d) Excelsior IIs were for some reason operated in regions / at times that did not coincide with those of our hero ships.
Perhaps these vessels were not used for ferrying admirals for some reason or another, so none were seen in TNG. But inventing reasons for their absence from DS9 is harder. I'd be ready to fall back on a, b or c here. The Excelsior II variant might have been used solely in a special role that did not require great numbers - say, as command ships in big battles (so when we saw the fighting Excelsiors at the front lines, we were turning our backs to the commanding Excelsiors further back).
Generally, DS9 was the first time we saw large numbers of ships at one glance, and thus the first time we could (and had to) make conclusions on the prevalence of certain ship types in the fleet. The absence of Excelsior IIs and Ambassadors is statistically significant enough to require an explanation. So is that of Belknaps or Rigels or other ship types of varying degrees of "unreality". Questions like "If the Larson class refit exists, why did it not fight alongside the Miranda class there?" are perfectly valid.
quote:Originally posted by Snay: * Where Excelsior I refers to ships matching the exterior design of the Excelsior, and Excelsior II refers to ships matching the exterior design of Enterprise-B.
Wouldn't "B-type" be superior nomenclature for the Enterprise-B Excelsior variant? Given that we've seen such terminology employed previously (for the D'Deridex in "The Defector"[TNG]), it not only has firmer canon backing, but is also pretty convenient, what with both being "B" and all.
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posted
That's probably an acceptable compromise, though not terribly popular. We often hear of stuff like "Type-III Variant" to describe stuff like the USS Saratoga in "Emissary". Didn't the semi-canon Encyclopedia use something like that?
posted
If the Enterprise B was meant to be the "explorer varient" of the Excelsior class, then it seems to me likely that that version suffered higher losses than the rest of the fleet, considering the higher risks involved in such missions.
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posted
Well, I've always said that the reason we so rarely see Ambassador-class ships on the show is because they're out there, exploring. Most of them could easily be a year or two away from Federation space and thus wouldn't be available to show up at all in the Dominion War.
This could just as easily apply to the Explorer-variAnt Excelsiors and other Explorers. The Galaxies are an exception to this rule, but that would lead to the continuing debate as to just how effectinve that class was as an explorer in the first place...
posted
I really hope that was the case. I always have been someone of a proponent (to myself) of bringing back the Ambassadors during DS9 or beyond, like, 1993. They would have been one of the most ideal ships to send to the Gamma Quadrant, but we never saw one. Either, yes, they were on deep space assignments, or they were all destroyed in the initial battle the original 7th (??) fleet from 'A time to stand'...or they were all on the front lines in other parts of the Federation. Either way, TPTB really wasted the opportunity to use that class, and instead saturated us with the same three classes (Galaxy, Excelsior, Miranda) over and over and over and over.....
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