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NX-01???? The registry number dance continues.
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peregrinus: [QB] [Part II] Franz Joseph was a darn good aerospace draftsman, and quite good at technical things, but he wasn't a Trekkie. He did the Technical Manual and the deckplans as both an intellectual exercise and as a favor to his daughter ([b]she[/b] was the Trekkie). As I said in Part I, most of the information he went from was taken from "The Making of Star Trek", supplemented by stills he and his daughter acquired from Lincoln Enterprises. He did see a few episodes in reruns, but they don't seem to have had much of an impact on the final result. When he decided to actually publish, he sought out Gene Roddenberry to clear everything. Lord only knows why -- when it came to technical things, Gene was a duffer at best. Gene Roddenberry was a writer and a producer. He had a feel for what worked and wat didn't when it came to technical things, but it wasn't always accurate. And forget about asking Gene for the answer to a technical question. Many know the story of how he was asked how Stardates work, and he pulled an answer out of his ass on the spot, an answer that sounds cool but is utter nonsense. If FJ had thought to track down the guy who actually [b]designed[/b] the [i]Enterprise[/i] -- inside [b]and[/b] out -- many of the problems with those two pieces of work probably would have been nipped before they had a chance to make it into print. In no particular order: �[i]Enterprise[/i] exteriors were based on the drawings in "The Making of Star Trek", not on the actual model that was built, resulting in numerous detail errors. �As evidence that FJ never actually sat down and watched the best source of material for the [i]Enterprise[/i] -- the show -- many things are left out (like the matter/antimatter service crawlway seen in "That Which Survives"), and many more things are screwed up (like the armament, detailed next). �Dialogue and visuals throughout the series placed main phasers (banks one through four) and six forward photon torpedo tubes in the forward ventral saucer. FJ gave us one bank of two phasers there, and placed two torpedo tubes (!) in the bridge superstructure. All references to midships and aft phasers or aft torpedoes were utterly missed and therefore left off. There's more, but you get the idea... Now we get to the relevent stuff. As additional fallout from his failure to talk to Matt Jeffries, FJ then proceeded to give us a larger view of the fleet than what we saw in the series. First of all, though, he made 'NCC' a blanket prefix for Starfleet as a whole, and assigned a literal meaning to the letters. Then he did something that has had massive repercussions down through the entire period of Treknical fandom all the way up to the present. He gave us four new ship classes with widely varying registry blocks, [b]and he never explained his reasoning[/b]. He didn't give any sort of guide to those who would come after, explaining why he did things the way he did -- the significance of giving the Hermes class registries way down there in the ~600 range, while the Ptolemy class was all the way up in the 3800s -- or give some hints as to how to assign registry blocks to later classes. The only source of non-chronological registries seems to be Franz Joseph's Technical Manual, but it's formed the basis for a whole school of thought on the matter. As a side note, at about the same time, a Star Trek fan named Greg Jein wrote an article for a fanzine called "T-Negative" where he assigned all the numbers on the "Court Martial" chart to the [i]Constitution[/i]-class ships known to exist at that point, in his reasoning. The method he used is not based on scientific method in the [b]least[/b]. After eliminating 1700 and 1701, he did a one-for-one matchup by putting the names of the remaining ships in reverse alphabetical order and starting at the top of the chart. It didn't really catch on, given the popularity enjoyed by Franz Joseph's works, but remember it. It'll become relelvent very quickly. Some years later there was a falling out between Gene and FJ, due in the main to a breakdown in communication. Bad feelings all round, but Gene was the one who controlled Star Trek (more or less). This is about the time that Gene came up with his "Rules of Starship Design" that so coincidentally invalidated all four of the ship classes that FJ had created. He also told Paramount's marketing department that FJ's works were unofficial, and that future liscensees should not go from them. Thus, in the mid-80s when FASA got the liscense to do a role-playing game based on Star Trek, their [i]Constitution[/i]-class registries matched FJ's list in only one instance*, and that was probably an accident (the U.S.S. [i]Kongo[/i] at NCC-1710). Over half of their canon starships' registries were actually taken from Greg Jein's T-Negative list. Now we come to 1985. A Hawaiian Star Trek fan who also happens to be an advertising artist sends some sample displays in to Paramount and gets hired as the new scenic artist for Star Trek IV. His name is Michael Okuda. Over the next couple years, he starts working closely with Gene Roddenberry to create Star Trek: The Next Generation. He knows nothing of the history between Gene and Franz Joseph. He just knows the Great Bird of the Galaxy is telling him the "Rules of Starship Design" and that FJ's works are invlaid sources. So when the time comes for him to create a listing of [i]Constitution[/i]-class ships, he starts with the known ones (1700, 1701, 1017, and 1371**). Then he uses Greg Jein's list for the remaining known canon ships up to that point (Mike didn't include the [i]Eagle[/i] and the [i]Endeavour[/i] until Star Trek VI). Then he fills in the gaps with FASA's list, since they still had their liscense at that point. The only one he seems to have made up whole cloth is the [i]Potemkin[/i]. So that's why things are the way they are. A whole lot of lack of communication, with a little stubbornness thrown in for flavor, on the parts of all but Mike, who thought he was doing the right thing, and Matt, who started all of it and was promptly ignored by those who came after. The lack of good research on the parts of Stephen Whitfield and Franz Joseph (and by extension, Greg Jein), coupled with the lack of professionalism on the part of Gene through all of this (and by extension, FASA and Mike Okuda) have left us in a nasty place today as far as registries go. I find it a real pity Matt never widely publicized his system and the reasoning behind it. His makes the most sense of anything out there... --Jonah *Apart from 1017, 1700, and 1701, duh... **Mike, too, adopted the baseless idea that the [i]Republic[/i] was [i]Constitution[/i]-class... [/QB][/QUOTE]
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