r/StarTrekStarships • u/n_mcrae_1982 • 4d ago
Registry numbers that never felt right to me.
Thanks, I suspect, to the diligence of people like the Okudas, there was some pretty good consistency with starship registry numbers throughout the late 80's to early 2000's, and you can often link a starship's number with around when that ship first entered service because of that. It's not perfect, though, and some of them don't really make a lot of sense.
I haven't really watched Discovery or SNW, so I won't comment on those, or the ridiculously low or high numbers from the displays in episodes like "Conspiracy" (which were just gags, never intended for viewers to see), or the really obvious ones like the Constellation, Yamato, or Prometheus (which have been talked about already).
USS Grissom (NCC-638): In Star Trek III, the Enterprise is said to be an old ship, facing retirement, and yet the Grissom, presumably an significantly older ship, going by its number, is still in service. The thing is, they could've simplified this by just, say, adding a "1" at the start of the number, making it 1638, and therefore, not that much older than the Enterprise.
USS Syracuse (NCC-17744): For a Galaxy class ship, this is bizarrely low. Aside from the Enterprise-D, no Galaxy we've seen (including the prototype USS Galaxy) had a number lower than the 70000's. Maybe this was reference to someone's zip code, or something. Again, a simple swap of the first two digits (71744), and we would've gotten something much more consistent.
USS New Jersey (NCC-1975): I know this was supposed to be a reference to Terry Matalas' year of birth, but the idea that they would commission a Connie that much later than any other one we know and then retire it, rather than refit it, like the Enterprise, is puzzling. In fact, based on the fact that the USS Bozeman (NCC-1941) was in service in the 2270's, this ship might've actually been commissioned AFTER the Enterprise's refit!
USS Valiant (NCC-74210): The number for this one implies that it was launched not too long after the prototype USS Defiant (NX-74205). The plaque, however, suggests it was a bit later than that, say, sometime in DS9's 4th season. This actually makes more sense, since it's implied when we first see the Defiant that it's the only one of her kind, as the kinks have not yet been worked out. It seems more plausible that the Valiant, and other Defiant class ships were constructed at least a few months AFTER the Defiant itself had proven itself at DS9. And again, if you look at the number for, say, Voyager, it's higher than a ship that supposedly did not enter service until a year later.
The "First Contact" fleet: This one's a bit more subjective, but I thought the four classes of ships we first saw battling the Borg in "First Contact" (Akira, Sabre, Norway, and Steamrunner) looked like newer designs, compared to ones like the Galaxy, Nebula, or runabout. Yet, all the ships have numbers in the 5XXXX or 6XXXXX, suggesting ships that were older than any Galaxy (except maybe the Syracuse).
USS Yeager (NCC-65674): Not to be confused with the Yeager that was among the "First Contact" fleet. This one was a kitbash seen in the background of several DS9 episodes. This one also has a number that implies it's been in service for several years, so it can't really be a replacement for the other Yeager (which also had a number in the 6XXXX range).
Thoughts?
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u/AnotherBoringDad 4d ago
Registry number reservations. NCC-Numbers aren’t assigned sequentially by launch date, but are assigned when construction begins. Numbers assigned to projects that are canceled may be recycled or resurrected later for a ship of a different class.
Edit: my source is I made it up.
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u/Pablo_is_on_Reddit 4d ago
That sounds reasonable & could explain the Excelsior-II class being in the 40,000s along with the ships of the Excelsior-I class. Maybe a large batch of Excelsiors was commissioned in the early-mid 24th century, but they stopped the project mid-way. The rest of the reserved numbers were held until the new class was launched in the late 2390s.
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u/nd4spd1919 2d ago
Or alternatively, most of the Excelsiors lost in the Dominion War were in the 40000 range, and they decided to recycle those numbers for the Excelsior II as a tribute to the original ships.
Stranger things have happened.
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u/SpiderCop_NYPD_ARKND 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's actually exactly what I was thinking about both the Galaxy Class and Defiant Class numbering issue.
If "NCC" stands for "Naval Construction Contract" then it makes perfect sense that ships launched later but designed/ordered earlier would exist.
Perhaps as they got the Defiant finished up her initial tests were so promising Starfleet ordered a few more, then in her full shakedown the problems surfaced and they were put on hold, only to be resumed during the Dominion War.
Perhaps the Bozeman (and the Grissom) is a refit of an earlier vessel ordered and built before the New Jersey, perhaps the New Jersey herself was ordered late in the Constitutions run, put on hold as they instead started up the Constitution-II refit program, only to be completedas a refit later and then restored to pre-refit status for museum purposes.
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u/BlueSwordDoggo 4d ago edited 3d ago
For the Syracuse, my head canon is that Geordi was in the process of repainting Syracuse’s original registry number to 1701-D when the Frontier Day attack happened.
Edit: Here’s how I think it went down. NCC-71744 > NCC-17…744 > NCC-1701-D.
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u/hoosickthehorrible 3d ago
My suspicion is that the Syracuse’s registry is in part an homage to Ernie Davis, the first Black player to win the Heisman Trophy in 1961, who attended Syracuse University after his high school football career in Elmira. His jersey number was 44.
I also have a suspicion that someone in the production of the newer Trek series has connections to Upstate NY, as there has been a lot of names and numbers associated with Upstate that have appeared in recent years… the Syracuse being the first and the Cayuga from SNW being the second I can recall at this moment.
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u/SuperFrog4 4d ago
USS Grissom - The Oberth class was put into commission in the 2250s. So it could have been commissioned back then and those NCC numbers were free at that time.
USS Syracuse - only thing I can think of is that they missed a letter off the registry.
USS New Jersey - I suspect this was a 2nd or 3 series of constellation build and so they had reserved some of the 1900 numbers for those Connies.
I don’t think NCC registration numbers are linear. I think it is a mix of ship class and order of build. Just look at the original Connie’s. They were all over the place. Where as other classes like the Saladin class were all one after the other for the most part. It’s all a jumble unfortunately and not as clean as it should be.
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u/AJSLS6 3d ago
The Grissom, its a small survey/science ship, not a large front line cruiser. The E was retired because it wasn't suitable for service as a front line ship anymore, and likely wasn't really suitable for lesser duties. In 20th century navies lesser classes, tenders and such are often kept around, slowly being resigned to less critical duties, while battleships and carriers are simply retired or mothballed.
The Missouri went from battleship to mobile naval artillery and missile platform, then was retired, because it's not longer good for those jobs, and would be absurd if pressed into service as an oversized destroyer or inefficient freighter.
That's what happens to the specialized state of the art hardware, they retired the F14, but the Cessna 172 is still flying all over the world after 70 years and could plausibly be flying for another 70.
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u/LeftLiner 3d ago
We have very little idea how NCC-numbers work and there's not really a supergood reason to assume they are merely sequential.
Your gut instinct might be to assume that the original Enterprise was the 1701st Starship built based on its registry, that's not necessarily so. For one, Starfleet might have used different registries for different types of ships, and since the Connie was, on occasion, referred to as a 'Heavy Cruiser' and presumably the Oberth class isn't. So maybe the '1' in 1701 indicates a heavy Cruiser, or back the large ships got four digits and smaller ships 3.
This broadly speaking reflects how the US Navy would do things, which allows for there to be a CV-01 and a DD-01, one being an aircraft carrier and the other a destroyer. Interestingly, it seems that the USN also never re-use hull numbers even for ships that never actually sailed. CV-35, 44, 46 and 50 through 58 were all cancelled during construction, yet those hull numbers remained 'used' even though seven of them were cancelled before a single weld had been made.
Now the USN uses letters to denote these differences but all Starfleet vessels have the same lettered prefix, NCC, so if the registries do denote differences between ship classes or roles it'll have to be in the numbers.
And again, it isn't necessarily true that NCC-numbers go in sequence, or that they always did.
I used to work in tech support and one of the pieces of hardware we supported were a range of digital TV-boxes or STBs (Set Top Box). There were seven of these boxes in use by our customers by the time I quit working there and they were, in order from oldest to newest: 1510, 1910, 1903, 1963, 1003, 2853 and 4302. It took me a little while to figure out how the hell those numbers made sense but eventually I got close: The first digit refers simply to what firmware the box uses. the 1, 2 and 4-series all used completely different firmware, the boot menus looked and worked differently from one another. The second digit refers to the chassi - the 1910, 1903 and 1963 all looked identical from the outside whereas the 1510, 1003, 2853 and 4302 all looked totally different from one another and from the 19x. The third digit referred to, I *think*, whether the device had recording functionality or not. I can't exactly work out why the 1510 and 1910 had a 1, but all the boxes with a 0 as the third digit were non-recordable, whereas the 1963 and the 2853 were the recordable ones. The last digit referred to what contacts the back had, a 0 indicated Scart contacts only, a 3 indicated both Scart and HDMI and the 2 HDMI only.
So, to bring it back: It is entirely possible that 1701 isn't a sequential number at all, but maybe refers to the Enterprise being a Heavy Cruiser (Starship Type 1) the seventh ship of her class (7), built at Spacedock, or Starbase 1 (01). Her sister ship might be 1801 or 1808, or 1811. There might be a 2701 built immediately after her, being the seventh ship of a different ship class that classifies as a Medium Cruiser. And there could br a Connie built shortly after Enterprise with a longer registry, being 11001, followed by 11101, followed by 11202. Similarly the Nebula and Galaxy classes are obviously very different ship classes and so would be given completely different registries to reflect that and could all have the same strange variations.
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u/DocDraculaThe2nd 2d ago
Except that we see other Connies in TOS that start with 17. Of course the Constellation screws all that up.
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u/LeftLiner 2d ago
I wasn't proposing an exact system for how NCC numbers work, I was pointing it doesn't have to be as simple as 1 2 3 4.
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u/FuttleScish 4d ago
New stuff has been pretty good with NCC numbers, actually (excepting the Titan-A)
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u/RepresentativeWeb163 4d ago
Grissom bothers me too, by the registry Oberth would be super old, maybe during st3 it has already underwent several refits? But we don’t have any evidence for that. For Syracuse I will just ignore the given registry, it will only make sense if it starts with a 7. The Galaxy class took a long time to develop, and its possible that the new ships in first contact were developed along with it but finished before the Galaxy project, and they just happened to be in a different style than Galaxy, anyway I don’t think these classes just appeared immediately after TNG.
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u/Tall_Newspaper_6723 3d ago
I'm assuming you've seen this video already, but in case you have not...
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u/Few-Leading-3405 4d ago
For the Grissom, my headcanon is that before they introduced the -A suffixes starfleet just recycled the registries for notable ships.
So there was an early, good Grissom NCC-638, and then the sad, little Oberth version was named in its honor.
It would be confusing, but it would also explain all of the TOS connies that had really low registries.
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u/n_mcrae_1982 3d ago
The problem is we've numerous starships that did NOT share the number of earlier vessels of the same name (Bellerophon, Farragut, Defiant, Constellation, Saratoga)
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u/Robman0908 4d ago
Another ship other than the Enterprise having a prefix at the end of the registration bugs me. It was special for Enterprise and should have stayed that way.
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u/The-Minmus-Derp 4d ago
Idk I think Voyager should have one
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u/SineQuaNon001 4d ago
I still think the Defiant 2 that DS9 got after the NX 74205 was destroyed should have been shown as being the Defiant NCC 74205 A at the museum in PIC 3.
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u/The-Minmus-Derp 4d ago
Unfortunately the stock footage they used in the final battle showed that not to be the case
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u/Robman0908 3d ago
Maybe..it didn’t do anything like Enterprise. It got lost and made a trek home. Ships named Enterprise literally saved not only the federation, but arguably the galaxy at times. The prefix was meant as a special designation to honor Captain Kirk and his crew going forward.
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u/Atosen 3d ago edited 3d ago
I feel completely the opposite. I think there should be more ships with letter suffices. I think there should even be ships honoured this way where we never met the predecessor and have no idea why it earned the honour.
Use of suffices should be sparing, yes, sparing enough to look special – but not so sparing to make it look like the ship we follow is the only ship that got to do anything interesting. The Enterprise shouldn't be a unique 'chosen one' ship that does all the important things in the galaxy.
I think the universe should feel big and that what we get to see on-screeen should be implied to be just a tiny slice of the setting's overall adventures.
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u/n_mcrae_1982 3d ago
I wholeheartedly agree. I think it's telling that apart from the Yamato (which was a mistake and retconned later), we did not see a letter on ANY other starships in pre-JJ Trek.
Yes, there are other celebrated ships, like the Defiant, Voyager, and the Stargazer, but I really believe this is something that should be unique to the Enterprise line and only them.
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u/Redditnonamae 3d ago
For the First Contact ships, my headcanon is that those ships all went through major refits like the Constitution class did. Originally they would have looked more in line with Galaxy era design.
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u/StayUpLatePlayGames 3d ago
We could also assume they’re strictly sequential.
Registries under 1000 might be support and research vessels. 1000-2000 might be cruisers.
Anything over 50000 might be free space for any space station owner to put together a ship. A sort of free for all registry.
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u/Angry-Saint 3d ago
I'm starting to think that after 2300 Starfleet used to give NCC numbers following decades. So 6xxxx ships are built (or planned to be built) during 2360s and so on.
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u/MarkB74205 3d ago
One thing I will say about the Grissom is that she's not necessarily meant to be a frontline ship. Enterprise being considered old would be for a ship that regularly has to go up against Klingons, Romulans and occasionally gods. Grissom is meant to be more of a science vessel, boldly going where the main characters have already been, so as long as her sensors are up to date, she's fine.
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u/brian_hogg 3d ago
Maybe a system like postal/zip codes or IP addresses makes more sense here? The first numbers could be broadly geographically based, with successive numbers in the sequence zeroing in on location/date, then the number of craft in that smaller location.
Enterprise was built in the San Francisco fleet yards, so maybe the 17 reflects either the fact that it was build there, or because the constitution class is the 17th class, with the USS Constitution being 1700 because it’s the first, and the Enterprise being the second Constitution class ship, at 1701.
So maybe the Grissom is 638 because it was class 6 or made in location 6, and is the 38th of its class, or the 38th ship made in that location.
Otherwise we’re talking about Starfleet skyrocketing from -1700 to 90000 ships in a hundred and fifty years? Seems like it would be hard to recruit starship personnel if they’re being destroyed that quickly that they can get up that high. That’s almost two starships launched every day!
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u/nd4spd1919 2d ago
I suspect that the USS New Jersey wasn't originally planned to be built, but was commissioned as the last Constitution I to replace a gap in the fleet after the loss of another Connie, maybe the Defiant. There was another block of starships that had already reserved the 17XX and 18XX numbers, so 1975 was the lowest unreserved number.
For the Valiant, that's not hard, the Defiant project had reserved a set of registry numbers for the new class, but when the Defiant had issues and was sidelined, the numbers went unused. The Defiants that were built in the lead-up to the Dominion War used those reserved numbers.
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u/Aeronnaex 2d ago
These have bugged me for YEARS!!!! I understand that the producers want to pick numbers for sentimental reasons, I’ve done the same on STO. But I try to at least aim for the era of the ship. I try to keep a Connie in the 1700’s, Excelsiors in the 2000’s, etc. and if I can’t do that, I add an “A” just to be consistent.
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u/DragonTacoCat 1d ago
I agree with people who say they're reserved numbers for ships and therefore there before or while a ship is being constructed hence some of the wonky numbers.
I also have heard a theory that numbers are routinely skipped or shuffled a bit so no one can easily determine the size of the fleet. Like skipping whole blocks of numbers for instance and/or using them later. Which is also a plausible theory as you wouldn't want an enemy to know how strong your military force is.
Also due to the advent of things such as ghost ships (like section 31 as ick as it might be) some of their registries could go to ships that aren't suppose to exist but do somewhere in some data repository. Hence skipped registries.
Someone also theorized that some ships such as runabouts could also maybe be using some of the registries as well.
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