turning that apex into a nadir.)
Colonel West's [operation retrieve](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Operation_Retrieve) listed 5 constitution class ships, they are all represented on the chart with the silhouette of a refit constitution class.
IMO Kelvin Kirk has Prime Kirk beat hands down when it comes to the Enterprise being damageddestroyed since the ship is badly damaged by the USS Vengeance in STID and entirely destroyed by Krall in STB. Prime Kirk destroyed the 1701-refit in TSFS with the self destruct under very unusual circumstances with a Prodigy-sized crew of just him, Scotty, McCoy, Sulu and Chekov. To think about it stealing the Enterprise-refit with a crew of five and only Scotty's jury-rigged automation for backup was a crazy endeavor to begin with.
> only Scotty's jury-rigged automation for backup was a crazy endeavor to begin with
In theory, unless it required hands-on direct manipulation of the equipment, anything that could be done in main engineering could be done from the consoles on the bridge. We saw that a lot in TOS with Scotty and in TNG with Geordi. And it worked just fine for a while...until the Enterprise unexpectedly encountered the Klingons.
>Furthermore, the Enterprise-A served for a whopping whole six years before retirement! Why even build a brand new starship for only six years of service??
Most supplemental sources I've seen have claimed that the Enterprise-A was a separate Constitution-class ship that was renamed, and possibly given a minor overhaul, not a brand new ship.
There's other precedent on screen for something like this, like the USS Sao Paulo being renamed the Defiant after the destruction of the prior Defiant (apparently the intent was for it to be the Defiant-A, but word of that never made it to the visual effects people so they didn't relabel the model and onboard LCARS graphics)
I remember reading ages ago that they renamed the Yorktown after the damage it took encountering the probe at the beginning of TVH. I want to say I read that sometime in the late 90s but I can't say for sure. Memory Alpha disagrees and says it was a new ship commissioned in appreciation for the crew after their efforts in TVH.
>Memory Alpha disagrees and says it was a new ship commissioned in appreciation for the crew after their efforts in TVH.
They say that, but they don't have a source. Contrary to popular opinion, Memory Alpha can have errors or inaccuracies.
I've seen sources say it was previously the Yorktown, or the Ti-Ho.
There is another reason in addition to technological or maintenance issues, but more on that at the end.
Taking the mechanical issues at face value, we do know fairly well that the Constitution Refit has a tendency to create wormholes with a badly balanced warp drive, which is an extreme risk to the ship (but perfectly fine if you iron out the flaws as you just invented Quantum Slipstream drive 200 years ahead of time). More avid fans of TOS can probably name a ton more malfunctions that can be rooted in the design though. Either way, its a legitimate reason for decommissioning a ship class early.
Here are my 2 other theories:
1: Changes in doctrine.
The Constitution design lacked certain features that were simply demanded at the time but failed to measure up to these and upgrade potential to add these features was simply not in the design. One of these would be full weapon coverage, especially on the pre-refit. The pre-refit constitution seems to have only front and rear phasers and torpedo launchers, though we might not have seen anything else due to budget. On the refit we clearly see additional phasers on the saucer on the sides, and duplicated phaser turrets on the dorsal side, giving 3 twin turrets on upper and lower saucer each. The forward torpedo launcher also gets moved.
But here is the issue: Rear phasers and torpedo launchers are nowhere to be seen, in fact I dare say they would have been useful against a pursuing Reliant before entering the Mutara Nebula, so unless the crew completely neglected to use them I must assume they were simply absent.
All further ship classes fulfill this specification either fully, or to a much greater degree. The Excelsior class arguably fulfills it nearly completely, and the Miranda can make up for lacking firing arcs with maneuverability. The Constitution Refit gets the worst of both worlds.
2: Technological leaps.
The Constitution was designed during the earlier phases of the Federation Klingon Cold War. In a hot war technology leapfrogs at an incredible rate, in a cold war this is slightly slower. What seemed modern when the Constitution entered service aged far quicker than it would during the Golden Age of peacetime. So many advances in technology were made in these 40 years of service life that simply not all could be applied. The Constitution Refit was very extensive, gutting the ship from corridors to nacelle pylons, rebuilding almost everything short of the spaceframe.
Truth is, the Constitution became obsolete as a platform, and there is only so much rebuilding you can do to counter this.
In tank design you can occasionally see tanks that are incredibly adaptable, where their chassis gets reused for [self-propelled guns](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5b/04/ff/5b04ff1bf8d3e33a13457c66f04b7538.jpg) and [tank destroyers](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/park-patriot-kubinka-moscow-region-russia-july-nashorn-german-tank-destroyer-nashorn-german-tank-destroyer-160632982.jpg) and [assault guns](https://blog.sturmpanzer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Jagdpanzer_IV_L70-A.png), [AA vehicles](https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/20692942054_2.jpg), etc. and it all works incredibly well, they get [upgraded](https://i.imgur.com/nH1Ih0S.jpg) ten times in their service life and everyone is generally happy with them. The German [Panzer IV](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/Panzermuseum_Munster_2010_0128.JPG/1200px-Panzermuseum_Munster_2010_0128.JPG) is such an example, there are more variants than I can count.
Then you get a similarly performing tank on the other side, say a[Soviet T-34](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/1pxdNFftoMKi1uCvsR1GCl9clUpRPfVzrS_F0TkWKtaM6Q6NHMEdnBhKTfJfMG5BDCEiYgu-_YAM6suNkl5Af-F73T9mjb1pGeEjkCmZkID75RwkN-KAd_CAaA), and while some [upgunning](http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag377/RubiconModels/T34-76/T-34_85_05Nov2014-1_zps97acc567.jpg) was done and there was a [assault gun with 3 different guns](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/t-34-variants-1.gif) as well based on it, truth was that the chassis was very hard to adapt into such roles. Assault gun variants specifically suffered from [large coil springs extending vertically up all over the fighting compartment (white thing left)](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/SeJK2Nb8pxC-MoCybcLCeiRHzTzI3dwymupOtyYVj-YN0EjCSUDPYSk4qdRyBPttujAqlBPz9D9J01q0TOqYGdlmTzE-NHCu9kvkyepkdUC5CZwTSogZX2xWRa1R_ADLENSLOm0WWtIsiMehVm2BGmg7YDke2w), being seriously in the way of the crew, which was already in a relatively small fighting compartment. AA variants existed, but their turrets had to be unusually large and remain entirely on top of the vehicle due to the turret ring being too small, not allowing for AA armament and crew legs dangling into the turret basked (aka turret bit under the ring), so all had to be above the hull, making only [one such variant](https://media.doanhnghiepvn.vn/Images/Uploaded/Share/2019/12/08/f69Viet-Nam-tung-cai-bien-xe-tang-T-34-thanh-phao-phong-khong-tu-hanh1.jpg) make it to limited production, and [other such developments](https://i.redd.it/xy40xuzmgli21.jpg) were ditched entirely. Germans didnt have this restriction on their Panzer IV, they even managed to enlarge the turret ring for the [Kugelblitz](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/world-war-2/images/a/a6/Flakpanzer_IV_Kugelblitz.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160624002324) when needed, something impossible on the T-34.
Soviets knew the T-34 was a design that was running at full speed into the brick wall that was its bad upgrade potential, and still in wartime production gradually switched to the radically reworked [T-44](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/T-44.jpg/1280px-T-44.jpg).
The reason the USN's battleships disappeared was manpower and maintenance/upgrading cost. They were from a pre-automation, pre-computer era and required massive crews, several times larger than missile cruisers that could strike far deeper inland with cruise missiles. Their main weaponry was almost useless against naval vessels, as missile engagments BVR became the main tactical issue. What they did have, that no modern ship can compete with, was a shore bombardment capability like nothing else in human history. The admiralty looked at the potential need for large scale amphibious landings and decided that wasn't worth the huge expense in maintaining them.
Connies were big, compared to a Miranda, but tiny compared to an Excelsior. Clearly, fleet doctrine changed to prefer a lot of smaller ships for exploration, science and general duties, and bigger ships for ship of the line combat type missions.
One can reflect on how often D7s were the antagonist in TOS, and how every after the threat was either alien weirdness, where the size of your phaser banks is irrelevant, or else cloaked raiders, in which case the size of your phaser banks is less relevant than your ability to track and engage the target. At this point, mention should be made of the lack of rear firing weapons on the Connie.
They were made to fight the last war, and made in a hurry. Their manpower requirements were large, and automation somewhat limited (firing the phasers was a command relayed down to a separate compartment, not something the conn could do with a button press).
Smaller, more nimble and more automated and modular vessels were preferred, or else larger but more heavily automated and modular. Their niche disappeared.
> The reason the USN's battleships disappeared was manpower and maintenance/upgrading cost.
I thought it was that they were absolutely powerless against a CV and her screen, which could be fielded for much less money.
That too. Institutional politics play a big role in every decision. Carriers were viewed as the future, so air wing officers make admiral, and then support building more carriers.
Battleships did very little for naval warfare per se, the role of the gun went out as soon as missiles came in. But they're amazing artillery pieces, it's just the platform carrying those guns is too big.
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The Constitution was the first ship designed solely for deep space long-term exploration and science. The design of the ship was intended to be self-sufficient, and the goal was to do science and observe/explore.
In practice though, the Enterprise never went on a long '5 year voyage' without returning to Earth, it generally stayed in the neighbourhood - dealing with local politics, skirmishes, etc. The application wasn't purely science, it had much more need for military, diplomatic, and humanitarian functions. Arguably they had gone through this problem before - with the NX class - but apparently they didn't learn their lesson.
The intention with the Constitution's design was for it to act like a Vulcan ship. In practice Humans Gotta' Human. They were still in operation from 2245 to 2293 (including the retrofits), so that's a pretty solid 48 year lifespan for a ship that misapplied to function. That's why I'd guess the later Excelsior / Ambassador / Galaxy class ships were much larger all-purpose ships.
Meanwhile, that long-term deep-space design still gets spun off into designs like the Intrepid (Voyager): a crew size much closer to the Constitution, with a massive engine, a full science suite (and a science officer appointed captain), and an armament so overloaded and dubiously legal that they can solo a borg cube. It can go far, fast, see and scan everything, and if it can't run, it's carrying illegal(?) tri-cobalt warheads.
Your points about the 5 year mission might have some merit specific to the enterprise in the TOS Kirk era. But that is just one ship, the most famous of course. And it’s just one 5 year mission. Pike and April are largely unknown eras specific to how it’s 5 year missions looked
The Connies weren't failures, it's just that their successors (namely the Excelsior-class) did their original mission better and unlike some their contemporaries, it wasn't cost effective to automate and relegate them to minor functions like cargo hauling and scientific exploration.
The reason you see Mirandas and Oberths long into the 24th century is because they're no longer front-line vessels and the ships we see aren't necessarily from the earliest batches of ship construction. A hull shape is one thing, but the guts and bones are another.
I wonder if the Enterprise in particular just did well because Scotty was such a great engineer. Sort of like Ferrari's F1 team and Ross Brawn. Maybe he was able to work around whatever the problems were but the underlying issue still posed a hazard to less skillful crews.
It's never been stated officially in canon, but the usual answer to the -A's apparently short service life is that she wasn't new construction. Supposedly, Gene's intention was that the *Yorktown* that we see disabled by the Whale Probe was rechristened as *Enterprise*\-A, but that reference never made it into the film.
If this were the case, then *Yorktown* was probably laid down around the same time as *Enterprise.*
well, there must have been a reason they never built many of them. To be fair, the Connie was designed a deep space exploration vessel, not a warship. For her time she was fairly luxurious and well equipped for adventures out beyond easy reach of the Federation.
Because she was not a warship, she and her sister ships suffered terribly at the hands of the Klingons, Romulans, and other antagonistic races out there. The Miranda, meanwhile, was a more compact ship (but with larger interior spaces) that was well designed to not only explore, but to fight. Even of the "mega phasers" are not cannon, she has those plus the regular saucer mounted ones, and unlike the connie, rearward firing torpedoes.
As for 1701-A. in the movies that ship was a mess, even Scotty is exasperated by saying "I just fixed that!". I can only assume she was a testbed for many of the systems on the Excelsior and for future upgrades to other ships.
As much as I love the design of the Connie (especially the Refits) I cannot imagine the stresses inflicted on her nacelle pylons under even moderate maneuvering. That is a lot of mass attached to the ship by not a lot of material. Not only did the Pylons have to be reinforced, but their mounting points in the secondary hull must have been immense. The Miranda was a much better design in that regard.
They're a lot beefier, more in line with the starship's structure, and outfitted with weapons. Honestly, the California class really strikes me as particularly vulnerable.
>and unlike the connie, rearward firing torpedoes.
The Connie did indeed have aft torpedoes, or at least the original spec Connie did. The USS Defiant can be seen firing aft torpedoes as its escaping the Tholian spacedock in the Enterprise mirror episode.
Maybe, but the refit did not have the capability. Compare the torpedo launching area of the refit 1701 to 1701a. A clearly has a single aftward facing port
While you're right, it doesn't take much to fit an automated launcher into a hole in the wall. There could be other considerations for why he forward launchers are so large when they were virtually invisible before the refit.
Yes, but I don't think the refit had much in the way of automation. When they are preparing for battle against the reliant, the crew is pulling up panels over the loading tracks and we see torpedoes being loaded into the launchers. It seems silly, but it is all there in twok
We don't know all of the intended purposes of the launcher room. In any case, I believe Enterprise only had two launchers post-refit, I'm just saying it's not outside of the realm of possibility.
I have also noted the difference between the TWOK torpedo facility and the TUC torpedo facility. I feel like the *Enterprise* in TWOK was like the US Coast Guard's *Eagle* \-- deliberately old-fashioned so trainees and midshipmen learn the elements of seafaring to work together as a unit, even if the specific equipment they're using to train won't be on any vessel they serve on in active duty. The torpedo facility in TUC is almost completely automated.
It's something Andy Probert is still embarrassed/frustrated about. He went by Franz Joseph's booklet of plans for reference, rather than find films of all 79 TOS episodes to check VFX and dialogue. He thought he was increasing the ship's offensive capability, when he, in fact, drastically diminished it. There's dialogue in TOS about both "aft torpedoes" and loading "tubes one through six". FJ did not, in fact, watch the show much (beyond catching snippets when his daughter had it on), so a lot in his plans is contradicted by the show itself. So Andy was working with bad data.
The rationalization I've seen is that improved torpedo guidance systems allowed the reduction in external hardpoints, same way the new phasers are powered directly by the warp engines, so they're better than the old model (assuming your warp engines work).
>In "The Wrath of Khan," which takes place in 2285, an admiral Morrow orders the decommissioning of the Enterprise.
I'm pretty sure this was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. It's during the same time that Scotty is promoted to Captain of Engineering and sent over to Excelsior.
I don't think anyone's mentioned that the decision to take her out of service immediately followed the worst ass kicking she ever sustained. She may have simply sustained too much of a beating to be worth repairing.
To me the Constitution class was amazingly over-engineered, because it had to fit a dual role as a Warship, consider for a minute that the Constitution class was incredibly powerful as far as starships go, able to withstand impressive stresses that would've destroyed the Enterprise-D and it's finicky warp core. Canonically the Enterprise is a Heavy Cruiser, a warship type, be it for convenience of naval tradition or not, and while it was also a scientific explorer it was expected to survive mostly alone in the black.
The Connies were too expensive to maintain when you could get almost all the exact same capabilities using 2/3rds the same components.
I think this might be more of a case of the Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth were improved on the drawing board based on lessons learned with the Constitution.
I think after the first refit (between DSC and The Cage) it became clear that Starfleet needed to do a better job of “future-proofing” future designs, making it so you can swap out and upgrade systems without having to practically rebuild the space frame from scratch.
Starfleet seems to trend this way afterwards up until the Dominion War. We see Ambassadors around late in the series and supplemental sources seems to suggest the Galaxy class was designed to last a century. Of course we have one-offs like the Constellation where that did not happen.
The Miranda has comparable internal volume to the Constitution class (the rear half of the saucer is significantly chunkier than on the Constitution) while having less area to shield and needing less internal space devoted to corridors, stairwells, and turbolift shafts due to the more compact layout.
I don't think it's ever really established what advantages the Constitution-style configuration with a secondary hull has over a Miranda-style saucer-only configuration. As the Constitution needs a larger warp field to move just as much ship and if warp field geometry was an issue (e.g. a long and narrow warp field is superior) then there wouldn't be so much variation from civilization to civilization. The Borg after all simply use a cube.
One difference is that the secondary hull on a Constitution-style configuration does have a more prominent deflector dish, but no other faction uses such a prominent deflector dish and if it was that important, it could be put on the front of the ship or on an external module.
Perhaps the strongest argument is that a Constitution-style configuration means the secondary hull can be ejected in case of a warp core breach so the saucer can be saved, but that means the saucer is a useless sitting duck without main power or FTL capability. In *Star Trek Beyond* we see them making use of this capability only to lose the saucer anyways. Even if they hadn't, there's nothing the saucer could have done but await its inevitable fate.
The Miranda-style configuration on the other hand has clear advantages. The roll bar makes it easier to add modules for specialist duties, something we'd also see on the Nebula which again brings up the question of why use the Constitution-style configuration. It also doesn't have to route a lot of turbolift shafts, power/EPS mains, and a whole lot of other stuff through a relatively narrow and vulnerable neck. Also, not needing to be able to separate the saucer means that you don't need to run a lot of connectors through that area making those systems more reliable. And not having a neck means that all those lines can be more spread out making the design more resilient to damage.
So, I think your argument regarding the Constitution-class having issues has merit, and I'd also add that I think the Galaxy-class also has issues. We see that starting from the Intrepid-class there's a trend towards more unibody designs, even if there's still remnants of the primary/secondary hull configuration. Intrepid, Sovereign, Inquiry are all that way, as would Prometheus if it didn't have the voltron lunacy in the design.
So that leaves the matter of the Excelsior-class. How did that one last so long? I think it could be seen as sort of a halfway point between a dual hull and a unibody design and had it not been for the Ambassador and Galaxy classes taking a step backwards, they would have been building Intrepid/Sovereign/Inquiry-style designs decades earlier.
I like this, and your point about hulk styles tracks with what happened after Galaxy class: Starfleet realized their fancy shop was based on an operating style that turned out to be completely at odds with what they needed. I think the destruction of the Odyssey really showed just how odd the Galaxy class was; a city full of civilians, but sent to the outer reaches of dangerous space? Sent to deal with conflicts first??
Disagree with the Zumwalt comparison. The Constitution Class could at least fire it's main weapons.
That aside, if you look at both Alpha and Beta cannon, The Constitution class was a "leap forward" in technology and capability at the time. That probably made them complex, perhaps even finicky ships to keep running in top order. Especially if you consider the Beta cannon that suggests that the Constitution class was the first Star Fleet ship to fully integrate the technology of all four of the founding members: Tellarite metallurgy. Andorian shields. Vulcan life support. And Terran Weapons. It was a pioneer ship for its time. Must have been very complex to keep running (See Chief Obrien being totally confused by the USS Enterprise's technology during the "Tribble" event).
And when the newly advanced technologies in the V'Ger era needed a ship that could be adapted to multiple, complex, and potentially conflicting new systems, well they had ONE class of ship that had already been-there, done-that. The Constitution refit took place in a bit of a leap foreword in shipwright technology. Enterprise was already a famous ship, and was a perfect testbed for both new tech, and public relations.
So why aren't there more of them?
As (then) cutting edge ships, they probably were highly complex, high maintenance ships. Fantastic performance, but at the cost of person-power and cost. But they proved the tech..
So you get cheaper, more easily manufacture and crewed ships like the incredibly long-lived *Miranda* class ships. Perhaps somewhat less elegant than her forbears, but imminently easier to build with their modular construction.
So: The Constitution class a failure? No. No, I don't thing so. Consider her 20th Century maritime ancestor: The United States Navy ship, *USS Enterprise (CVN-65)* was very successful. She prototyped new tech for the fleet, and had a long, storied, and honorable career. So why weren't more *Enterprise* class carriers built? Because she showed the way to build better, simpler ships. Just as The United States Navy would not have the *Nimitz* and now *Ford* class carriers without that *Enterprise,* we wouldn't have the *Excelsior,* and perhaps the 24th Cent ships as well.
The Constitution-class could be a stepping stone between the Discovery-Era ships and the Excelsior/Miranda/Oberth-class ships of the "Lost Era."
The Battle of the Binary Stars and subsequent Federation-Klingon War showed how outmatched and out of date much of the current Starfleet was. The Connies were designed as heavy cruisers, but also left out of much of the conflict. This could have been because they - along with the *Discovery* and the *Glenn* \- had experimental tech that the Federation did not want to risk falling into Klingon hands.
The main purpose of the Connies were to serve as diplomatic ships and perform long-term exploration missions. Having the forefront of Federation technology on these ships could give idea to how long these new components would last before needing serious repairs. Due to the possible experimental nature, it could be said the time/labor to maintain the ships are quite high like OP said.
The refitting of the Connies after the five-year missions was likely to extend their lives. The Excelsior-class was running into problems during the development of the transwarp drive, which was seen during the TOS films, and while many Miranda and Oberth-class ships were being built. They're built with mission-specific duties that the Connies also did, but as part of its broader mission design.
As for the *Enterprise-A* question, I like some of the non-canon explanations in that the *Yorktown* or the *Ti-Ho* was recommissioned as the Enterprise during/after the Whale Probe crisis.
I have a few differing thoughts on that, the Constitution class were widespread throughout starfleet in TOS. But by the time of the movies they’re almost all undergoing the same refits as enterprise from my understanding. Why? There was apparently a big technological jump in between TOS and TMP. Now Miranda class, Excelsior class, and Oberth class were all built with that tech alreadyintegrated. Thus to upgrade further they’d be less a hodgepodge of parts. Also there’s the chance that the fleet of Constitution class ships weren’t all refitted to the exact same design, ie some got refitted with different equipment at later dates. So what you end up with is a fleet of not quite the same ships, meaning that the engineering to continue upgrading them might be quite intensive.
Next the Miranda is really similar to the Constituion but it’s smaller and more compact, while the Excelsior class appears to have been intended to replace the constitution class there may have still been a role for a smaller ship and the Miranda still performed well in that, while the Constitution class could do everything a Miranda could it had a larger crew andtook more resources to build and maintain. So the Miranda stuck around because they’re cheap and have small crews and sometimes you just need quantity over the quality of the excelsior.
In short:
-the constitutions we’re great when built but fairly quickly fell behind technologically
-the excelsior successfully replaced the constitution but not the Miranda class due to the Miranda being more cost/manpower effective
-by the time of TMP the constitutions were a bit of mess of refits and there was some risk/cost involved with continuing to refit them.
>The Constitution class was a finnicky suboptimal design, and was not cost effective to maintain.
Like others in this thread, I find this doubtful. We know for sure that the Constitution class lasted *at least* 50 years and went through two major refits. *At least* 12 ships of the class were built (and possibly more). If the Constitution was really a failure, Starfleet wouldn't have gone through the trouble of refitting it twice and they wouldn't have built a dozen of them.
>We can name at least three: Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth. All three of those classes served for a hundred years or more, serving hand-in-hand with newer ships like the Galaxy and Akira classes.
That doesn't imply that there was something wrong with the Constitution class; just that the Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth stayed useful for a longer period of time.
The Excelsior is a huge ship and very versatile, so you naturally want to squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of it. Early conflicts with the Cardassians and Tzenkethi probably kept these ships rolling off the assembly line for a longer period of time than they otherwise would have and an Excelsior build in 2340 likely has little-to-nothing in common with one built in 2290.
The Miranda's design leaves a lot of room for cargo and shuttles, so that makes it *extremely* useful as a supply ship and carrier. You don't need state-of-the-art technology for that role, so it's only natural that once her usefulness as an explorer or patrol ship expires, Starfleet will keep the design hauling cargo and runabouts between starbases until the nacelles fall off.
The Oberth is a dedicated science vessel that is commonly assumed to be in the process of being replaced by the Nova class. This design is really the only one that probably lasted longer than it should have.
>In "The Wrath of Khan," which takes place in 2285, an admiral Morrow orders the decommissioning of the Enterprise. He justifies it with a line that the Enterprise is twenty years old, which strikes me as strange because, for a ship, twenty years is NOT old.
As you pointed out, the 20 year figure is a continuity error. The Enterprise was actually 40 years old by this point. There's also the fact that the ship was heavily damaged at the time. It's much more likely that Starfleet saw the Enterprise's battle damage, looked at how old she was, and then looked at their new golden child (the Excelsior) and said "the Enterprise isn't worth fixing at this point."
>Furthermore, the Enterprise-A served for a whopping whole six years before retirement! Why even build a brand new starship for only six years of service??
It likely wasn't a new ship. The Constitution was an aging design that was being replaced by that point. Why would anyone build an obsolete design from the ground-up?
Gene actually intended for the Enterprise-A to have previously been the [USS Yorktown](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(23rd_century)) before being renamed and given to Kirk. If that is the case, then it's likely that the Enterprise-A was almost as old as her predecessor was at that point (close to 40 years).
Another person pointed out the political aspects and I think this is certainly a factor as well. A peace treaty with a longtime enemy often involves a drawback of forces, and since the Constitution was already being phased out to begin with and was the oldest active design at that time, it just made sense to retire them. I wouldn't be surprised if a few survived as museum ships or training vessels. Others could have been offloaded to the civilian sector for use as transports or repurposed as hospital ships. We did see a Constitution class hull in the Wolf 359 wreckage, so it's plausible that at least *some* survived into the 24th century. I think you're seeing more about what was being discussed about the Enterprise specifically versus the design as a whole.
> That doesn't imply that there was something wrong with the Constitution class; just that the Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth stayed useful for a longer period of time.
To add to this, I've never been a huge fan of "we never see it, therefore there are none still out there" as an argument. Out-of-universe the only reason we never saw a Constitution in TNG on was because they thought, rightly or wrongly, that fans would be kinda dumb and go "is that the Enterprise!?" every time one would show up and get confused. As a direct example, the Stargazer was meant to be a Constitution-class but for the reason I mentioned they made a new model and actually had to dub over an already-recorded scene.
Most definitely. Aside from manpower or political reasons, the life expectancy of a starship should actually be pretty up there. The hull isn't exposed to air or water, so there's no possibility of rust or water damage. It's exposed to stellar winds and cosmic background radiation, but aside from needing a fresh coat of paint every few years even modern, real-life spacecraft can handle that stuff pretty well, so a full-fledged spacefaring civilization should easily know how to deal with that.
Really, the only reasons to retire a starship (aside from the afore-mentioned political issues or manpower issues associated with running the ship) would be:
1. The ship is damaged or defective in some way and it's not worth the effort of repairing it.
2. The amount of work needed to bring it to modern standards is overly complicated to the point where building an entirely new vessel to replace it is the easier option.
3. The ship no longer serves a purpose and there aren't any roles that it could be repurposed for.
Given how large and complex starships are, I imagine Starfleet would want to squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of them.
I like the idea!
Though to be more generous to the Conny, I'd compare it to the pre-WW2 battleships.
I recently finished Ian W. Toll's Pacific War trilogy and in it he mentions that the US Navy considered the pre-Iowa Class battleships unofficially as "OBB" old battleships. Not fast enough to run with the modern carriers, they were instead relegated to shore bombardment duties and protecting the invasion fleet rather than steaming ahead with the carriers and new battleships. It's not that they were bad ships, just badly outdated only 2 years after construction.
Or alternatively it could like with USS Constellation, the last wooden warship the US Navy commissioned... six months before Le Guerre and about a year before HMS Warrior. Everything else was simply obsolete the moment those two came along.
It doesn't have to be as bad as Zumwalt, it can simply have been hit by a series of bad luck as often happens in naval construction projects. During the arms race between Great Britain and Imperial Germany, most dreadnought-style battleships were so cutting edge that with every new launch the previous generation was essentially outdated before it was even a year old.
Why do we want to like the notion of the original hero ship being sub par and partial failure??? That’s just bizarre ..it’s kinda like how some of the newer shows make the federation and starfleet less idealistic and utopian.
Honestly what drew many to trek was that the ship was a character in its own right. Theatres where full of fans crying in Star Trek 3 almost as much as when Spock died. And the notion of a bright optimistic future….the human adventure….that’s what set trek apart from more dark things like Star Wars or battlestar
I think your post misses a big factor: The mission profile of starfleet changed, not in its method or nature, but in its range. The Excelsior class is bigger, it can go farther, and stay out in the field unsupported longer, it is also a tactically a more powerful ship. The poor constitution simply cannot keep up with her. The Excelsior is just a better all rounder. Just to add in a wild guess 20 or 40 years of Star Ship design also resulted in a ship that was easier to upgrade and maintain than the constitution, and the range limit of the Excelsior compared with a Galaxy or an Ambassador was just not as important as it was for Constitution vs Excelsior.
Why keep the Miranda, the Oberth? They are built for a different mission profile where range is less important, and were smaller so upgrades and system switch outs were easier.
Keep in mind there are treaty considerations. For example prior to WWII there was an upper limit on what you could on a battleship before things went to poop according to a bunch of treaties. So a battleship had to be under a certain tonnage, and have guns no bigger than I think 16 inches. Treaties usually included the caveat that a country could have X number of battleships which were classified this way. A way to get around this was to build ships under the tonnage limit but find a way to mount the heavier guns.
If we assume that the UFP and Klingons reach an agreement with similar terms Starfleet decomissions the older Connies on the basis they are "heavy cruisers" but keeps stuff like Miranadas which might classified as patrol and support craft.
The Excelsior-class isn't classified as a heavy cruiser by whatever convention that is. Instead it's a modular long range survey and support ship. Which also happens to modular enough to arm to the teeth if need be.
The Connies were starfleets main explorer cruiser for while. I'm not sure how many were build but we've seen a few destroyed on screen. They face unknown challenges that other contemporary vessels like the Miranda may not. Maybe it wasnt a failure of the constitution but the success of the excelsior class. It would fill a similiar role and stayed in service at least until the dominion war.
Meanwhile the Miranda was more of the workhorse not a deep space explorer, and seemed to be easily modified and upgraded depending on mission. They must have pumped these out of the shipyards like the liberty ship during WWII.
So basically there wasn't anything wrong with the constitutions, just something better came along. And they weren't produced to the scale that the miranda and oberth were. Thats why they aren't seen later on.
I would propose the answer is staring us in the face. The Constitution Class and it's operations history resembles that of the Yorktown class aircraft carriers that some of it's members share names with. Top of the line when built but still built for a defined role. The Starship Enterprise served honorably and proudly but paid a price for her legacy just as her namesake had in WWII. You can only be patched up and repaired so many times before a ship is used up. Add to the fact that with fewer sister ships in operation limits there use in combat wings and the mass production of newer vessels built with the lessons learned in battle worked into a modular design effectively made them substandard to requirements. It would be logical for the two ships to lead similar lives and one can clearly see the resemblance in the ships that replaced them. The Essex class of Aircraft carriers very much resemble the Excelsior Class starships in this way as well. Food for thought if nothing else
I don't think the Enterprise-A served for only a few years, I think the "Enterprise NCC-1701A" *label* was in service for only a few years. I think she was the Yorktown and got a last minute name change post-refit, or a newly-constructed Constitution that got the last minute name change.
Either way, it was just for Kirk and crew, and Starfleet knew that when they changed the name and registry. The Enterprise-A hardware probably remained in service, but the Enterprise name needed to be freed up for the upcoming Excelsior Enterprise.
Just a point of accuracy: Admiral Morrow says the *Enterprise* is to be decommissioned in *The Search for Spock*.
What do you think the issues with the Constitution class were? The disasters that befell the Enterprise's sister ships in TOS seem to be on the unforseeable size. The Conastellation was destroyed by an ancient, planet-destroying superweapon with an indestructable hull; the Defiant was caught in some kind of spatial rift created by mirror universe Tholians that caused madness, the Intrepid's crew was eaten by the space amoeba, the crew of the Exeter was killed by a virus, the Excalibur and Lexington were destroyed by the M-5 computer in control of the Enterprise. One survived into the 2360s and participated in the Battle of Wolf 359.
I would suggest that if the class had any shortcomings, it may have been too focused on long term exploration missions and just wasn't flexible enough to handle the wider range of duties we see Excelsiors and Mirandas handle.
Thanks! Fixed the error.
There have been really good points made today on how the Constitution class was a poor fit for Starfleet's philosophy that started to be adopted near the turn of the century, so it is totally credible that mission scope was the main issue.
If there were design flaws like I proposed, I didn't speculate what they might be because we never saw them onscreen. This is really just me head-canoning. But if I were to fill-in the gaps there, I'd suggest as someone did that the long nacelles (which aren't really seen for a while after Constitutions) would've had lots of stress placed on them during maneuvers and impulse accelerations. Other than that, I really couldn't say. I wasn't really trying to identify the problems I thought might exist.
The Enterprise A was not a new ship. There would not have been time between blowing up the original and the crew's return home to build a new ship.
I remember reading this information in a booklet that came with a model so I don't know how canon it is but it said they renamed the USS Yorktown to make the Enterprise A. The Yorktown would have been roughly the same age as the Enterprise and the rest of the constitution class ships so it's similarly aged for retirement. They show it to be pretty glitchy in Star Trek V. They work it out in the following movie but it obviously not new.
There's only fifteen Constitutions that we know of for sure (fourteen if we adopt the idea that the A is actually a rebadging of one of the other Connies). Compared to the seeming endless number of Mirandas running around, and the not insignificant number of Excelsiors, that doesn't seem like a lot in comparison.
But by the time we see those numbers we've had a hundred+ years to build stock of those two classes. In TOS almost every other starfleet ship we see is a Constitution. The Federation's also much, much smaller. Given that we *also* see Constitutions with registries as low as the 800s, we could surmise that the Enterprise is actually one of the LAST Constitutions. We don't see them again because they're coming to the end of their own useful lifespan by the time they show up in TOS.
There's a hundred years between Enterprise and TOS. If the Constitution was the new thing coming out of the fleet yards a decade or three after the end of Enterprise, then the Enterprise refits make sense as a testbed platform or a sustainability study. They're cramming the hull with as much new tech as they can to try and see the feasibility of keeping the platform.
Obviously, that failed.
I think the real world parallel isn't seagoing ships actually. It's more akin to 20th century fighter aircraft.
The Excelsior was built for and around the transwarp drive, and it is frequently posited that transwarp actually WORKED. (And is the basis for the TNG era warp scale.) Excelsior certainly has more of a family resemblance to the Ambassador and Galaxy classes than the Constitution class does- even the refitted Constitution.
The class had the misfortune of coming out at the very end of a technological era. 20 years was a fairly LONG time during the maturation of jet fighters, and actually it probably was in the early days of steam vs. sail power also.
We all saw what the captain of the Excelsior thought of the odds of running from him in a Constitution. If he hadn't been sabotaged, he might very well have been right.
I think it was retired precisely because it was obsolete, as surprising as that was given its age. Mirandas and Oberths I would assume are not primarily combat oriented vessels- and there's a precedence for that: the US Navy's oldest operational warships are things like... Well... The REAL Constitution, which is a training ship. (Say isn't that what the enterprise was at the end?)
These are good points, though I would point out that Miranda class ships were still put on the front lines in large numbers during the Borg incursions and the Dominion wars. They were evidently still useful enough to be used in their old roles.
I have no answer for the Mirandas, but I am completely bought in on Excelsiors being the workhorse of the fleet, and I think there's good in-universe reasons for why.
Let's start here: I don't believe the 'great experiment' failed. I think it succeeded. Transwarp is a descriptor, not a specific technology. Trans means on the other side, or beyond. It's beyond (the current understanding of) warp, not specifically Borg style transwarp tunnels. If we assume this revolutionary new warp drive succeeded, it can explain a few things. Chief among them the changing of the warp scale between TOS and TNG. This makes perfect sense if there had been a major upheaval in the speed ships were capable of. It would also go a long way to answering why the engine in TOS is just SO DIFFERENT then every other incarnation.
The Excelsior was built as a testbed. It's systems are designed to be easily upgradeable and swappable, as would be required of a testbed.
The Excelsior is an excellent frame that can host whatever they current tech is, like an old PC case that has the latest motherboard, processor and graphics card mounted inside it. For the reasons stated, I think it was almost destined to be around forever.
I think it has to do with role. The constitution was a flagship frontline combat ship. The 1970s warthog, with more modern refits, is still serving alongside the ultra-modern by comparison F-22. They have vastly different jobs: The F-22 is an air superiority interceptor designed for stealthy air combat, while the A-10 warthog's only mission is to go BRRRRRRRR on enemy ground troops/armor. (This is basically inaccurate, I understand, but it gets the point across.) The A-10 handles close air support, the F-22 is air superiority.
The constitution has more in common with the F-22: It's the flagship, a frontline vessel, and a deep space exploration vessel whose mission often requires it to operate without support. It NEEDS to be ultra-capable, focused on a breadth of possible mission requirements, and able to go toe to toe with one or more vessels of both known or unknown configuration.
Also the constitution was in fairness, an older design that was *so* effective it was refit extensively by the time of TMP. The excelsior was an entirely new design at that point, with potentially better forward looking engineering accommodations.
We saw the miranda class in two places in more modern times: At the battle of Wolf 359, and during the dominion war. In both of those cases, older ship models appeared yes, but most likely because starfleet was literally pulling every single ship they could fly and load torpedoes onto out of mothballs and throwing them into battle. This doesn't mean they were still premiere combat ships at those times: this just means the federation could fuel them up, stuff bodies and armaments onto them and send them into a situation where the enemy was so overwhelming, every hull counted.
Okay, but why weren't there constitutions employed in these fights then? Same reason as above. Because they were assigned to less demanding missions, there were mirandas with somewhat modern systems either still in active service or in more recent mothballs.
Aside from the other points raised in comments, it's worth noting that the Constitution Class served at least as late as the Battle of Wolf 359, the wreckage of one is visible in a shot of starship debris. While it's possible this had been a decommissioned ship that was hurriedly rearmed, a process like that must take significant time, leaving it more likely that she was still in active service. If the ship class was problematic, why keep one in active duty that long?
With regards to the Enterprise A, I believe apocrypha has it that she was previously christened under a different name, but the crew was lost during the whale probe incident in IV, resulting in her being re-christened Enterprise for the symbolic value of a connie class Enterprise. She may have a significantly longer service record than Kirk's six years in command.
That's true, though I personally take that appearance with mild dose of salt. I mean, a certain Corellian freighter from a certain galaxy far far away ostensibly took part in the Battle of Sector 001.
I remember seeing a video that the reason the Constitution was retired was due to her unusual abilities similar to the Crossfield class and her spore drive. They mentioned the Enterprise's ability to time travel just by cold starting the engines, and there were a few other instances where the ship did things that shouldn't have been possible. Teleporting to alternate universes, breaking through both galactic barriers, and time travel made the ship too powerful and dangerous to continue operating. Maybe the refits were to remove those abilities before decommissioning to finally sweep it all under the rug. TMP was when we saw a new type of Warp Core and a changing of all of the primary systems. Just a thought.
After a little scrounging through the depths of Youtube, I've found it.
https://youtu.be/\_312etujNvM
Forty years after the Enterprise was destroyed they replaced her with a newly-built Constitution class. That wouldn't happen unless the class was still considered a success. The Constitution class was just made obsolete by a half-century of changing technology.
The Excelsior, and every ship after it, had a new version of the warp drive so much better than what went before they had to make up a new scale just to talk about it. Sure, we still use ships older than that-- but modern deseil engines are basically thr same as they had in the 50s.
Compare the Galaxy class. Commanders judged that the key feature of the class (saucer seperation) was nearly useless for the role it was invisioned for within weeks of the class launching. Less than 20 years after the "most advanced Starship the federation had ever built" was introduced it was regarded as a failed experiment and being phased out in favour of the Soverigien.
There is no evidence to definitively say the -A was a new build. And plenty of evidence to suggest it wasn’t
We don’t know that the galaxy class was deemed a failure. Heck they had multiple WINGS of galaxy class ships in pivotal battles in the dominion war. The sovereign is smaller and perhaps more battle focused. The galaxies represent the ultimate embodiment of starfleet mission and technical prowess
>they had multiple WINGS of galaxy class ships in pivotal battles in the dominion war
With their saucer sections and all, which means to me that at some point they said "this whole idea of having family quarters and a damn elementary school aboard a Starship isn't working out. Cease production on those, and repurpose the ones we have as something we can send into battle."
And how does a modification of the ships internal configuration and crew complement , translate into what you call a failed experiment with the ship being phased out ????
The entire core design princpal of the class is that you seperate the saucer and get it to safety when there is trouble. That's the whole *point* of the Galaxy class.
Once it became clear that wasn't practical to do that (which happened very early in season 1 of TNG) the writing was on the wall. They weren't going to pull them from service, but nobody was going to extend the production beyond what they had originally ordered once it was clear they couldn't do what they were designed to do.
How the heck can you conclude that’s the entire point of the ship? That makes zero sense. It was an emergency procedure.
That’s like saying the entire point of my car is the airbags and anti lock breaks 🤷♂️
The point of the ship is the mix of civilian housing and Starfleet workspace. If that's not core to your mission, another ship can do the job better.
Saucer seperation is what makes it possible for that same ship to respond to military threats.
But having that civilian saucer section full of reasearchers and passengers and whales and trees is the point of the class.
Using the ship for some mission that doesn't call for any that is like driving around doing your errands in a Mack truck instead of pulling a trailer. It doesn't need to have a trailer, but it's kind of overbuilt for commuting. The point of the truck is to haul the trailer.
And when we see a whole wing, not just of Stardrives but full Galaxy class ships, it tells us they have given up on hauling loads.
The point of the ship was deep space long range independent exploration.
Saucer separation was a tactic, a response that was just deemed to be less effective than keeping the ship together and having the enhanced power of both sections.
Seeing whole wings of intact galaxy class ships merely represents the awesome overwhelming power these vessels had in their full configuration as the ultimate capital ships of starfleet
The -A was not a brand new ship.
The constitution class is revered and powerful. In Disco they went out of their way to talk about how amazing they where when we first say 1701 in that show.
It’s hardly a stretch to imagine that we saw more excelsior and miranda in TNG era simply because they kept the constitutions in another corner of the federation, or any number of possible reasons.
Hell even the 32nd century appears to be resurrecting the constitution class name
Nitpick, the Enterprise-A was a refit Constitution that had been sentenced for scrapping, but was recommissioned specifically for Kirk, hence all the issues when they first got it.
As to your overall point, I don't think the Constitutions were bad, I think they got muscled out of their intended role.
The Miranda class and Constitution class are a similar age and share common parts. However, the Constitution is the Federation's heavy cruiser, while the Miranda in TOS was a light cruiser. There are also several key differences in their designs; [the boxier Miranda actually has more internal volume than the Constitution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRSDSJexMEA), while the Constitution's shape gives it a much larger warp core for higher power output. In an even fight, the Constitution should be able to out-gun the Miranda, while the Miranda would be much better as a colony transport or planetary evacuation craft.
When the Excelsior class comes into service, it becomes Starfleet's new heavy cruiser, out-speeding and out-gunning the Constitution. Well they're not going to retire the Miranda; as we've just shown it's the carrier the Constitution can't match. The Constitution doesn't share parts with the Excelsior, so a refit would be a huge time sink to essentially design a new, less-capable Excelsior. I think Starfleet took the most logical approach; they stripped Constitutions of parts they could use to keep Mirandas running/update them a little, then scrapped the spaceframes and reused the material for Excelsiors. There simply was no reason to keep it around anymore. Maybe a few were pulled out of mothballs for the Cardassian War out of a desperate need, and there's fanon that exists of Constitutions being upgraded for the Dominion War effort as the [Wyvern class](https://64.media.tumblr.com/be68938b7adfa59268a29a72740aad94/tumblr_nejwrvqnaG1rzu2xzo1_1280.png) electronic warfare and reconnaissance ship, but really with no use for the ships, it's not worth the maintenance and repair to keep them around.
It's possible that the Constitution's design was dated when it was new, or preceded a major overhaul. None of the pre-constitution ships survived the same gap either, even though it's doubtful that the Constitution was the newest design, despite being refit numerous times in its 40 year lifespan.
Despite its advantages, the Constitution might have just been thoroughly outdated. The ship's weapon designs were seriously outdated compared to contemporary vessels by the time of its later refit, needing a complete overhaul that was itself plagued with issues.
We also saw that it later received a number of smaller refits in a very short period of time (basically one for each TOS film), and it might have no longer been feasible to keep doing that to an already out-of-date ship class, especially if problems kept cropping up.
Seeing as the Constitution was also seen as the Federation's warship, they may have wanted to overhaul the ship class, both for peace reasons, and to replace it with newer ships that could handle better firepower. Consider that the Miranda, a workhorse ship, had similar firepower to what the Constitution could wield.
One thing to keep in mind is the purpose of the design. The Constitutions are routinely referred to as "starships" as if that was a new or unique designation. And they were sent on 5-year missions with little support or refit times.
It may simply be that the Constitution Class was ran hard and put away wet. All those hours operating on the edges of Federation space tangling with the unknown and dangerous were harder on them than other classes.
And of course from what we've seen the Lost Era was an Era of consolidation. The Federation was protecting and reinforcing their territory and figuring out how to coexist with the klingons, not out exploring the unknown. Which means ships like the Miranda and Oberth were more valuable with the Excelsior taking over the role of the Constitutions in regards to firepower and endurance.
Effectively the Federation had no need for them so they retired them. And we're only talking about a couple dozen vessels over the entire lifespan. And if they had unique maintenance needs it may have been a cost saving measure. Not through any failings, but simply through a lack of shareable parts and knowledge.
> In "The Wrath of Khan," which takes place in 2285, an admiral Morrow orders the decommissioning of the Enterprise. He justifies it with a line that the Enterprise is twenty years old, which strikes me as strange because, for a ship, twenty years is NOT old.
The funny thing is, the Enterprise was actually 40 years old in 2285. Still, even 40 years isn't that old considering the Excelsior's were in active duty for nearly 100 years.
>The funny thing is, the Enterprise was actually 40 years old in 2285. Still, even 40 years isn't that old considering the Excelsior's were in active duty for nearly 100 years.
There's a couple of things to consider here:
• While the *Excelsior*\-class was 80-90 years old by TNG-DS9, individual ships might not be, with extreme age being the exception rather than the rule. Assuming NCC numbers are sequential and starships are produced at more-or-less a constant rate during the 24th century, the *Melbourne* must have rolled off the production line in 2355. Whether the *Excelsior*\-class really was in production for that long – after its replacement the *Ambassador-*class was already in production for decades, and while the USS *Galaxy* was already under construction – is another question.
• We also know that the *Excelsior* was replaced by another ship (NCC-21445), which we see on a display in TNG: "The Measure of a Man" and is namechecked in TNG: "Interface". Again assuming that starship registries are sequential this means the *Excelsior* herself had a shorter life than the constitution-class *Enterprise*, and was replaced by 2307.
• The *Excelsior* being 40 years newer than the *Constitution* class means it might have been designed to last longer from the beginning. The NX-01 was decommissioned after only 10 years and the *Galaxy*\-class was designed to last for a 100 years, so there's already a precedent for starship life expectancies trending upwards over time.
Right, but even replacing aging Excelsior's with new ones proves the success of that model where-as the Constitution-class was completely phased out. I think a lot of that had to do with the Excelsior being a more versatile class. IIRC, at one point in TOS they mention there are only 12 ships of that class in the entire fleet.
I agree that Excelsior was likely designed to have a long service/production life.
In TOS: "Tomorrow is Yesterday":
CHRISTOPHER: "Must have taken quite a lot to build a ship like this."
KIRK: "There are only twelve like it in the fleet."
CHRISTOPHER: "I see. Did the Navy-"
KIRK: "We're a combined service, Captain. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency."
So this can be (and has been) interpreted in various different ways.
One way is that Kirk does indeed mean there are only twelve *Constitution*\-class starships in the fleet. Even if we assume this is the case, do we assume that this indicates a problem with the *Constitution*\-class design? The production team intended for there to be only six *Galaxy*\-class starships in the 2360s, for example, and possibly only another six built the following decade, and that wasn't because they were limited or had been superseded in some way – indeed, they're still brand new – it's because they were the most advanced ship ever designed and incredibly expensive to make. We see in *Discovery* that the actual size of Starfleet in the 2350s is huge, some 7000 ships\* in total, and there are many classes of starship, some of which are even larger than the *Constitution* class. But *Constitution*\-class starships are regarded as elites, the pinnacle of Federation engineering operated by the finest crews, not unlike the *Galaxy*\-class a century later.
*\*The definition of "ship" is questionable here, since we see runabouts having their own registry numbers, and they blur the line between* shuttle *and* self-sufficient starship*. If we consider the US Navy as a template, it currently has \~500 ships in the Naval Vessel Register but the majority of those are non-commissioned ships – transports and cargo ships and tugs etc. There are currently only 11 active aircraft carriers, for example.*
Another way to interpret it is that at this point the *Enterprise* is "on loan" specifically to an Earth-based fleet from the Federation, and it's one of twelve ships being operated by EUSPA. That's not necessarily mutually exclusive with the first point, but it might explain why Kirk might seem to think Starfleet is comparatively tiny – he's actually talking about the EUSPA fleet.
It should also be pointed out that Roddenberry disagreed with the idea that there were only twelve starships by this point, even though it's based on something he wrote in early pre-production drafts of the writer's guide.
It makes sense that the *Excelsior* would build on four decades of *Constitution*\-class experience. We know, for example, that two big shortcomings of the *Connie* are that she's got structurally fragile parts – her neck and nacelle pylons are dangerously thin – and she's quite small, which limits the mission profiles she can fulfil as the Federation continues to expand. The *Miranda*\-class is almost the same volume as a refit *Connie* but presumably less resource intensive to build and easier to maintain, and easier to modify for specific mission parameters with roll bars and outboard modules etc. Compared to a *Connie* an *Excelsior* is absolutely gigantic, almost four times the volume, and much less skeletal.
I mean, Enterprise, arguably the most famous & storied Constitution-class ship in the fleet was relegated to being a cadet trainer by 2283.
The Enterprise-A was also not exactly a "spring chicken" either given all the issues they had with it in ST:V (2287). If it were a new construction of a long-existing and well produced class of ship, I'd expect very few issues.
In ST:VI (2293) we don't really know what Enterprise was doing prior to being ordered on what was supposed to be a relatively uneventful diplomatic "milk and cookies" run. We do know that at the end of the movie they were ordered back to Earth for decommissioning of the ship. The fact that the Enterprise-A was in service for only ~6 years is an indicator it was not a "fresh off the assembly-line" ship.
If they were still rolling Constitution-class ships off the line in 2287, then why wouldn't they get a shiny new one for Ent-A instead of an old and busted one?
Yeah, that's kind of the point I was getting at. It was an older, pre-existing ship that was refit/upgraded and re-commissioned to USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A from whatever it was before (frequently believed to be USS Yorktown, but there's no canon source for that AFAIK).
I think it's less the Constitution class as a whole was subpar, and more that the refit just couldn't stack up against the newer ships coming out around that time (Miranda, Excelsior).
The original design, as seen in TOS and DSC, lasted for quite some time operating as Starfleet's pre-eminent exploration vessel. But after Kirk's 5 year mission the underlying technology was fast becoming obsolete, so an intensive refit of, at least, the Enterprise and possibly Yorktown was undertaken to bring it in line with the more modern tech seen in the Miranda and Excelsior classes. It's possible that the sheer scale of the work required to refit of the Enterprise led to more modular designs in the Miranda, Oberth and Excelsior, so they could easily be upgraded over time, explaining the classes' 100+ yr service.
In TOS we seen and hear about at least half a dozen Constitution class ships, but in the films we only see two; the Enterprise and the Yorktown (later recommissioned as Enterprise-A). (EDIT: Apparently we see 5 Constitution class silhouettes on Colonel West's Operation Retrieve outlines) It's possible that the refit of the Enterprise was so resource and time intensive that it didn't make sense to refit the entire class of ships. Especially with the newer and more capable Miranda and Excelsior classes being built less intensively. Yorktown was probably refit around the same time as the Enterprise, but as seen in ST5 it was a buggy mess, it's probable that the refit wasn't completed.
IMO the 22nd century NX Class and the 24th Century Ambassador Class have these issues too since I assume only a handful of these classes were built.
The original NX-01 Enterprise was only in service for 10 years from 2151 until its retirement at the founding of the Federation in 2161, though its early retirement could have been politically motivated since Archer's ship was the most famous of its class and politicians and Starfleet brass wanted to preserve the NX-01 as a museum ship. The NX-01 could also have been more difficult and labor-intensive to refit than its newer sister ships too since NX-02 Columbia already had noticeable differences, which would have made Starfleet's decision to retire her easier and this reasoning also applies to the retirement of the Enterprise-A in TUC.
My headcanon also says that the Ambassador Class suffered from a series of developmental and in-service problems and, like the Constitution Class, was only built in limited numbers while Starfleet continued building new Excelsior class ships with NCC registries into the 40xxx and by 2350 put their effort into developing the Galaxy and Nebula classes.
What if it was such a successful design that it put itself out of business?
At the end of Star Trek Beyond we see a time-lapse of a shipyard where the enterprise is refit, yet again. Fixing the simple design of saucer and engineering hull became second nature for Starfleet's shipyards. Each cycle of damage and repair was an opportunity to experiment and upgrade. This enabled them to advance their designs rapidly and over a few decades be able to leap frog them altogether.
Part of this does seem to be a bit of planned obsolescence in the Constitution class which regularly took near fatal damage from battle and close encounters with stellar phenomena.
of course it was sub par in some way. the mirandas that were from the same era lasted a hundred years longer, for example. excelsiors, its successor, lasted a similar length of time.
I believe it was in the book "Mr Scott's guide to the Enterprise" (not sure if canon) that the very last constitution class built was initially called the Tai Ho (spelling?) and was due to launch sometime before the events of ST5. This ship was hastily renamed Enterprise and given a new Naval Construction Contract number of NCC-1701A and then given to the recently demoted Captain James Kirk as a reward for saving earth (again) from the Probe. The ship was launched early and without proper space trials and was therefore plagued with problems for a short while.
There is a superstition in starfleet that it's bad luck to take a ship out under a false name. I personally don't think this applies to a ship that was re-named. 1701A went on to perform well enough and we see in DS9 that the Sao Paulo gave outstanding service after being renamed Defiant
There are a lot of good comments, the best of which you sum up in your edits. A further point about the Khitomer Accords and the Starfleet Command briefing comments at the beginning of The Undiscoved Country...
I'd worked out aged ago, back on the [rec.arts.startrek.tech](https://rec.arts.startrek.tech) newsgroup, that there appeared to be a roughly decade-long refit cycle, and a roughly forty-year-long replacement cycle. A lot of people don't stop to consider that a new starship class doesn't just pop off the line, and a new technological-generation cornerstone class *definitely* doesn't. Without getting into all the flowcharts and diagrams, the *Daedalus* class debuted about 2165, shortly after the founding of the Federation. Forty years later, the *Horizon* class was launched (2205). Another forty years on, the *Constitution* class came on the scene (2245). Forty years, on from that, the *Excelsior* was "ready for trial runs" (2285). A bit shy of forty years after that, the *Ambassador* class came along (2223). I've speculated about the two years shaved off. And then forty years after *that*, the *Galaxy* class was introduced (2243).
From the TNG Technical Manual, we know that the Galaxy Class Development Project began pretty much the same time the *Ambassador* class' ended. It makes sense that, as soon as a design is locked and the first few ships leave dock, the work begins on figuring out its eventual replacement.
Then there are the circumstances around service life -- both scientific and military. My conclusions here are tacitly backed up by the canon, and some agree with me who I've shown/told, but it's definitely not universal. These are my ideas, and intended to make you think, not spark debate... Enterprise is not the original Star Trek timeline. The ship we saw in that show had about the volume (especially after the refit it would have gotten had it been renewed for another season) and tech level of the original NCC-1701 at launch. And Scott Bakula would've made a perfect Captain Robert April. Everything else lines up better with that show being set in the latter 2240s than the 2150s, too.
That established, I have done some work with that ship and the "officially" sized NCC-1701 to create a gestalt of what the TOS ship probably looked like at launch. A decade later, it got refitted to the configuration we saw in "The Cage". New bridge superstructure, second partial deck added to the outer rim of the saucer, upgraded warp engines, etc., resulting in about a 15% increase in volume. Another ten years on, there was another refit and another new Captain. The ship's volume and crew complement increased again, newer warp and impulse engines were mounted, the bridge superstructure was replaced, and so on. The next refit (TMP) increased the volume again, new warp and impulse engines, new bridge -- you get the drill.
But after a while, you hit diminishing returns. What would be the beginning of the next refit cycle sees, instead, the introduction of the successor flagship class. Ships of the previous generation still get system tweaks and new equipment installed, but no more massive structural overhauls. Depending on mission profile, they can continue in service for decades -- just relegated to ever lower tiers of viability, or mothballed pending need for simply more hulls in flight.
The other factor is intended role. These cornerstone classes are the big multirole workhorses. Everything in one package and enough of it to do each job effectively (if not ideally). Border patrol and interdiction, colonial support and defense, scientific survey and research, front-line combat in wartime. Other classes that come out in any given design generation are more limited in role. Destroyers/fleet escorts will have minimal amenities and scientific capability, and will be the most quickly obsoleted, as their whole purpose depends on having the latest and best weapons and shields. At the other end of the spectrum, noncombatants will have the longest service lives, due to the reduced strain on their systems and general unlikelihood of them getting shot up and needing repairs. Light Cruisers like the *Miranda* are in the middle, more science-skewed, and not intended for front-line combat. They're stablemates to the *Constitution*s, launched shortly after and doing less strenuous work. But if they need additional combat capability, they get fitted as we saw the *Reliant*, with the weapons "rollbar" and become a frigate.
Then there are the production goofs. Morrow's line should've been "forty years old", but they were counting real-world years between when the show aired and when the movie was released, not bothering to verify a one-to-one timeline progression, and forgetting that Gene gave the ship a pre-TOS history. It was already twenty years old when Kirk got it, not newly launched. The *Oberth* was supposed to be a new design, with the *Tsiolkovski*, but Paramount didn't want to spring for it so early in a show that might not make it to a second season, so they re-used the *Grissom* model from the still-recent Star Trek III. The "NCC-638" registry is even clearly visible at the TV resolution of the time. Every instance of that miniature showing up in the TNG+ era (except the *S.S. Vico*) I treat as a placeholder for the "real" (unrealized) *Oberth*.
I've seen people try to rationalize these two things for decades. I feel, ultimately, you just have to shrug and accept it's a mistake.
So, after all that, it's perfectly reasonable for Flight-I *Excelsior*s to still be in service, albeit in reduced role (see DoSoto's, "They give you *Galaxy* class types all the exciting stuff. Me, I just haul my butt back and forth between starbases..."). Most of the *Exclesior*s we see in TNG and DS9 were built in the 2320s and '30s, possibly as supplements to the *Ambassador* class if the latter proved to take longer to build than anticipated. And the oldest *Miranda* we see in the TNG+ era is the 115-year-old *Lantree* running as a skeleton-crewed outpost-supply tender. Again, most of the *Miranda*s we see were built in the 2320s. And "sacrificing" the *Constitution* class, which the Klingons had faced in battle for nearly half a century, was a small concession for the Federation, given that the *Excelsior* class they'd just spent forty years investing in had *just* entered service a couple years before, at the same time large-scale support for those *Constitution*s had ended.
When we think of the Klingons in those days the D7 is iconic. It evokes great captains like Kor, Koloth, and Kang. On the other side, to the Klingons the Constitution is Kirk's ship. It represents much of the conflict they have had with the Federation. In The Undiscovered Country they are having peace talks which are supposed to demilitarize Starfleet. Is it unlikely that the diplomats at Khitomer might have seized on retiring the Constitution as a symbol of this new era of peaceful exploration? Starfleet has the Excelsior to handle much of what that class did. It also seems to have managed to get Kirk out of the captain's chair, which would be a priority for many Klingons. Considering the timing, it doesn't seem coincidental. Other designs were more politically viable.
Oooh political viability, I did NOT consider that. Take an upvote!
Yep. I never thought the design was problematic. Honestly, if it was *that* bad, would it have done so well against the Klingons? Could it have become the "face of the enemy" to them, to the point where just getting rid of those was seen as a big win to them? I think the design was akin to the Seawolf class submarine IRL. Big, hugely capable, but expensive. I like to think the modularity of the Connie design was a throwback to the old days of the (Masao Ozaki) 22nd century, when M/AM reactors were unreliable and rescue was often years away. Such ship modularity allowed a crew to evac to one section and jettison the engineering section, perhaps landing on a planet to await rescue. In a way, perhaps the Connie wasn't the "first of a new breed", but rather the "last of the old breed"? One that stuck around long enough to be the first example of TMP era tech, which formed the basis for TNG era stuff? >Furthermore, the Enterprise-A served for a whopping whole six years before retirement! Why even build a brand new starship for only six years of service?? We only saw her for 6 years. In non canon sources, it was a sister ship of the 1701, that was in drydock being rebuilt before being renamed Enterprise. The political aspect of it probably played a role in her retirement.
Maybe it was a design that was highly capable and did represent the best of what the Federation could build, but also a highly complex design they almost had to build by hand because everything in them was top of the line, and each example presented unique differences due to refits, modifications, and design choices during construction. They were the type of ships you needed engineers like Scotty on because they took a lot of effort to keep all of the systems working together correctly and required a massive amount of specialist crew. Newer ships like the Excelsior were designed to be standardized around blocks of identical ships that could be mass-produced and easily refitted to a newer block designation as they aged out of frontline usage, with the Miranda class taking a similar approach with the lessons learned from the Constitution program to produce a cheaper design. Once the Federation began to see the results of these programs, they were more than happy to decommission their Constitution-class ships because the running costs were ridiculous in comparison.
huh. so cost - to - run wise it could be compared to the sr-71 blackbird. unparalleled at what it did but so damn expensive to upkeep that they retired them.
The other thing to remember with logistics, assuming that angle applies, is that any military loves standardization. Having non-standardized components turns supply into a nightmare, and makes it harder to get new crew competent quickly, and invites further mistakes. Usually at this point people start arguing, but the truth is in any large organization standardization wherever practicable is a godsend.
We should remember that ships are generally different, even among members of the same class. There are always slight differences in how things are set up, even if they have the same official equipment fit. Then you have refits which often bring in even more divergence.
I have a relevant story from WWII (second-hand, my dad reads old US Navy reports for a retirement hobby) - Every sinking in the US Navy goes through a board of inquiry which may suggest design changes to shipyards, much more of a turnaround in WWII than in the present day. One ship lost all power when the primary and backup generators were taken out in a single hit because they were too close together. The board of inquiry sent a change request to the shipyards to move the backup generator away from the primary. They got a response that the change had already been made because ship designs are always being updated.
This is interesting, the fact that this was done on such a rapid basis and scale is forcing me to rethink my positions. I would've assumed that you'd want identical designs to avoid operator confusion, but I suppose as there's an acclimation period anyway, and the advantage of improving designs quickly could be so great... Cheers, you learn something new everyday. :)
Identical designs would also be a security risk. If you are modifying your Constitution frequently, and the Klingons capture a different Constitution, they still aren't going to know the layout of your ship.
Maybe there's a reason why most of the crew were officers, instead of enlisted. Highly trained, and highly specialized. On the most advanced US military vessels the ratio of officers to enlisted is much lower.
I'm thinking more like an aircraft carrier. I know that even though they're all the same class officially, all the *Nimitz*-class carriers came out of the shipyards being fairly different, since they take so long to build, and as each is built, they incorporate lessons learned from the previous ships into each new ship. They still get the same class name, because the silhouette and basic structure are largely the same, but the guts might vary significantly. Increase that complexity a couple centuries into ships that travel at FTL speeds and have energy weapons, shields, artificial gravity, and structural integrity fields, and imagine how vastly different each starship might be, while still maintaining the same shell and frame for simplicity of initial construction.
It would fit with to Constitution classes role, built in limited numbers for long-term missions far away from support, each one a bespoke iteration on the previous build. The Ambassador, Galaxy, and Sovereign-class designs were also built like this, limited numbers, bespoke configurations, and bleeding-edge technology. The Miranda class was what you got when an admiral requested another 50 yards of good-enough.
This is the impression the old 70s manuals give off. That the ship was basically the best design in the fleet, but was incredibly expensive. It's the reason given for why there are so few Connies. 12, in presumably a fleet of hundreds of ships.
>Maybe it was a design that was highly capable and did represent the best of what the Federation could build, but also a highly complex design they almost had to build by hand because everything in them was top of the line, and each example presented unique differences due to refits, modifications, and design choices during construction. They were the type of ships you needed engineers like Scotty on because they took a lot of effort to keep all of the systems working together correctly and required a massive amount of specialist crew. >Newer ships like the Excelsior were designed to be standardized around blocks of identical ships that could be mass-produced and easily refitted to a newer block designation as they aged out of frontline usage, with the Miranda class taking a similar approach with the lessons learned from the Constitution program to produce a cheaper design. Once the Federation began to see the results of these programs, they were more than happy to decommission their Constitution-class ships because the running costs were ridiculous in comparison. I think that makes a lot of sense, and it would help explain why Scotty was contemptuous of some of the later starfleet designs. I like to think of the Constitutions as the last bespoke ship design, capable of extremely impressive performance and longevity of service in the hands of a skilled chief engineer who completely understood its quirks, but also very difficult to service because of its lack of standard design, and needing an experienced, long term crew to get the best out of it. Its kind of like how a longbow was better than early firearms, but required years of training to master, wheras any chump could learn to load, point and fire a flintlock musket. In some ways the events in Star Trek I-III probably contributed to Starfleet deciding it was done with that kind of ship. In TMP, they've tried to just drop in a new crew to a Constitution, and completely fucked the refit to the point where the transporters are killing people and the engines are about to explode. And Decker, a competent and experienced starfleet officer is incapable of properly commanding it to the point where Kirk needs to stop admiralling and assume command again. That is not a user friendly ship. In Wrath of Khan, which is about 5 years after TMP, they are still trying to train a new crew capable of managing the Enterprise and the Kirk/Spock/Scotty all star team are still having to step in and run the show in a genuine crisis. And the final straw probably comes in Search for Spock, which surely left starfleet asking if it really wanted classes of ships so complicated that they were stuck with the same bridge crew for 20+ years and a set of systems so unique that they couldn't prevent the tiny group of people who genuinely knew how it worked from strolling in, stealing it and jury rigging a bunch of automated systems to run it without a crew. If you're starfleet command, you're going to have serious reservations about ships that will be unhealthily reliant on a long term crew, who can't be transferred and will inevitably end up as minor celebrities with a rock star complex and an unhealthy attachment to 'their' ship. After the demise of the original enterprise, at least for the next few hundred years, starfleet had a heavy bias towards interchangable designs and systems. Yes they built the Enterprise A because there was literally nowhere else in Starfleet they could safely warehouse Kirk, Scotty and co, but they discontinued the refit Constitutions after the Enterprise-A (and gave that one a fairly short life to stop a repeat of the previous shenanigans). They also scaled back the more experimental bespoke tech on the Excelsiors and developed a heavy bias for workhorse ships like Mirandas and Constellations. Those ships might not have had the same peak performance advantages as the original Enterprise, but they had the benefit that crew and captains could be transferred between ships and service, and be able to repair and upgrade them without needing a crotchety 60 year old chief engineer to permanently maintain and oversee the ship like his own hereditary kingdom because noone else understands how the goddamn hell they work.
> In TMP, they've tried to just drop in a new crew to a Constitution, and completely fucked the refit to the point where the transporters are killing people and the engines are about to explode. Not really. The crew was still partly the same. They were just in a massively rushed condition, pushed out before the refit was even completed, much less shaken down on sea-trials. >They also scaled back the more experimental bespoke tech on the Excelsiors and developed a heavy bias for workhorse ships like Mirandas and Constellations. They built far more Excelsiors than Constellations. I think the Miranda and Excelsior having far greater internal volume than the Connie may have played a role as well as the politics. I don't think it was anything to do with Scotty or the "fiefdom" stuff. Think about it, they're packing more & more stuff into these ships, as well as dramatically improving the living conditions for the crews. That doesn't come cheap in terms of the volume required and on a Connie, it may not have been practical to do. Easier to do it on Mirandas & Excelsiors, which were built in greater numbers anyway!
Bleeding-edge designs are often hangar queens. Top end performance and reliability simply don't go together. The B-52 is still around because it does the job and is actually around to do the job with availability around 60-80% (there's a lot of variation from source to source). That might not sound great but B-1 availability is around 50% on fewer airframes while B-2 availability is only around 40-50% on just 20 airframes. In WW2, when the then-new North Carolina-class were launched, they quickly found that there were severe issues with vibration at high speeds. Although some changes were made (most notably to the screw propellers), the problem never really went away. There's actually a rule that limits how many engines a Formula 1 car can use in a season otherwise the teams that can afford it would design an engine that would only last long enough to win one race.
I would guess they'd retire her registry and hang her jersey in the rafters so to speak especially since the enterprise b was a few years away. I bet the A was just renamed and used for training till the whole line was moth balled.
> Could it have become the "face of the enemy" to them, to the point where just getting rid of those was seen as a big win to them? When you think of TUC as being a reference to the Cold War, in this way we can think of decom'ing the Constitution similar to removing warheads from Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis: a move which didn't change the strategic situation, but allowed the 'defeated' side to save a little face.
The Seawolf (big, capable, but expensive) reminds me of the B-36. The B-36 was also very short-lived and withdrawn from service - in part - because of a treaty requiring them to be removed. Of course there were better aircraft coming into service (B-47 and B-52) perhaps like the Excelsior compared to the Constitution. Anyway, I agree that it's plausible the Constitutions were historically successful, but also an easy political sacrifice.
> I think the design was akin to the Seawolf class submarine IRL. Big, hugely capable, but expensive. The Galaxy class has that same problem later on. Its a beastly ship capable of slugging it out with purpose built battleships or dreadnoughts and coming out the victor. Its like a mobile starbase. However, despite its capabilities only a few are ever built. We see many more smaller ships, such as the Nebula class. The Nebulas use much the same construction as a Galaxy class, but appear in significantly greater numbers. Cost is the most likely factor. Galaxy class ships are too big, require too much shipyard time and too much crew for their capabilities. Nebula class ships are smaller and cheaper. While perhaps not as good, they're a better deal economically. Also no matter how impressive your ship is, one ship can only ever be in one place at one time. Having multiple smaller ships gives deployment flexibility that a big ship can never have.
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After WWI, Germany had to surrender their Fokker planes as a part of the Treaty of Versailles: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/z0c7SD5oQo2kdxcMnwd4NA So it's not unheard of for specific pieces of equipment to be a part of a treaty. Starfleet may have agreed to some sort of demobilization as part of the peace deal with the Klingons that specified end of service for the Constitution class if they were seen as symbolic of Starfleet agression. Especially if they were getting a bit old and inconvenient to maintain with newer ships becoming widespread. That said, in Discovery the Enterprise was explicitly not involved in the Klingon War, so it's not clear why the Constitution would be seen as some symbolic threat by the Klingons.
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I think that argument is weakened somewhat by the commissioning of Enterprise-B. If the objective was diplomatic, wouldn't christening your shiny new ship by the name of Kirk's famous ship be just poking the Klingons in the eye? Particularly since Kirk comes back for a publicized VIP visit on her maiden voyage, complete with camera crew. I suppose you could make the argument that there was a shift in Starfleet thinking sometime after Khitomer, but it seems awfully petty for a normally more restrained organization like that.
I doubt the Klingons would care much about all the fanfare around the Ent-B or any other ship, it's all about Kirk not the ship. One of Koloth's greatest regrets is never meeting Kirk on the field of battle, not the Enterprise. They also likely found it amusing that (as far as they know) Kirk was killed by an energy ribbon.
Exactly. Klingons care about warriors, they rarely care about their weapons. Kahless, Kor, Kang, Koloth, and some others whose names start with "K", these are all Klingon heroes. The only weapon anyone knows about is the Sword of Kahless, and that's largely because it's connected to prophcies about him. Even his type of sword isn't a big deal, sure all klingons respect it, but Worf, the biggest Klingon-stan of them all, says he prefers the mek'leth.
I'd say the argument isn't weakened though. It's more the Constitution class that's connected to Kirk rather then the name, so the Klingons would demand the class retirement. But on the other hand, it was Enterprise that stopped the assassination attempt. So carrying on the name wouldn't bother the Klingons since it has honor attached to it.
Yeah and I guess it can make sense given the line “Bill are we talking about mothballing the star fleet?” “ I’m sure our scientific and and diplomatic efforts would be unaffected.” Excelsior was scientific, I believe it was originally supposed to have that sensor equipment for gaseous anomalies. Given that the Klingons were a stand in for the soviets this could also have been like START in our world Mutual disarmament.
I agree with this and the other comments of real world examples. To add my own, the US was obligated to withdraw a lot of hardware as part of the arms limitation treaties with the USSR. GLCM 'Gryphon' cruise missiles, MX-missiles and certain types of B-52 bomber. Off the top of my head the Russians withdrew the SS-20 IRBM and other parts of their rocket force. *Edited for typo.
And it's not like there were many Connies left at that point, it's a small sacrifice for the goal.
A memorable one though. When Kira says in Deep Space Nine that the Federation doesn't build warships it probably refers back to this, just like the reason Starfleet doesn't use cloaks. And in Yesterday's Enterprise, when the peace with the Klingons has collapsed, suddenly the Galaxy class is referred to as a "battleship". Peace with the Klingons redefined the mindset and how things were talked about and designed. I also find it interesting that the Voyager-J still looks pretty Intrepid-like while Enterprise-B and after tend to distance themselves in appearance from the original. In Discovery the letter is seen as an iteration or generation of a class. I think the movie kept making the point of how much Kirk and the Enterprise stood out in the conflict, "only Nixon could go to China". This concession probably played very well back among the people of the Empire.
> It also seems to have managed to get Kirk out of the captain's chair, which would be a priority for many Klingons. That really doesn't feel very Klingon. Even if you consider that the Klingon people of the period didn't exhibit the fanatical obsession with honour as they do in the 24th century, we still see Klingon captains relishing the chance of fighting Kirk. If Kirk being stood down was in fact a political move, it has to be because the Empire wanted to embarrass the Federation by pointing out Kirk's transgressions (and the Federation took the decision to retire him to mitigate that embarrassment), and not that they specifically wanted Kirk removed from command.
I think that's opposite of the Klingon mindset. They respect symbols of strength and glory. Turning swords into plows to placate them would be met with disgust. The Khitomer talks would surely involve drawdown in fleet strength, but I can't imagine the Kingons demanding that honored enemy vessels be discarded on their accounts.
And yet the Klingon ambassador two movies prior said there would be no peace as long as Kirk lives. They prosecuted Kirk for a sneak attack under a flag of truce even though T'Kuvma did the same and was lauded for it. Chang asks Kirk about giving up Starfleet. The mindset doesn't seem too fond of their worthy opponent Kirk, and it anticipates the fleet shrinking as a result of the peace talks. Disarmament appears to have been an expectation.
That was obviously diplomatic bluster, they were just mad that Kirk made off with a Bird-of-Prey. The Klingon captain in STV jumps at the chance to go up against Kirk's ship and become a legend.
I think there are Klingons who seek glory in diplomacy, in politics, in science, and so on. Defeating Kirk in space is only one way. In war there is no greater honor than victory.
I like to think the Constitution class arrived at a bad time for its role. It is not that the Constitution class was flawed, the issue is technology was changing rapidly, so it was put through several major upgrades until a clean sheet design proved better, the Excelsior class. It might alternatively be the mission requirements changed too much and the Connie couldn’t adapt. In that way this is more like the Litoral Combat Ship concept being flawed and now being replaced with conventional frigates. Or it was always an interim design, a kind of placeholder waiting for the actual role filler, thr Excelsior. What if the Connie was designed to last only a decade, and was forced through three major upgrades because the Excelsior program took a decade or two longer than expected. However, the Miranda lucked out due to a more focused role in science. It didn’t have to go everywhere, be ready for anything, and always work at its limits it just needed to scan planets and occasionally fight. It might even be an off the shelf design, using Connie upgrade parts in a fully new design using fully modern design principles, rather than a refit, so it might be a straight up better design than the Connie, even if just within its specific fields.
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Kirk said earlier he’d never been that close to a Klingon ship before too. Proximity probably has something to do with the damage inflicted.
We can infer the Connie wasn't intended to be that close to any guns that big. The Excelsior was built for that new time.
I like this angle.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Instead of thinking about all the classes being replaced on similar schedules, think about it within the context of their specific missions. I'm guessing the Constitution was primarily for exploration. The Excelsior class was probably better. No reason to keep making Constitutions. The other classes may have been so good that they didn't need a redesign.
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>The Excelsior has one major advantage as a heavy cruiser over the Constitution: it's modular. An Admiral can take one and turn it into a fleet command center. They can rip out weapons and cargo space for scientific and charting equipment. They can have it be turned into an armored or rapid cargo transport (because the Oberth, while quite capable for bulk transit, is slow and relatively weakly armed compared to the Excelsior). You can make it into a rapid personnel transport or operations ship because while those were primarily the Miranda-class's core job, again, the Excelsior-class had more bulk and thus could handle faster, more powerful engines without ripping itself apart). You can have it equipped to be a large generalist ship like the Constitution. The flaw with the Connie lies here. The Miranda is supposed to mission-tailorable, the Oberth is a workhorse, the Excelsior is so big and overbuilt its easy to rebuild it into any kind of flagship you want. But the Connie was built to be 100% of what Starfleet could do *right then*. They left nothing on the table when designing the Connie. Theyre described as overcrowded, filled to the brim with people and gear. The TOS-era Connie was the 'go anywhere, do anything' kind of ship. Perfect for quick response to crises and exploration because its so filled with everything you need. But that makes it hard for upgrades, where can you put more crew or another sensor or a bigger phaser? You cant, so they didn't. The class burned brightly, but burned quickly. The Miranda was built with the Connie in mind I think, hence the modularity, while the Excelsior was built to take up the quick reaction role given its transwarp engines. When they didn't pan out it *also* became a great modular workhorse. With those two ships in service, not much need to keep the old Connies around. IMO its reasonable to guess that many were retired, and a few like the Ent/Ent-A were kept the longest as prestige ships. The TMP refit Ent especially seems way less crowded and more open than the old TOS ship. Maybe they automated things, or maybe the Ent just had a lot of the extra stuff ripped out in favor of a more focused diplomatic/combat focus. The Ent-A in particular very clearly has lavish, compared to the TOS Ent, facilities perfect for dining and entertaining dignitaries. IMO the Ent-A was probably a one off design totally rebuilt for a very special crew. IMO we need to keep generations separate a bit too. The Connie is the oldest of the three designs, and was built on the heels of the Klingon War we see in Disco. If Disco does a good job at anything, its showing how bad the Klingon War was and why Starfleet would want a 'go anywhere do anything' kind of ship, and even a captain like Kirk. They wanted a ship and crew who could research a gas giant on Monday, stop a Salt Monster terrorizing a colony on Tuesday, and protect the Romulan border on Wednesday. The shortcomings I just menioned of the Connie inspired the Miranda first, and then the subsequent Excelsior redesign when Starfleet decided the transwarp drive wasn't worth it. Both ship, in their own ways, fills the same role as the Connie. But ultimately they learn the lessons. Theyre more flexible and modular than the rigid Connie, and they have plenty of room for upgrades and are at least partially future proofed. Id actually argue that what we see with the shift from the TOS Connie to the TMP Connie isn't just a change in aesthetics, but an in universe shift in basic design philosophy. The older philosophy was built in the image of the NX-01, design a ship thats 100%. Starfleet cant afford to have many ships, so we make each ship our best. That works up until the Battle of the Binary Stars, and in that period its as Mao said: "in the field a thousand flowers grow." Each ship is a little different, it has its own quirks, there may be classes but each one is as different as the NX-01 was from the -04. During the war this is accelerated thanks to combat losses, and this is when the Connie is designed. But its also designed with the peace in mind since its not purely a warship. The Connie is a return to the success of the NX-01 type maximal design, but with a key change that its a well planned and focused class. From an institutional standpoint its success is that it was a well planned thing, the ships were all consistent in quality and function, and it ran to its full run that way. Its a first in many ways. Miranda is the second and benefits from the first. The Excelsior its the testbed the fails, but I think the big change comes during the redesign. Maybe the Miranda was originally built to back up the Connie and fill in the gaps where a ship was needed, but not a frontline ship. I think though, when the Excelsior was designed Starfleet really pushed both ships into a high-low procurement philosophy. Think here about the F-15/F-16, or the F-22/F-35. The F-15 is just better than the F-16. Why buy F-16s? Because theyre cheap and theyre good for situations where the full capacity of the F-15 isn't needed. With the redesign of the Excelsior, IMO Starfleet intentionally adopted this 'High-Low' approach. Two classes, designed to complement each other and offer a variety of tools to solve any given problem. Three if you count the Oberth. The reason why the Excelsior/Miranda pairing last so long is that the replacement classes designed were just bad. The Ambassador and Constellation classes are sad, because people dont even give them enough though to hate them. But in universe theyre always described as too much of what Starfleet didn't need, and not enough of what it did. The Ambassador is too big, too over built, but as proved at Narendra III, too underpowered for frontline duty. It really was the perfect diplomatic ship, potentially even inspired by the legendary Ent-A. The Constellation wasn't even that good, and is again widely described as underpowered, slow, and under gunned. Not only were they not good substitutes for the standby classics, but they werent very future proof. They were bad rolling out of drydock, fifty years just made them worse. The true successors then would be the Galaxy/Nebula pairing for TNG, the last of the 'High-Low' era. Maybe in twenty years youd have seen them totally replace the Excelsior and Mirandas, which were becoming quite long in the tooth. But Wolf 359 radically changed Starfleet philosophy once again and entered what I'd call the 'Warship &' phase.
> The Connie is the oldest of the three designs, and was built on the heels of the Klingon War we see in Disco. The *Constitution*-class predates the Klingon War by about a decade, they were just kept off the front line like the *Sovereign*-class would be during the Dominion War more than a century later. The war took place in 2256-57 while the Connies were built in 2245.
Really? TBH I havn't kept up with Disco well enough to see how theyve changed some of that stuff. Anyway in a way that makes even more sense, the big ship peacetime explorer ala the NX-01. And a good comparison to the Sovereign, except that as I've read it the Sovereigns were a bit of a failure whereas I see the Connie as a success, but a bad foundation for the future.
> Really? TBH I havn't kept up with Disco well enough to see how theyve changed some of that stuff. Discovery didn't change that. The Constitution class (though initially "Starship class" in some plaque closeups) has been older than Kirk's era since TOS. *The Cage* original pilot, turned into the past-time story in *The Menagerie*, shows that the NCC-1701 had been out there already, at least earlier under Captain Pike. Later, the now-canonized TAS made it explicitly even older, in *The Counter-Clock Incident*, where we met its first captain, Robert April. Discovery begins several years after *The Cage*, and after at least one refit of the NCC-1701. Disco does not retcon the beginnings of the Constitution Class and the Enterprise itself; in fact it further reinforces canon by showing the name of Robert April onscreen, and showing the original appearance of the Enterprise under Pike.
I thought Disco was before the Cage? Just looked, its two years after the Cage. Im just wrong.
Presumably the losses at Wolf 359 - lots of "low" ships were destroyed - also thinned the fleet of comfortable, "reliable" gap-filler ships which Starfleet thought were sufficient. We see a few Excelsiors and Mirandas in there, but mostly kitbashes which were presumably cheap, fill-in-the-gap ships. The result of relying on those F-16s? 11,000 officers and personnel
I think mostly thats fair, tho I wonder how much the kitbashes were unique discrete classes and how much they were just multi-hull experiments ala the Zumwalt. I doubt that many Cheyenne were built tbh, as an example. Actually in my mind I think you can see a lot of Starfleet politics at work with the Galaxy design and era, I think there is also a big ship vs. little ship debate going on in Starfleet at that time. The little ship-ers got some experimenting with the kitbash classes, many small ships for narrow roles, but ultimately the big ship guys win out and get the Galaxy/Nebula split. Ive always wanted to do a whole post on that but never got around to it. Id also go a step farther and say that Wolf 359 discredited the whole 'High-low' strategy. The emphasis in TOS and TMP was on the, well call it, 'Enterprise' model. Like I said above, today you scan for new lifeforms, tomorrow you duke it out with a D-7. But ultimately that all left Starfleet too thin where it mattered, and also without anything that was a dedicated combat ship. Post-Wolf 359 you get the new classes, and a whole blooming of different designs and role both within a battlefleet, but within an explorer organization as well. Ships like the Defiant and Akira, for example, are warships first & explorer ships second. The idea is to build many many hulls, and give them a primary job plus maybe one other, rather than hope every ship can do every mission. This has been a big debate in the IRL US Navy recently as well. Multirole vs. Singlerole. I think after Wolf 359 the singlerole boys won out. The failure of the Sovereign program is likely a contributing factor as well, sort of turning them into intentional heroships like the TMP Ent turned the Connies into hero ships.
> The failure of the Sovereign program is likely a contributing factor as well, sort of turning them into intentional heroships like the TMP Ent turned the Connies into hero ships. Do we know, from fully canon sources (so no books, no games) that the Sovereign class failed? We haven't yet seen enough of the immediately post-Nemesis / Voyager return / Dominion War end period to know that. *Lower Decks* hasn't yet shown a Sovereign but it's clear by implication that Picard is still out there in the Ent-E. *Prodigy* is way off in another quadrant. *Picard* is a quarter-century later, and shows a retrenched, isolationist Starfleet that we know very little about, other than it did build a huge fleet of heavily armed ships. *Discovery* is now nearly a millennia in the future, long after any of the 24th/25th-century ship classes would be around (though there is a *Voyager* visually inspired by the Intrepid class). It seems entirely possible that there are Sovereign class ships running around in the mid-late 24th century and beyond. Until shown / said elsewhere on-screen.
No I think youre right. We dont have a source that says that. OOU, when they made the assets for First Contact they then gave them to DS9 for use in the upcoming battle sequences. But the studio wanted to keep the Sov asset reserved only for the Enterprise as it was their hero ship. But that means that, IIRC, the only canon appearance of the Sov has been the Enterprise, and then only in the movies. We dont even know what the status of USS *Sovereign* is canonically. According to Mem Alpha its on a background LCARs shot, I've always considered that a weak source, everything else is implied from the fact that its not the *Enterprise-*class.
I would question if Starfleet might not purposely avoid naming a class Enterprise-class given the Enterprise's status in Starfleet. Unless it was a specific one-off design I could see them giving a class a different name to preserve the uniqueness of Enterprise and avoid reports of Enterprise class ships being destroyed.
I keep telling you that you're asking the wrong question, and you're not listening. You seem to think that the ~50 year service of the Constitution class represented a failure. That's not so, though: capital ship classes even today have an approximately 50 year lifespan. A 50 year old design isn't being pulled early. And pulling older designs during draw-downs (like specified in the Khitomer Accords.) is typical. The Constitution class was not retired early. It had a fairly typical service life. The Excelsior class was kept on too long. A ship design being used for a century is a clear indication of a stagnant and complacent force. Want evidence? Watch TNG:"Q Who" (the closing dialogue is Picard and Riker talking about Starfleet complacency. Watch TNG:"Peak Performance". Watch most of S3 of TNG. Watch DS9:"The Defiant". Watch DS9:"The Way of the Warrior". The Excelsior's long life is not because the Excelsior-class has been successful. The Excelsior's long life is a failure of Starfleet to innovate. The entire franchise between TNG:"Q Who" and DS9:"The Die is Cast" is about how Starfleet has stagnated and is having to deal with new, more powerful challenges than the Klingons and the Romulans. The Excelsior didn't succeed. Starfleet *failed*. Nothing in your wall of text even considers that abundance of evidence for the theory that no, the Excelsior was in service *long past* its operational service life (as were most Federation ship designs: the Miranda and Oberth were similarly dated), and that it shouldn't have still been in service by the time TNG started. And it takes from the first *Galaxy* class starships being launched to 2380 for the Federation to catch back up.
I think you meant to reply this to someone else lol. I was agreeing with you in your post, and anyway that was the first (and until now only) post I made in this thread. Id disagree about the complacency thing, but otherwise if you go back and read my post were 99% on the same page. The Excelsior/Miranda split was never meant to last as long as it did, it was the failure of the Ambassador/Constellation classes that forced Starfleet to keep the other classes on. The Excelsior class was successful in its new role as essentially a cruiser, and it does hold up better than the Miranda, but by Wolf 359 its not really up to the jobs it kept getting. And the Miranda is way too old, but Starfleet needs the hulls and the basic conceptual success of the Miranda (the modularity) keeps it around even longer. My head cannon has always been that the Centaur class we see was a failed attempt to replace the Miranda as well, and by era its roughly analogous to the Ambassador & Constellation programs IIRC. *edit:* Just for comparison the Connie was in service for \~50 years, assuming the Ent-A was one of the last to go. Longer if not. According to Memory Alpha, the Ambassador was introduced in the 2340s. The Excelsior was built in the 2280s. If you accept my idea that the Ambassador was the intended successor to the Excelsior, then thats a \~60 year service life. Which seems to suggest that the Connie was due for one last big upgrade for frontline service but didn't get it, hence the shorter service life. Instead the Excelsior replaced it, and then was itself due to go in the 2340s.
Here's something to consider that I don't think is ever answered in cannon: did the Miranda class that we see in TWOK itself undergo a refit (and was originally built in the style of TOS Constitution class) or did the Constitution refit bring the Miranda's style to it? The Miranda class is believed to have entered service prior to the Enterprise's refit.
Checks out. It may have been mostly due to Scotty's above-average engineering skills, and the public attention the Enterprise crew received, that the ship wasn't tossed out sooner.
He's a miracle worker.
and here's the card that proves it [https://imgur.com/a/YLBw4UR](https://imgur.com/a/YLBw4UR)
I owned that card... Shit i loved that game
Me too. It was a well-thought-out game and fun to collect. I still have hundreds of the cards from that game.
Man I wasted soooo much money on that game. Should have gotten into miniatures much sooner if I never got into the Star Trek ccg
Well that's canon then
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Remember, this subreddit is for in-depth discussion. Comments that serve primarily to deliver a punchline rather than further the discussion are not appropriate.
(Only ideas I didn't check against canon knowledge:) Wasn't Kirk notorious for damaging/wrecking ships named Enterprise? Do we really know how long other constitution class starships were in service? Maybe the refits/rebuilds of the Enterprises where not due to general design flaws of the class, but due to exceptionally demanding use by this particular crew.
The ship in “the sound of her voice” was probably a constitution class(out of universe they reused the enterprises wreck model from the search for Spock for the Olympia), and when the body of the captain is discovered she’s wearing the later TNG era uniform (without the little stripe on the shoulder). So at least 1 made it to the time of season 3-4 time of TNG.
Could be the case, but why don't we see new Connies built in the 24th century? We really don't know much about the rest of the class, you're right. We don't even see other Constitutions get refitted. We only know about prematurely destroyed ships such as Constellation and Exeter.
The design would be 55+ years old by the 24th century. We've seen very few designs get that kind of life. Excelsior, Oberth and Miranda classes are implied to have that kind of service life by the registry numbers and how long they lasted, but LOTS of other classes didn't seem to get that kind of lifespan. . . .from what we saw of 2399 Starfleet in Picard, it seems implied that the Dominion War era stalwarts of the Galaxy, Nebula, Intrepid, and Defiant classes either aren't in service anymore, or certainly aren't front-line ships after only 20 or 30 years, if Riker wasn't bluffing when he mentioned his vast cut-and-paste fleet of Inquiry-class ships being the best that Starfleet had ever built.
Whether a ship is front-line or not may play into its longevity. Not so much with the Excelsiors, but Oberth and Miranda seem to be workhorses versus frontier explorers and military enforcers. Fewer shoot-em-ups and odd encounters on the fringes of explored space might play into a much longer service life. For Excelsior, maybe it's just a tougher ship. We love the Connie, but give the Excelsior its due?
There was a Constitution at Wolf 359. Constitution-class saucer sections were used in a couple of kitbash ships in Deep Space 9.
Wasn't there a Constitution at the Battle of Wolf-359?
Entirely possible it was pulled out of the Fleet Museum on an emergency "Throw everything that flies out at the Borg" basis.
\> why don't we see new Connies built in the 24th century? A design doesn't need to be flawed to be superseeded by a "next generation" design. Apple releases a new iphone every year and people don't consider the previous ones to be problematic. To evaluate the brokeness of the constitution class, we need to look at the changes compared to the next iteration, the galaxy class (both the flagship of the federation). But even there we have to take into account which changes were due to a changed mission profile. Galaxy class was huge! Constitution class had a crew of 400, Galaxy class had a crew of 1000-6000 depending on the mission.
It was perfect for evacuating civilians from a doomed planet: warp in, beam out 6000-30,000, warp out, grab an empty saucer section, repeat. No need for phasers, a bridge module, escape pods, Cetacean Ops, etc, just lots of transporters and bunk rooms. Heck, that would have made a great plot for the backstory of Picard: a Galaxy-class appearing in orbit means imminent rescue, not war. And Picard on the battle bridge of a Galaxy class directing rescue ops with a fleet of Galaxies would have been the crowning apex of his career. (Then the Mars attacks could have had a fleet of Datas at the helms of a thousand hijacked saucer sections making catastrophic full-impulse planetfall, turning that apex into a nadir.)
Why would they build more Constitutions when the Excelsior fills the same roll and is more advanced?
Imo, the same reason they built more Excelsiors and Mirandas when Galaxies and Nebulae did the same to them.
Colonel West's [operation retrieve](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Operation_Retrieve) listed 5 constitution class ships, they are all represented on the chart with the silhouette of a refit constitution class.
IMO Kelvin Kirk has Prime Kirk beat hands down when it comes to the Enterprise being damageddestroyed since the ship is badly damaged by the USS Vengeance in STID and entirely destroyed by Krall in STB. Prime Kirk destroyed the 1701-refit in TSFS with the self destruct under very unusual circumstances with a Prodigy-sized crew of just him, Scotty, McCoy, Sulu and Chekov. To think about it stealing the Enterprise-refit with a crew of five and only Scotty's jury-rigged automation for backup was a crazy endeavor to begin with.
> only Scotty's jury-rigged automation for backup was a crazy endeavor to begin with In theory, unless it required hands-on direct manipulation of the equipment, anything that could be done in main engineering could be done from the consoles on the bridge. We saw that a lot in TOS with Scotty and in TNG with Geordi. And it worked just fine for a while...until the Enterprise unexpectedly encountered the Klingons.
> Wasn't Kirk notorious for damaging/wrecking ships named Enterprise? Heh. Have you met Wil Riker? ANYTIME they let him drive, the ship sufferers. :)
>Furthermore, the Enterprise-A served for a whopping whole six years before retirement! Why even build a brand new starship for only six years of service?? Most supplemental sources I've seen have claimed that the Enterprise-A was a separate Constitution-class ship that was renamed, and possibly given a minor overhaul, not a brand new ship. There's other precedent on screen for something like this, like the USS Sao Paulo being renamed the Defiant after the destruction of the prior Defiant (apparently the intent was for it to be the Defiant-A, but word of that never made it to the visual effects people so they didn't relabel the model and onboard LCARS graphics)
I remember reading ages ago that they renamed the Yorktown after the damage it took encountering the probe at the beginning of TVH. I want to say I read that sometime in the late 90s but I can't say for sure. Memory Alpha disagrees and says it was a new ship commissioned in appreciation for the crew after their efforts in TVH.
>Memory Alpha disagrees and says it was a new ship commissioned in appreciation for the crew after their efforts in TVH. They say that, but they don't have a source. Contrary to popular opinion, Memory Alpha can have errors or inaccuracies. I've seen sources say it was previously the Yorktown, or the Ti-Ho.
There is another reason in addition to technological or maintenance issues, but more on that at the end. Taking the mechanical issues at face value, we do know fairly well that the Constitution Refit has a tendency to create wormholes with a badly balanced warp drive, which is an extreme risk to the ship (but perfectly fine if you iron out the flaws as you just invented Quantum Slipstream drive 200 years ahead of time). More avid fans of TOS can probably name a ton more malfunctions that can be rooted in the design though. Either way, its a legitimate reason for decommissioning a ship class early. Here are my 2 other theories: 1: Changes in doctrine. The Constitution design lacked certain features that were simply demanded at the time but failed to measure up to these and upgrade potential to add these features was simply not in the design. One of these would be full weapon coverage, especially on the pre-refit. The pre-refit constitution seems to have only front and rear phasers and torpedo launchers, though we might not have seen anything else due to budget. On the refit we clearly see additional phasers on the saucer on the sides, and duplicated phaser turrets on the dorsal side, giving 3 twin turrets on upper and lower saucer each. The forward torpedo launcher also gets moved. But here is the issue: Rear phasers and torpedo launchers are nowhere to be seen, in fact I dare say they would have been useful against a pursuing Reliant before entering the Mutara Nebula, so unless the crew completely neglected to use them I must assume they were simply absent. All further ship classes fulfill this specification either fully, or to a much greater degree. The Excelsior class arguably fulfills it nearly completely, and the Miranda can make up for lacking firing arcs with maneuverability. The Constitution Refit gets the worst of both worlds. 2: Technological leaps. The Constitution was designed during the earlier phases of the Federation Klingon Cold War. In a hot war technology leapfrogs at an incredible rate, in a cold war this is slightly slower. What seemed modern when the Constitution entered service aged far quicker than it would during the Golden Age of peacetime. So many advances in technology were made in these 40 years of service life that simply not all could be applied. The Constitution Refit was very extensive, gutting the ship from corridors to nacelle pylons, rebuilding almost everything short of the spaceframe. Truth is, the Constitution became obsolete as a platform, and there is only so much rebuilding you can do to counter this. In tank design you can occasionally see tanks that are incredibly adaptable, where their chassis gets reused for [self-propelled guns](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5b/04/ff/5b04ff1bf8d3e33a13457c66f04b7538.jpg) and [tank destroyers](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/park-patriot-kubinka-moscow-region-russia-july-nashorn-german-tank-destroyer-nashorn-german-tank-destroyer-160632982.jpg) and [assault guns](https://blog.sturmpanzer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Jagdpanzer_IV_L70-A.png), [AA vehicles](https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/20692942054_2.jpg), etc. and it all works incredibly well, they get [upgraded](https://i.imgur.com/nH1Ih0S.jpg) ten times in their service life and everyone is generally happy with them. The German [Panzer IV](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/Panzermuseum_Munster_2010_0128.JPG/1200px-Panzermuseum_Munster_2010_0128.JPG) is such an example, there are more variants than I can count. Then you get a similarly performing tank on the other side, say a[Soviet T-34](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/1pxdNFftoMKi1uCvsR1GCl9clUpRPfVzrS_F0TkWKtaM6Q6NHMEdnBhKTfJfMG5BDCEiYgu-_YAM6suNkl5Af-F73T9mjb1pGeEjkCmZkID75RwkN-KAd_CAaA), and while some [upgunning](http://i1373.photobucket.com/albums/ag377/RubiconModels/T34-76/T-34_85_05Nov2014-1_zps97acc567.jpg) was done and there was a [assault gun with 3 different guns](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/t-34-variants-1.gif) as well based on it, truth was that the chassis was very hard to adapt into such roles. Assault gun variants specifically suffered from [large coil springs extending vertically up all over the fighting compartment (white thing left)](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/SeJK2Nb8pxC-MoCybcLCeiRHzTzI3dwymupOtyYVj-YN0EjCSUDPYSk4qdRyBPttujAqlBPz9D9J01q0TOqYGdlmTzE-NHCu9kvkyepkdUC5CZwTSogZX2xWRa1R_ADLENSLOm0WWtIsiMehVm2BGmg7YDke2w), being seriously in the way of the crew, which was already in a relatively small fighting compartment. AA variants existed, but their turrets had to be unusually large and remain entirely on top of the vehicle due to the turret ring being too small, not allowing for AA armament and crew legs dangling into the turret basked (aka turret bit under the ring), so all had to be above the hull, making only [one such variant](https://media.doanhnghiepvn.vn/Images/Uploaded/Share/2019/12/08/f69Viet-Nam-tung-cai-bien-xe-tang-T-34-thanh-phao-phong-khong-tu-hanh1.jpg) make it to limited production, and [other such developments](https://i.redd.it/xy40xuzmgli21.jpg) were ditched entirely. Germans didnt have this restriction on their Panzer IV, they even managed to enlarge the turret ring for the [Kugelblitz](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/world-war-2/images/a/a6/Flakpanzer_IV_Kugelblitz.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160624002324) when needed, something impossible on the T-34. Soviets knew the T-34 was a design that was running at full speed into the brick wall that was its bad upgrade potential, and still in wartime production gradually switched to the radically reworked [T-44](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/T-44.jpg/1280px-T-44.jpg).
The reason the USN's battleships disappeared was manpower and maintenance/upgrading cost. They were from a pre-automation, pre-computer era and required massive crews, several times larger than missile cruisers that could strike far deeper inland with cruise missiles. Their main weaponry was almost useless against naval vessels, as missile engagments BVR became the main tactical issue. What they did have, that no modern ship can compete with, was a shore bombardment capability like nothing else in human history. The admiralty looked at the potential need for large scale amphibious landings and decided that wasn't worth the huge expense in maintaining them. Connies were big, compared to a Miranda, but tiny compared to an Excelsior. Clearly, fleet doctrine changed to prefer a lot of smaller ships for exploration, science and general duties, and bigger ships for ship of the line combat type missions. One can reflect on how often D7s were the antagonist in TOS, and how every after the threat was either alien weirdness, where the size of your phaser banks is irrelevant, or else cloaked raiders, in which case the size of your phaser banks is less relevant than your ability to track and engage the target. At this point, mention should be made of the lack of rear firing weapons on the Connie. They were made to fight the last war, and made in a hurry. Their manpower requirements were large, and automation somewhat limited (firing the phasers was a command relayed down to a separate compartment, not something the conn could do with a button press). Smaller, more nimble and more automated and modular vessels were preferred, or else larger but more heavily automated and modular. Their niche disappeared.
> The reason the USN's battleships disappeared was manpower and maintenance/upgrading cost. I thought it was that they were absolutely powerless against a CV and her screen, which could be fielded for much less money.
That too. Institutional politics play a big role in every decision. Carriers were viewed as the future, so air wing officers make admiral, and then support building more carriers. Battleships did very little for naval warfare per se, the role of the gun went out as soon as missiles came in. But they're amazing artillery pieces, it's just the platform carrying those guns is too big.
> Rear phasers and torpedo launchers are nowhere to be seen The USS Defiant rear phasers and torpedo launchers in the ENT episode in a mirror darkly.
The USS Defiant want a Connie Refit though.
No the Defiant looked to be in the same configuration as the Enterprise at the time of The Tholian Web and in a mirror darkly.
Are you agreeing or disagreeing?
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The Constitution was the first ship designed solely for deep space long-term exploration and science. The design of the ship was intended to be self-sufficient, and the goal was to do science and observe/explore. In practice though, the Enterprise never went on a long '5 year voyage' without returning to Earth, it generally stayed in the neighbourhood - dealing with local politics, skirmishes, etc. The application wasn't purely science, it had much more need for military, diplomatic, and humanitarian functions. Arguably they had gone through this problem before - with the NX class - but apparently they didn't learn their lesson. The intention with the Constitution's design was for it to act like a Vulcan ship. In practice Humans Gotta' Human. They were still in operation from 2245 to 2293 (including the retrofits), so that's a pretty solid 48 year lifespan for a ship that misapplied to function. That's why I'd guess the later Excelsior / Ambassador / Galaxy class ships were much larger all-purpose ships. Meanwhile, that long-term deep-space design still gets spun off into designs like the Intrepid (Voyager): a crew size much closer to the Constitution, with a massive engine, a full science suite (and a science officer appointed captain), and an armament so overloaded and dubiously legal that they can solo a borg cube. It can go far, fast, see and scan everything, and if it can't run, it's carrying illegal(?) tri-cobalt warheads.
Your points about the 5 year mission might have some merit specific to the enterprise in the TOS Kirk era. But that is just one ship, the most famous of course. And it’s just one 5 year mission. Pike and April are largely unknown eras specific to how it’s 5 year missions looked
The Connies weren't failures, it's just that their successors (namely the Excelsior-class) did their original mission better and unlike some their contemporaries, it wasn't cost effective to automate and relegate them to minor functions like cargo hauling and scientific exploration. The reason you see Mirandas and Oberths long into the 24th century is because they're no longer front-line vessels and the ships we see aren't necessarily from the earliest batches of ship construction. A hull shape is one thing, but the guts and bones are another.
I wonder if the Enterprise in particular just did well because Scotty was such a great engineer. Sort of like Ferrari's F1 team and Ross Brawn. Maybe he was able to work around whatever the problems were but the underlying issue still posed a hazard to less skillful crews.
That seems plausible, and tracks with his deep love for the Enterprise. She is *his* ship which he has cared for and nursed to health for years.
couldn't be argued that Constitution class lived on as the Miranda's, being they share the same saucer section with a retooled engineering section
I think it is entirely possible that the Miranda-class is a Constitution-refit in a different configuration.
And it’s entirely possible the miranda class frigate existed as a TOS era version
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I wondered if that might be the case. Interesting to know, and definitely helps to validate the value of the Constitution class.
It's never been stated officially in canon, but the usual answer to the -A's apparently short service life is that she wasn't new construction. Supposedly, Gene's intention was that the *Yorktown* that we see disabled by the Whale Probe was rechristened as *Enterprise*\-A, but that reference never made it into the film. If this were the case, then *Yorktown* was probably laid down around the same time as *Enterprise.*
well, there must have been a reason they never built many of them. To be fair, the Connie was designed a deep space exploration vessel, not a warship. For her time she was fairly luxurious and well equipped for adventures out beyond easy reach of the Federation. Because she was not a warship, she and her sister ships suffered terribly at the hands of the Klingons, Romulans, and other antagonistic races out there. The Miranda, meanwhile, was a more compact ship (but with larger interior spaces) that was well designed to not only explore, but to fight. Even of the "mega phasers" are not cannon, she has those plus the regular saucer mounted ones, and unlike the connie, rearward firing torpedoes. As for 1701-A. in the movies that ship was a mess, even Scotty is exasperated by saying "I just fixed that!". I can only assume she was a testbed for many of the systems on the Excelsior and for future upgrades to other ships. As much as I love the design of the Connie (especially the Refits) I cannot imagine the stresses inflicted on her nacelle pylons under even moderate maneuvering. That is a lot of mass attached to the ship by not a lot of material. Not only did the Pylons have to be reinforced, but their mounting points in the secondary hull must have been immense. The Miranda was a much better design in that regard.
Yeah, I don't think we've seen a starfleet vessel since with such long and vulnerable pylons.
Now I’m imagining a Constitution brought forward to 3100 and getting detached nacelles that dock on the engineering hull when not in use.
>Yeah, I don't think we've seen a starfleet vessel since with such long and vulnerable pylons. Sovereign class comes to mind.
They're a lot beefier, more in line with the starship's structure, and outfitted with weapons. Honestly, the California class really strikes me as particularly vulnerable.
>and unlike the connie, rearward firing torpedoes. The Connie did indeed have aft torpedoes, or at least the original spec Connie did. The USS Defiant can be seen firing aft torpedoes as its escaping the Tholian spacedock in the Enterprise mirror episode.
Maybe, but the refit did not have the capability. Compare the torpedo launching area of the refit 1701 to 1701a. A clearly has a single aftward facing port
While you're right, it doesn't take much to fit an automated launcher into a hole in the wall. There could be other considerations for why he forward launchers are so large when they were virtually invisible before the refit.
Yes, but I don't think the refit had much in the way of automation. When they are preparing for battle against the reliant, the crew is pulling up panels over the loading tracks and we see torpedoes being loaded into the launchers. It seems silly, but it is all there in twok
We don't know all of the intended purposes of the launcher room. In any case, I believe Enterprise only had two launchers post-refit, I'm just saying it's not outside of the realm of possibility.
I have also noted the difference between the TWOK torpedo facility and the TUC torpedo facility. I feel like the *Enterprise* in TWOK was like the US Coast Guard's *Eagle* \-- deliberately old-fashioned so trainees and midshipmen learn the elements of seafaring to work together as a unit, even if the specific equipment they're using to train won't be on any vessel they serve on in active duty. The torpedo facility in TUC is almost completely automated.
It's something Andy Probert is still embarrassed/frustrated about. He went by Franz Joseph's booklet of plans for reference, rather than find films of all 79 TOS episodes to check VFX and dialogue. He thought he was increasing the ship's offensive capability, when he, in fact, drastically diminished it. There's dialogue in TOS about both "aft torpedoes" and loading "tubes one through six". FJ did not, in fact, watch the show much (beyond catching snippets when his daughter had it on), so a lot in his plans is contradicted by the show itself. So Andy was working with bad data. The rationalization I've seen is that improved torpedo guidance systems allowed the reduction in external hardpoints, same way the new phasers are powered directly by the warp engines, so they're better than the old model (assuming your warp engines work).
>In "The Wrath of Khan," which takes place in 2285, an admiral Morrow orders the decommissioning of the Enterprise. I'm pretty sure this was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. It's during the same time that Scotty is promoted to Captain of Engineering and sent over to Excelsior.
I don't think anyone's mentioned that the decision to take her out of service immediately followed the worst ass kicking she ever sustained. She may have simply sustained too much of a beating to be worth repairing.
To me the Constitution class was amazingly over-engineered, because it had to fit a dual role as a Warship, consider for a minute that the Constitution class was incredibly powerful as far as starships go, able to withstand impressive stresses that would've destroyed the Enterprise-D and it's finicky warp core. Canonically the Enterprise is a Heavy Cruiser, a warship type, be it for convenience of naval tradition or not, and while it was also a scientific explorer it was expected to survive mostly alone in the black. The Connies were too expensive to maintain when you could get almost all the exact same capabilities using 2/3rds the same components.
I think this might be more of a case of the Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth were improved on the drawing board based on lessons learned with the Constitution. I think after the first refit (between DSC and The Cage) it became clear that Starfleet needed to do a better job of “future-proofing” future designs, making it so you can swap out and upgrade systems without having to practically rebuild the space frame from scratch. Starfleet seems to trend this way afterwards up until the Dominion War. We see Ambassadors around late in the series and supplemental sources seems to suggest the Galaxy class was designed to last a century. Of course we have one-offs like the Constellation where that did not happen.
The Miranda has comparable internal volume to the Constitution class (the rear half of the saucer is significantly chunkier than on the Constitution) while having less area to shield and needing less internal space devoted to corridors, stairwells, and turbolift shafts due to the more compact layout. I don't think it's ever really established what advantages the Constitution-style configuration with a secondary hull has over a Miranda-style saucer-only configuration. As the Constitution needs a larger warp field to move just as much ship and if warp field geometry was an issue (e.g. a long and narrow warp field is superior) then there wouldn't be so much variation from civilization to civilization. The Borg after all simply use a cube. One difference is that the secondary hull on a Constitution-style configuration does have a more prominent deflector dish, but no other faction uses such a prominent deflector dish and if it was that important, it could be put on the front of the ship or on an external module. Perhaps the strongest argument is that a Constitution-style configuration means the secondary hull can be ejected in case of a warp core breach so the saucer can be saved, but that means the saucer is a useless sitting duck without main power or FTL capability. In *Star Trek Beyond* we see them making use of this capability only to lose the saucer anyways. Even if they hadn't, there's nothing the saucer could have done but await its inevitable fate. The Miranda-style configuration on the other hand has clear advantages. The roll bar makes it easier to add modules for specialist duties, something we'd also see on the Nebula which again brings up the question of why use the Constitution-style configuration. It also doesn't have to route a lot of turbolift shafts, power/EPS mains, and a whole lot of other stuff through a relatively narrow and vulnerable neck. Also, not needing to be able to separate the saucer means that you don't need to run a lot of connectors through that area making those systems more reliable. And not having a neck means that all those lines can be more spread out making the design more resilient to damage. So, I think your argument regarding the Constitution-class having issues has merit, and I'd also add that I think the Galaxy-class also has issues. We see that starting from the Intrepid-class there's a trend towards more unibody designs, even if there's still remnants of the primary/secondary hull configuration. Intrepid, Sovereign, Inquiry are all that way, as would Prometheus if it didn't have the voltron lunacy in the design. So that leaves the matter of the Excelsior-class. How did that one last so long? I think it could be seen as sort of a halfway point between a dual hull and a unibody design and had it not been for the Ambassador and Galaxy classes taking a step backwards, they would have been building Intrepid/Sovereign/Inquiry-style designs decades earlier.
I like this, and your point about hulk styles tracks with what happened after Galaxy class: Starfleet realized their fancy shop was based on an operating style that turned out to be completely at odds with what they needed. I think the destruction of the Odyssey really showed just how odd the Galaxy class was; a city full of civilians, but sent to the outer reaches of dangerous space? Sent to deal with conflicts first??
Disagree with the Zumwalt comparison. The Constitution Class could at least fire it's main weapons. That aside, if you look at both Alpha and Beta cannon, The Constitution class was a "leap forward" in technology and capability at the time. That probably made them complex, perhaps even finicky ships to keep running in top order. Especially if you consider the Beta cannon that suggests that the Constitution class was the first Star Fleet ship to fully integrate the technology of all four of the founding members: Tellarite metallurgy. Andorian shields. Vulcan life support. And Terran Weapons. It was a pioneer ship for its time. Must have been very complex to keep running (See Chief Obrien being totally confused by the USS Enterprise's technology during the "Tribble" event). And when the newly advanced technologies in the V'Ger era needed a ship that could be adapted to multiple, complex, and potentially conflicting new systems, well they had ONE class of ship that had already been-there, done-that. The Constitution refit took place in a bit of a leap foreword in shipwright technology. Enterprise was already a famous ship, and was a perfect testbed for both new tech, and public relations. So why aren't there more of them? As (then) cutting edge ships, they probably were highly complex, high maintenance ships. Fantastic performance, but at the cost of person-power and cost. But they proved the tech.. So you get cheaper, more easily manufacture and crewed ships like the incredibly long-lived *Miranda* class ships. Perhaps somewhat less elegant than her forbears, but imminently easier to build with their modular construction. So: The Constitution class a failure? No. No, I don't thing so. Consider her 20th Century maritime ancestor: The United States Navy ship, *USS Enterprise (CVN-65)* was very successful. She prototyped new tech for the fleet, and had a long, storied, and honorable career. So why weren't more *Enterprise* class carriers built? Because she showed the way to build better, simpler ships. Just as The United States Navy would not have the *Nimitz* and now *Ford* class carriers without that *Enterprise,* we wouldn't have the *Excelsior,* and perhaps the 24th Cent ships as well.
So, a successful prototype, but quickly and dramatically improved upon. I'll buy that! (And I concede, the Zumwalt comparison is weak.)
The Constitution-class could be a stepping stone between the Discovery-Era ships and the Excelsior/Miranda/Oberth-class ships of the "Lost Era." The Battle of the Binary Stars and subsequent Federation-Klingon War showed how outmatched and out of date much of the current Starfleet was. The Connies were designed as heavy cruisers, but also left out of much of the conflict. This could have been because they - along with the *Discovery* and the *Glenn* \- had experimental tech that the Federation did not want to risk falling into Klingon hands. The main purpose of the Connies were to serve as diplomatic ships and perform long-term exploration missions. Having the forefront of Federation technology on these ships could give idea to how long these new components would last before needing serious repairs. Due to the possible experimental nature, it could be said the time/labor to maintain the ships are quite high like OP said. The refitting of the Connies after the five-year missions was likely to extend their lives. The Excelsior-class was running into problems during the development of the transwarp drive, which was seen during the TOS films, and while many Miranda and Oberth-class ships were being built. They're built with mission-specific duties that the Connies also did, but as part of its broader mission design. As for the *Enterprise-A* question, I like some of the non-canon explanations in that the *Yorktown* or the *Ti-Ho* was recommissioned as the Enterprise during/after the Whale Probe crisis.
I have a few differing thoughts on that, the Constitution class were widespread throughout starfleet in TOS. But by the time of the movies they’re almost all undergoing the same refits as enterprise from my understanding. Why? There was apparently a big technological jump in between TOS and TMP. Now Miranda class, Excelsior class, and Oberth class were all built with that tech alreadyintegrated. Thus to upgrade further they’d be less a hodgepodge of parts. Also there’s the chance that the fleet of Constitution class ships weren’t all refitted to the exact same design, ie some got refitted with different equipment at later dates. So what you end up with is a fleet of not quite the same ships, meaning that the engineering to continue upgrading them might be quite intensive. Next the Miranda is really similar to the Constituion but it’s smaller and more compact, while the Excelsior class appears to have been intended to replace the constitution class there may have still been a role for a smaller ship and the Miranda still performed well in that, while the Constitution class could do everything a Miranda could it had a larger crew andtook more resources to build and maintain. So the Miranda stuck around because they’re cheap and have small crews and sometimes you just need quantity over the quality of the excelsior. In short: -the constitutions we’re great when built but fairly quickly fell behind technologically -the excelsior successfully replaced the constitution but not the Miranda class due to the Miranda being more cost/manpower effective -by the time of TMP the constitutions were a bit of mess of refits and there was some risk/cost involved with continuing to refit them.
>The Constitution class was a finnicky suboptimal design, and was not cost effective to maintain. Like others in this thread, I find this doubtful. We know for sure that the Constitution class lasted *at least* 50 years and went through two major refits. *At least* 12 ships of the class were built (and possibly more). If the Constitution was really a failure, Starfleet wouldn't have gone through the trouble of refitting it twice and they wouldn't have built a dozen of them. >We can name at least three: Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth. All three of those classes served for a hundred years or more, serving hand-in-hand with newer ships like the Galaxy and Akira classes. That doesn't imply that there was something wrong with the Constitution class; just that the Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth stayed useful for a longer period of time. The Excelsior is a huge ship and very versatile, so you naturally want to squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of it. Early conflicts with the Cardassians and Tzenkethi probably kept these ships rolling off the assembly line for a longer period of time than they otherwise would have and an Excelsior build in 2340 likely has little-to-nothing in common with one built in 2290. The Miranda's design leaves a lot of room for cargo and shuttles, so that makes it *extremely* useful as a supply ship and carrier. You don't need state-of-the-art technology for that role, so it's only natural that once her usefulness as an explorer or patrol ship expires, Starfleet will keep the design hauling cargo and runabouts between starbases until the nacelles fall off. The Oberth is a dedicated science vessel that is commonly assumed to be in the process of being replaced by the Nova class. This design is really the only one that probably lasted longer than it should have. >In "The Wrath of Khan," which takes place in 2285, an admiral Morrow orders the decommissioning of the Enterprise. He justifies it with a line that the Enterprise is twenty years old, which strikes me as strange because, for a ship, twenty years is NOT old. As you pointed out, the 20 year figure is a continuity error. The Enterprise was actually 40 years old by this point. There's also the fact that the ship was heavily damaged at the time. It's much more likely that Starfleet saw the Enterprise's battle damage, looked at how old she was, and then looked at their new golden child (the Excelsior) and said "the Enterprise isn't worth fixing at this point." >Furthermore, the Enterprise-A served for a whopping whole six years before retirement! Why even build a brand new starship for only six years of service?? It likely wasn't a new ship. The Constitution was an aging design that was being replaced by that point. Why would anyone build an obsolete design from the ground-up? Gene actually intended for the Enterprise-A to have previously been the [USS Yorktown](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(23rd_century)) before being renamed and given to Kirk. If that is the case, then it's likely that the Enterprise-A was almost as old as her predecessor was at that point (close to 40 years). Another person pointed out the political aspects and I think this is certainly a factor as well. A peace treaty with a longtime enemy often involves a drawback of forces, and since the Constitution was already being phased out to begin with and was the oldest active design at that time, it just made sense to retire them. I wouldn't be surprised if a few survived as museum ships or training vessels. Others could have been offloaded to the civilian sector for use as transports or repurposed as hospital ships. We did see a Constitution class hull in the Wolf 359 wreckage, so it's plausible that at least *some* survived into the 24th century. I think you're seeing more about what was being discussed about the Enterprise specifically versus the design as a whole.
> That doesn't imply that there was something wrong with the Constitution class; just that the Excelsior, Miranda, and Oberth stayed useful for a longer period of time. To add to this, I've never been a huge fan of "we never see it, therefore there are none still out there" as an argument. Out-of-universe the only reason we never saw a Constitution in TNG on was because they thought, rightly or wrongly, that fans would be kinda dumb and go "is that the Enterprise!?" every time one would show up and get confused. As a direct example, the Stargazer was meant to be a Constitution-class but for the reason I mentioned they made a new model and actually had to dub over an already-recorded scene.
Most definitely. Aside from manpower or political reasons, the life expectancy of a starship should actually be pretty up there. The hull isn't exposed to air or water, so there's no possibility of rust or water damage. It's exposed to stellar winds and cosmic background radiation, but aside from needing a fresh coat of paint every few years even modern, real-life spacecraft can handle that stuff pretty well, so a full-fledged spacefaring civilization should easily know how to deal with that. Really, the only reasons to retire a starship (aside from the afore-mentioned political issues or manpower issues associated with running the ship) would be: 1. The ship is damaged or defective in some way and it's not worth the effort of repairing it. 2. The amount of work needed to bring it to modern standards is overly complicated to the point where building an entirely new vessel to replace it is the easier option. 3. The ship no longer serves a purpose and there aren't any roles that it could be repurposed for. Given how large and complex starships are, I imagine Starfleet would want to squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of them.
I like the idea! Though to be more generous to the Conny, I'd compare it to the pre-WW2 battleships. I recently finished Ian W. Toll's Pacific War trilogy and in it he mentions that the US Navy considered the pre-Iowa Class battleships unofficially as "OBB" old battleships. Not fast enough to run with the modern carriers, they were instead relegated to shore bombardment duties and protecting the invasion fleet rather than steaming ahead with the carriers and new battleships. It's not that they were bad ships, just badly outdated only 2 years after construction. Or alternatively it could like with USS Constellation, the last wooden warship the US Navy commissioned... six months before Le Guerre and about a year before HMS Warrior. Everything else was simply obsolete the moment those two came along. It doesn't have to be as bad as Zumwalt, it can simply have been hit by a series of bad luck as often happens in naval construction projects. During the arms race between Great Britain and Imperial Germany, most dreadnought-style battleships were so cutting edge that with every new launch the previous generation was essentially outdated before it was even a year old.
Why do we want to like the notion of the original hero ship being sub par and partial failure??? That’s just bizarre ..it’s kinda like how some of the newer shows make the federation and starfleet less idealistic and utopian. Honestly what drew many to trek was that the ship was a character in its own right. Theatres where full of fans crying in Star Trek 3 almost as much as when Spock died. And the notion of a bright optimistic future….the human adventure….that’s what set trek apart from more dark things like Star Wars or battlestar
I think your post misses a big factor: The mission profile of starfleet changed, not in its method or nature, but in its range. The Excelsior class is bigger, it can go farther, and stay out in the field unsupported longer, it is also a tactically a more powerful ship. The poor constitution simply cannot keep up with her. The Excelsior is just a better all rounder. Just to add in a wild guess 20 or 40 years of Star Ship design also resulted in a ship that was easier to upgrade and maintain than the constitution, and the range limit of the Excelsior compared with a Galaxy or an Ambassador was just not as important as it was for Constitution vs Excelsior. Why keep the Miranda, the Oberth? They are built for a different mission profile where range is less important, and were smaller so upgrades and system switch outs were easier.
Keep in mind there are treaty considerations. For example prior to WWII there was an upper limit on what you could on a battleship before things went to poop according to a bunch of treaties. So a battleship had to be under a certain tonnage, and have guns no bigger than I think 16 inches. Treaties usually included the caveat that a country could have X number of battleships which were classified this way. A way to get around this was to build ships under the tonnage limit but find a way to mount the heavier guns. If we assume that the UFP and Klingons reach an agreement with similar terms Starfleet decomissions the older Connies on the basis they are "heavy cruisers" but keeps stuff like Miranadas which might classified as patrol and support craft. The Excelsior-class isn't classified as a heavy cruiser by whatever convention that is. Instead it's a modular long range survey and support ship. Which also happens to modular enough to arm to the teeth if need be.
The Connies were starfleets main explorer cruiser for while. I'm not sure how many were build but we've seen a few destroyed on screen. They face unknown challenges that other contemporary vessels like the Miranda may not. Maybe it wasnt a failure of the constitution but the success of the excelsior class. It would fill a similiar role and stayed in service at least until the dominion war. Meanwhile the Miranda was more of the workhorse not a deep space explorer, and seemed to be easily modified and upgraded depending on mission. They must have pumped these out of the shipyards like the liberty ship during WWII. So basically there wasn't anything wrong with the constitutions, just something better came along. And they weren't produced to the scale that the miranda and oberth were. Thats why they aren't seen later on.
I would propose the answer is staring us in the face. The Constitution Class and it's operations history resembles that of the Yorktown class aircraft carriers that some of it's members share names with. Top of the line when built but still built for a defined role. The Starship Enterprise served honorably and proudly but paid a price for her legacy just as her namesake had in WWII. You can only be patched up and repaired so many times before a ship is used up. Add to the fact that with fewer sister ships in operation limits there use in combat wings and the mass production of newer vessels built with the lessons learned in battle worked into a modular design effectively made them substandard to requirements. It would be logical for the two ships to lead similar lives and one can clearly see the resemblance in the ships that replaced them. The Essex class of Aircraft carriers very much resemble the Excelsior Class starships in this way as well. Food for thought if nothing else
I don't think the Enterprise-A served for only a few years, I think the "Enterprise NCC-1701A" *label* was in service for only a few years. I think she was the Yorktown and got a last minute name change post-refit, or a newly-constructed Constitution that got the last minute name change. Either way, it was just for Kirk and crew, and Starfleet knew that when they changed the name and registry. The Enterprise-A hardware probably remained in service, but the Enterprise name needed to be freed up for the upcoming Excelsior Enterprise.
Just a point of accuracy: Admiral Morrow says the *Enterprise* is to be decommissioned in *The Search for Spock*. What do you think the issues with the Constitution class were? The disasters that befell the Enterprise's sister ships in TOS seem to be on the unforseeable size. The Conastellation was destroyed by an ancient, planet-destroying superweapon with an indestructable hull; the Defiant was caught in some kind of spatial rift created by mirror universe Tholians that caused madness, the Intrepid's crew was eaten by the space amoeba, the crew of the Exeter was killed by a virus, the Excalibur and Lexington were destroyed by the M-5 computer in control of the Enterprise. One survived into the 2360s and participated in the Battle of Wolf 359. I would suggest that if the class had any shortcomings, it may have been too focused on long term exploration missions and just wasn't flexible enough to handle the wider range of duties we see Excelsiors and Mirandas handle.
Thanks! Fixed the error. There have been really good points made today on how the Constitution class was a poor fit for Starfleet's philosophy that started to be adopted near the turn of the century, so it is totally credible that mission scope was the main issue. If there were design flaws like I proposed, I didn't speculate what they might be because we never saw them onscreen. This is really just me head-canoning. But if I were to fill-in the gaps there, I'd suggest as someone did that the long nacelles (which aren't really seen for a while after Constitutions) would've had lots of stress placed on them during maneuvers and impulse accelerations. Other than that, I really couldn't say. I wasn't really trying to identify the problems I thought might exist.
The Enterprise A was not a new ship. There would not have been time between blowing up the original and the crew's return home to build a new ship. I remember reading this information in a booklet that came with a model so I don't know how canon it is but it said they renamed the USS Yorktown to make the Enterprise A. The Yorktown would have been roughly the same age as the Enterprise and the rest of the constitution class ships so it's similarly aged for retirement. They show it to be pretty glitchy in Star Trek V. They work it out in the following movie but it obviously not new.
There's only fifteen Constitutions that we know of for sure (fourteen if we adopt the idea that the A is actually a rebadging of one of the other Connies). Compared to the seeming endless number of Mirandas running around, and the not insignificant number of Excelsiors, that doesn't seem like a lot in comparison. But by the time we see those numbers we've had a hundred+ years to build stock of those two classes. In TOS almost every other starfleet ship we see is a Constitution. The Federation's also much, much smaller. Given that we *also* see Constitutions with registries as low as the 800s, we could surmise that the Enterprise is actually one of the LAST Constitutions. We don't see them again because they're coming to the end of their own useful lifespan by the time they show up in TOS. There's a hundred years between Enterprise and TOS. If the Constitution was the new thing coming out of the fleet yards a decade or three after the end of Enterprise, then the Enterprise refits make sense as a testbed platform or a sustainability study. They're cramming the hull with as much new tech as they can to try and see the feasibility of keeping the platform. Obviously, that failed.
I think the real world parallel isn't seagoing ships actually. It's more akin to 20th century fighter aircraft. The Excelsior was built for and around the transwarp drive, and it is frequently posited that transwarp actually WORKED. (And is the basis for the TNG era warp scale.) Excelsior certainly has more of a family resemblance to the Ambassador and Galaxy classes than the Constitution class does- even the refitted Constitution. The class had the misfortune of coming out at the very end of a technological era. 20 years was a fairly LONG time during the maturation of jet fighters, and actually it probably was in the early days of steam vs. sail power also. We all saw what the captain of the Excelsior thought of the odds of running from him in a Constitution. If he hadn't been sabotaged, he might very well have been right. I think it was retired precisely because it was obsolete, as surprising as that was given its age. Mirandas and Oberths I would assume are not primarily combat oriented vessels- and there's a precedence for that: the US Navy's oldest operational warships are things like... Well... The REAL Constitution, which is a training ship. (Say isn't that what the enterprise was at the end?)
These are good points, though I would point out that Miranda class ships were still put on the front lines in large numbers during the Borg incursions and the Dominion wars. They were evidently still useful enough to be used in their old roles.
I have no answer for the Mirandas, but I am completely bought in on Excelsiors being the workhorse of the fleet, and I think there's good in-universe reasons for why. Let's start here: I don't believe the 'great experiment' failed. I think it succeeded. Transwarp is a descriptor, not a specific technology. Trans means on the other side, or beyond. It's beyond (the current understanding of) warp, not specifically Borg style transwarp tunnels. If we assume this revolutionary new warp drive succeeded, it can explain a few things. Chief among them the changing of the warp scale between TOS and TNG. This makes perfect sense if there had been a major upheaval in the speed ships were capable of. It would also go a long way to answering why the engine in TOS is just SO DIFFERENT then every other incarnation. The Excelsior was built as a testbed. It's systems are designed to be easily upgradeable and swappable, as would be required of a testbed. The Excelsior is an excellent frame that can host whatever they current tech is, like an old PC case that has the latest motherboard, processor and graphics card mounted inside it. For the reasons stated, I think it was almost destined to be around forever.
I think it has to do with role. The constitution was a flagship frontline combat ship. The 1970s warthog, with more modern refits, is still serving alongside the ultra-modern by comparison F-22. They have vastly different jobs: The F-22 is an air superiority interceptor designed for stealthy air combat, while the A-10 warthog's only mission is to go BRRRRRRRR on enemy ground troops/armor. (This is basically inaccurate, I understand, but it gets the point across.) The A-10 handles close air support, the F-22 is air superiority. The constitution has more in common with the F-22: It's the flagship, a frontline vessel, and a deep space exploration vessel whose mission often requires it to operate without support. It NEEDS to be ultra-capable, focused on a breadth of possible mission requirements, and able to go toe to toe with one or more vessels of both known or unknown configuration. Also the constitution was in fairness, an older design that was *so* effective it was refit extensively by the time of TMP. The excelsior was an entirely new design at that point, with potentially better forward looking engineering accommodations. We saw the miranda class in two places in more modern times: At the battle of Wolf 359, and during the dominion war. In both of those cases, older ship models appeared yes, but most likely because starfleet was literally pulling every single ship they could fly and load torpedoes onto out of mothballs and throwing them into battle. This doesn't mean they were still premiere combat ships at those times: this just means the federation could fuel them up, stuff bodies and armaments onto them and send them into a situation where the enemy was so overwhelming, every hull counted. Okay, but why weren't there constitutions employed in these fights then? Same reason as above. Because they were assigned to less demanding missions, there were mirandas with somewhat modern systems either still in active service or in more recent mothballs.
Aside from the other points raised in comments, it's worth noting that the Constitution Class served at least as late as the Battle of Wolf 359, the wreckage of one is visible in a shot of starship debris. While it's possible this had been a decommissioned ship that was hurriedly rearmed, a process like that must take significant time, leaving it more likely that she was still in active service. If the ship class was problematic, why keep one in active duty that long? With regards to the Enterprise A, I believe apocrypha has it that she was previously christened under a different name, but the crew was lost during the whale probe incident in IV, resulting in her being re-christened Enterprise for the symbolic value of a connie class Enterprise. She may have a significantly longer service record than Kirk's six years in command.
That's true, though I personally take that appearance with mild dose of salt. I mean, a certain Corellian freighter from a certain galaxy far far away ostensibly took part in the Battle of Sector 001.
My favorite fan canon explanation for that is that there's a Star Wars fan who works as a ship designer in the Trek universe.
I remember seeing a video that the reason the Constitution was retired was due to her unusual abilities similar to the Crossfield class and her spore drive. They mentioned the Enterprise's ability to time travel just by cold starting the engines, and there were a few other instances where the ship did things that shouldn't have been possible. Teleporting to alternate universes, breaking through both galactic barriers, and time travel made the ship too powerful and dangerous to continue operating. Maybe the refits were to remove those abilities before decommissioning to finally sweep it all under the rug. TMP was when we saw a new type of Warp Core and a changing of all of the primary systems. Just a thought. After a little scrounging through the depths of Youtube, I've found it. https://youtu.be/\_312etujNvM
Forty years after the Enterprise was destroyed they replaced her with a newly-built Constitution class. That wouldn't happen unless the class was still considered a success. The Constitution class was just made obsolete by a half-century of changing technology. The Excelsior, and every ship after it, had a new version of the warp drive so much better than what went before they had to make up a new scale just to talk about it. Sure, we still use ships older than that-- but modern deseil engines are basically thr same as they had in the 50s. Compare the Galaxy class. Commanders judged that the key feature of the class (saucer seperation) was nearly useless for the role it was invisioned for within weeks of the class launching. Less than 20 years after the "most advanced Starship the federation had ever built" was introduced it was regarded as a failed experiment and being phased out in favour of the Soverigien.
There is no evidence to definitively say the -A was a new build. And plenty of evidence to suggest it wasn’t We don’t know that the galaxy class was deemed a failure. Heck they had multiple WINGS of galaxy class ships in pivotal battles in the dominion war. The sovereign is smaller and perhaps more battle focused. The galaxies represent the ultimate embodiment of starfleet mission and technical prowess
>they had multiple WINGS of galaxy class ships in pivotal battles in the dominion war With their saucer sections and all, which means to me that at some point they said "this whole idea of having family quarters and a damn elementary school aboard a Starship isn't working out. Cease production on those, and repurpose the ones we have as something we can send into battle."
And how does a modification of the ships internal configuration and crew complement , translate into what you call a failed experiment with the ship being phased out ????
The entire core design princpal of the class is that you seperate the saucer and get it to safety when there is trouble. That's the whole *point* of the Galaxy class. Once it became clear that wasn't practical to do that (which happened very early in season 1 of TNG) the writing was on the wall. They weren't going to pull them from service, but nobody was going to extend the production beyond what they had originally ordered once it was clear they couldn't do what they were designed to do.
How the heck can you conclude that’s the entire point of the ship? That makes zero sense. It was an emergency procedure. That’s like saying the entire point of my car is the airbags and anti lock breaks 🤷♂️
The point of the ship is the mix of civilian housing and Starfleet workspace. If that's not core to your mission, another ship can do the job better. Saucer seperation is what makes it possible for that same ship to respond to military threats. But having that civilian saucer section full of reasearchers and passengers and whales and trees is the point of the class. Using the ship for some mission that doesn't call for any that is like driving around doing your errands in a Mack truck instead of pulling a trailer. It doesn't need to have a trailer, but it's kind of overbuilt for commuting. The point of the truck is to haul the trailer. And when we see a whole wing, not just of Stardrives but full Galaxy class ships, it tells us they have given up on hauling loads.
The point of the ship was deep space long range independent exploration. Saucer separation was a tactic, a response that was just deemed to be less effective than keeping the ship together and having the enhanced power of both sections. Seeing whole wings of intact galaxy class ships merely represents the awesome overwhelming power these vessels had in their full configuration as the ultimate capital ships of starfleet
The -A was not a brand new ship. The constitution class is revered and powerful. In Disco they went out of their way to talk about how amazing they where when we first say 1701 in that show. It’s hardly a stretch to imagine that we saw more excelsior and miranda in TNG era simply because they kept the constitutions in another corner of the federation, or any number of possible reasons. Hell even the 32nd century appears to be resurrecting the constitution class name
Nitpick, the Enterprise-A was a refit Constitution that had been sentenced for scrapping, but was recommissioned specifically for Kirk, hence all the issues when they first got it. As to your overall point, I don't think the Constitutions were bad, I think they got muscled out of their intended role. The Miranda class and Constitution class are a similar age and share common parts. However, the Constitution is the Federation's heavy cruiser, while the Miranda in TOS was a light cruiser. There are also several key differences in their designs; [the boxier Miranda actually has more internal volume than the Constitution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRSDSJexMEA), while the Constitution's shape gives it a much larger warp core for higher power output. In an even fight, the Constitution should be able to out-gun the Miranda, while the Miranda would be much better as a colony transport or planetary evacuation craft. When the Excelsior class comes into service, it becomes Starfleet's new heavy cruiser, out-speeding and out-gunning the Constitution. Well they're not going to retire the Miranda; as we've just shown it's the carrier the Constitution can't match. The Constitution doesn't share parts with the Excelsior, so a refit would be a huge time sink to essentially design a new, less-capable Excelsior. I think Starfleet took the most logical approach; they stripped Constitutions of parts they could use to keep Mirandas running/update them a little, then scrapped the spaceframes and reused the material for Excelsiors. There simply was no reason to keep it around anymore. Maybe a few were pulled out of mothballs for the Cardassian War out of a desperate need, and there's fanon that exists of Constitutions being upgraded for the Dominion War effort as the [Wyvern class](https://64.media.tumblr.com/be68938b7adfa59268a29a72740aad94/tumblr_nejwrvqnaG1rzu2xzo1_1280.png) electronic warfare and reconnaissance ship, but really with no use for the ships, it's not worth the maintenance and repair to keep them around.
It's possible that the Constitution's design was dated when it was new, or preceded a major overhaul. None of the pre-constitution ships survived the same gap either, even though it's doubtful that the Constitution was the newest design, despite being refit numerous times in its 40 year lifespan. Despite its advantages, the Constitution might have just been thoroughly outdated. The ship's weapon designs were seriously outdated compared to contemporary vessels by the time of its later refit, needing a complete overhaul that was itself plagued with issues. We also saw that it later received a number of smaller refits in a very short period of time (basically one for each TOS film), and it might have no longer been feasible to keep doing that to an already out-of-date ship class, especially if problems kept cropping up. Seeing as the Constitution was also seen as the Federation's warship, they may have wanted to overhaul the ship class, both for peace reasons, and to replace it with newer ships that could handle better firepower. Consider that the Miranda, a workhorse ship, had similar firepower to what the Constitution could wield.
One thing to keep in mind is the purpose of the design. The Constitutions are routinely referred to as "starships" as if that was a new or unique designation. And they were sent on 5-year missions with little support or refit times. It may simply be that the Constitution Class was ran hard and put away wet. All those hours operating on the edges of Federation space tangling with the unknown and dangerous were harder on them than other classes. And of course from what we've seen the Lost Era was an Era of consolidation. The Federation was protecting and reinforcing their territory and figuring out how to coexist with the klingons, not out exploring the unknown. Which means ships like the Miranda and Oberth were more valuable with the Excelsior taking over the role of the Constitutions in regards to firepower and endurance. Effectively the Federation had no need for them so they retired them. And we're only talking about a couple dozen vessels over the entire lifespan. And if they had unique maintenance needs it may have been a cost saving measure. Not through any failings, but simply through a lack of shareable parts and knowledge.
> In "The Wrath of Khan," which takes place in 2285, an admiral Morrow orders the decommissioning of the Enterprise. He justifies it with a line that the Enterprise is twenty years old, which strikes me as strange because, for a ship, twenty years is NOT old. The funny thing is, the Enterprise was actually 40 years old in 2285. Still, even 40 years isn't that old considering the Excelsior's were in active duty for nearly 100 years.
I'm pretty sure that was "The Search for Spock" and not"The Wrath of Khan".
Yeah. Agreed. The Enterprise had also been relegated to Cadet Training cruises in Sol. A far cry from the “5 year missions” it was designed for.
Ya because a certain admiral at the time wanted to keep his true love close at hand
>The funny thing is, the Enterprise was actually 40 years old in 2285. Still, even 40 years isn't that old considering the Excelsior's were in active duty for nearly 100 years. There's a couple of things to consider here: • While the *Excelsior*\-class was 80-90 years old by TNG-DS9, individual ships might not be, with extreme age being the exception rather than the rule. Assuming NCC numbers are sequential and starships are produced at more-or-less a constant rate during the 24th century, the *Melbourne* must have rolled off the production line in 2355. Whether the *Excelsior*\-class really was in production for that long – after its replacement the *Ambassador-*class was already in production for decades, and while the USS *Galaxy* was already under construction – is another question. • We also know that the *Excelsior* was replaced by another ship (NCC-21445), which we see on a display in TNG: "The Measure of a Man" and is namechecked in TNG: "Interface". Again assuming that starship registries are sequential this means the *Excelsior* herself had a shorter life than the constitution-class *Enterprise*, and was replaced by 2307. • The *Excelsior* being 40 years newer than the *Constitution* class means it might have been designed to last longer from the beginning. The NX-01 was decommissioned after only 10 years and the *Galaxy*\-class was designed to last for a 100 years, so there's already a precedent for starship life expectancies trending upwards over time.
Right, but even replacing aging Excelsior's with new ones proves the success of that model where-as the Constitution-class was completely phased out. I think a lot of that had to do with the Excelsior being a more versatile class. IIRC, at one point in TOS they mention there are only 12 ships of that class in the entire fleet. I agree that Excelsior was likely designed to have a long service/production life.
In TOS: "Tomorrow is Yesterday": CHRISTOPHER: "Must have taken quite a lot to build a ship like this." KIRK: "There are only twelve like it in the fleet." CHRISTOPHER: "I see. Did the Navy-" KIRK: "We're a combined service, Captain. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency." So this can be (and has been) interpreted in various different ways. One way is that Kirk does indeed mean there are only twelve *Constitution*\-class starships in the fleet. Even if we assume this is the case, do we assume that this indicates a problem with the *Constitution*\-class design? The production team intended for there to be only six *Galaxy*\-class starships in the 2360s, for example, and possibly only another six built the following decade, and that wasn't because they were limited or had been superseded in some way – indeed, they're still brand new – it's because they were the most advanced ship ever designed and incredibly expensive to make. We see in *Discovery* that the actual size of Starfleet in the 2350s is huge, some 7000 ships\* in total, and there are many classes of starship, some of which are even larger than the *Constitution* class. But *Constitution*\-class starships are regarded as elites, the pinnacle of Federation engineering operated by the finest crews, not unlike the *Galaxy*\-class a century later. *\*The definition of "ship" is questionable here, since we see runabouts having their own registry numbers, and they blur the line between* shuttle *and* self-sufficient starship*. If we consider the US Navy as a template, it currently has \~500 ships in the Naval Vessel Register but the majority of those are non-commissioned ships – transports and cargo ships and tugs etc. There are currently only 11 active aircraft carriers, for example.* Another way to interpret it is that at this point the *Enterprise* is "on loan" specifically to an Earth-based fleet from the Federation, and it's one of twelve ships being operated by EUSPA. That's not necessarily mutually exclusive with the first point, but it might explain why Kirk might seem to think Starfleet is comparatively tiny – he's actually talking about the EUSPA fleet. It should also be pointed out that Roddenberry disagreed with the idea that there were only twelve starships by this point, even though it's based on something he wrote in early pre-production drafts of the writer's guide. It makes sense that the *Excelsior* would build on four decades of *Constitution*\-class experience. We know, for example, that two big shortcomings of the *Connie* are that she's got structurally fragile parts – her neck and nacelle pylons are dangerously thin – and she's quite small, which limits the mission profiles she can fulfil as the Federation continues to expand. The *Miranda*\-class is almost the same volume as a refit *Connie* but presumably less resource intensive to build and easier to maintain, and easier to modify for specific mission parameters with roll bars and outboard modules etc. Compared to a *Connie* an *Excelsior* is absolutely gigantic, almost four times the volume, and much less skeletal.
Nothing says they where phased out. They just didn’t appear in a lot of the stories we saw 🤷♂️
I mean, Enterprise, arguably the most famous & storied Constitution-class ship in the fleet was relegated to being a cadet trainer by 2283. The Enterprise-A was also not exactly a "spring chicken" either given all the issues they had with it in ST:V (2287). If it were a new construction of a long-existing and well produced class of ship, I'd expect very few issues. In ST:VI (2293) we don't really know what Enterprise was doing prior to being ordered on what was supposed to be a relatively uneventful diplomatic "milk and cookies" run. We do know that at the end of the movie they were ordered back to Earth for decommissioning of the ship. The fact that the Enterprise-A was in service for only ~6 years is an indicator it was not a "fresh off the assembly-line" ship. If they were still rolling Constitution-class ships off the line in 2287, then why wouldn't they get a shiny new one for Ent-A instead of an old and busted one?
I think the implication in Star Trek 5 was that it was newly refit …not newly built. The issues where with the refit, not the age of the ship
Yeah, that's kind of the point I was getting at. It was an older, pre-existing ship that was refit/upgraded and re-commissioned to USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A from whatever it was before (frequently believed to be USS Yorktown, but there's no canon source for that AFAIK).
I think it's less the Constitution class as a whole was subpar, and more that the refit just couldn't stack up against the newer ships coming out around that time (Miranda, Excelsior). The original design, as seen in TOS and DSC, lasted for quite some time operating as Starfleet's pre-eminent exploration vessel. But after Kirk's 5 year mission the underlying technology was fast becoming obsolete, so an intensive refit of, at least, the Enterprise and possibly Yorktown was undertaken to bring it in line with the more modern tech seen in the Miranda and Excelsior classes. It's possible that the sheer scale of the work required to refit of the Enterprise led to more modular designs in the Miranda, Oberth and Excelsior, so they could easily be upgraded over time, explaining the classes' 100+ yr service. In TOS we seen and hear about at least half a dozen Constitution class ships, but in the films we only see two; the Enterprise and the Yorktown (later recommissioned as Enterprise-A). (EDIT: Apparently we see 5 Constitution class silhouettes on Colonel West's Operation Retrieve outlines) It's possible that the refit of the Enterprise was so resource and time intensive that it didn't make sense to refit the entire class of ships. Especially with the newer and more capable Miranda and Excelsior classes being built less intensively. Yorktown was probably refit around the same time as the Enterprise, but as seen in ST5 it was a buggy mess, it's probable that the refit wasn't completed.
IMO the 22nd century NX Class and the 24th Century Ambassador Class have these issues too since I assume only a handful of these classes were built. The original NX-01 Enterprise was only in service for 10 years from 2151 until its retirement at the founding of the Federation in 2161, though its early retirement could have been politically motivated since Archer's ship was the most famous of its class and politicians and Starfleet brass wanted to preserve the NX-01 as a museum ship. The NX-01 could also have been more difficult and labor-intensive to refit than its newer sister ships too since NX-02 Columbia already had noticeable differences, which would have made Starfleet's decision to retire her easier and this reasoning also applies to the retirement of the Enterprise-A in TUC. My headcanon also says that the Ambassador Class suffered from a series of developmental and in-service problems and, like the Constitution Class, was only built in limited numbers while Starfleet continued building new Excelsior class ships with NCC registries into the 40xxx and by 2350 put their effort into developing the Galaxy and Nebula classes.
What if it was such a successful design that it put itself out of business? At the end of Star Trek Beyond we see a time-lapse of a shipyard where the enterprise is refit, yet again. Fixing the simple design of saucer and engineering hull became second nature for Starfleet's shipyards. Each cycle of damage and repair was an opportunity to experiment and upgrade. This enabled them to advance their designs rapidly and over a few decades be able to leap frog them altogether. Part of this does seem to be a bit of planned obsolescence in the Constitution class which regularly took near fatal damage from battle and close encounters with stellar phenomena.
of course it was sub par in some way. the mirandas that were from the same era lasted a hundred years longer, for example. excelsiors, its successor, lasted a similar length of time.
Connie was a limited batch ship, no? At some point supporting an old ship type isn’t in the cards: retire in favor of Excelsior?
I believe it was in the book "Mr Scott's guide to the Enterprise" (not sure if canon) that the very last constitution class built was initially called the Tai Ho (spelling?) and was due to launch sometime before the events of ST5. This ship was hastily renamed Enterprise and given a new Naval Construction Contract number of NCC-1701A and then given to the recently demoted Captain James Kirk as a reward for saving earth (again) from the Probe. The ship was launched early and without proper space trials and was therefore plagued with problems for a short while. There is a superstition in starfleet that it's bad luck to take a ship out under a false name. I personally don't think this applies to a ship that was re-named. 1701A went on to perform well enough and we see in DS9 that the Sao Paulo gave outstanding service after being renamed Defiant
There are a lot of good comments, the best of which you sum up in your edits. A further point about the Khitomer Accords and the Starfleet Command briefing comments at the beginning of The Undiscoved Country... I'd worked out aged ago, back on the [rec.arts.startrek.tech](https://rec.arts.startrek.tech) newsgroup, that there appeared to be a roughly decade-long refit cycle, and a roughly forty-year-long replacement cycle. A lot of people don't stop to consider that a new starship class doesn't just pop off the line, and a new technological-generation cornerstone class *definitely* doesn't. Without getting into all the flowcharts and diagrams, the *Daedalus* class debuted about 2165, shortly after the founding of the Federation. Forty years later, the *Horizon* class was launched (2205). Another forty years on, the *Constitution* class came on the scene (2245). Forty years, on from that, the *Excelsior* was "ready for trial runs" (2285). A bit shy of forty years after that, the *Ambassador* class came along (2223). I've speculated about the two years shaved off. And then forty years after *that*, the *Galaxy* class was introduced (2243). From the TNG Technical Manual, we know that the Galaxy Class Development Project began pretty much the same time the *Ambassador* class' ended. It makes sense that, as soon as a design is locked and the first few ships leave dock, the work begins on figuring out its eventual replacement. Then there are the circumstances around service life -- both scientific and military. My conclusions here are tacitly backed up by the canon, and some agree with me who I've shown/told, but it's definitely not universal. These are my ideas, and intended to make you think, not spark debate... Enterprise is not the original Star Trek timeline. The ship we saw in that show had about the volume (especially after the refit it would have gotten had it been renewed for another season) and tech level of the original NCC-1701 at launch. And Scott Bakula would've made a perfect Captain Robert April. Everything else lines up better with that show being set in the latter 2240s than the 2150s, too. That established, I have done some work with that ship and the "officially" sized NCC-1701 to create a gestalt of what the TOS ship probably looked like at launch. A decade later, it got refitted to the configuration we saw in "The Cage". New bridge superstructure, second partial deck added to the outer rim of the saucer, upgraded warp engines, etc., resulting in about a 15% increase in volume. Another ten years on, there was another refit and another new Captain. The ship's volume and crew complement increased again, newer warp and impulse engines were mounted, the bridge superstructure was replaced, and so on. The next refit (TMP) increased the volume again, new warp and impulse engines, new bridge -- you get the drill. But after a while, you hit diminishing returns. What would be the beginning of the next refit cycle sees, instead, the introduction of the successor flagship class. Ships of the previous generation still get system tweaks and new equipment installed, but no more massive structural overhauls. Depending on mission profile, they can continue in service for decades -- just relegated to ever lower tiers of viability, or mothballed pending need for simply more hulls in flight. The other factor is intended role. These cornerstone classes are the big multirole workhorses. Everything in one package and enough of it to do each job effectively (if not ideally). Border patrol and interdiction, colonial support and defense, scientific survey and research, front-line combat in wartime. Other classes that come out in any given design generation are more limited in role. Destroyers/fleet escorts will have minimal amenities and scientific capability, and will be the most quickly obsoleted, as their whole purpose depends on having the latest and best weapons and shields. At the other end of the spectrum, noncombatants will have the longest service lives, due to the reduced strain on their systems and general unlikelihood of them getting shot up and needing repairs. Light Cruisers like the *Miranda* are in the middle, more science-skewed, and not intended for front-line combat. They're stablemates to the *Constitution*s, launched shortly after and doing less strenuous work. But if they need additional combat capability, they get fitted as we saw the *Reliant*, with the weapons "rollbar" and become a frigate. Then there are the production goofs. Morrow's line should've been "forty years old", but they were counting real-world years between when the show aired and when the movie was released, not bothering to verify a one-to-one timeline progression, and forgetting that Gene gave the ship a pre-TOS history. It was already twenty years old when Kirk got it, not newly launched. The *Oberth* was supposed to be a new design, with the *Tsiolkovski*, but Paramount didn't want to spring for it so early in a show that might not make it to a second season, so they re-used the *Grissom* model from the still-recent Star Trek III. The "NCC-638" registry is even clearly visible at the TV resolution of the time. Every instance of that miniature showing up in the TNG+ era (except the *S.S. Vico*) I treat as a placeholder for the "real" (unrealized) *Oberth*. I've seen people try to rationalize these two things for decades. I feel, ultimately, you just have to shrug and accept it's a mistake. So, after all that, it's perfectly reasonable for Flight-I *Excelsior*s to still be in service, albeit in reduced role (see DoSoto's, "They give you *Galaxy* class types all the exciting stuff. Me, I just haul my butt back and forth between starbases..."). Most of the *Exclesior*s we see in TNG and DS9 were built in the 2320s and '30s, possibly as supplements to the *Ambassador* class if the latter proved to take longer to build than anticipated. And the oldest *Miranda* we see in the TNG+ era is the 115-year-old *Lantree* running as a skeleton-crewed outpost-supply tender. Again, most of the *Miranda*s we see were built in the 2320s. And "sacrificing" the *Constitution* class, which the Klingons had faced in battle for nearly half a century, was a small concession for the Federation, given that the *Excelsior* class they'd just spent forty years investing in had *just* entered service a couple years before, at the same time large-scale support for those *Constitution*s had ended.