posted
I'm in the middle of watching "First Contact," and it occurs to me that we might be able to trace back the NX-01 to the interference that we saw in the movie...
I hate to be an ENT apologist, but this just might make some weird sense --
In the "original" timeline, Cochrane developed his ships without any kind of interference. But thanks to the Borg's interference, the Enterprise-E showed up to give some help. Picard, Riker and company specifically called the ship the Enterprise... which could potentially inspire Dr. Cochrane to leave a request for the first Warp Five starship to be named "Enterprise."
On top of that, Cochrane got a chance to look at the Enterprise-E through a telescope. Of course it was just a brief glimpse -- but it was long enough to make note of a saucer and nacelles... thus inspiring the basic and too-advanced configuration of the NX-01.
See? We can blame it all on temporal interference! And since it's clear that the previous series -- specifically TOS, TNG, and DS9 -- were "before" the interference, and so in the 24th century timeline there's no history of the NX-01. But for Voyager (specifically the Friendship One ship which carried Cochrane's message) was apparently influenced by the Starfleet interference...
Of course, the intricacies of time travel are too much for our simplistic 21st-century minds to understand...
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Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Why is the first serious interstellar Earth mission of any consequence something whose absence in dialogue we have to go all nuts about, and yet no one rants about the absence of, say, the exact founding members of the Federation in dialogue, or its first president, or something. Surely those are far more important events to your average 24th century citizen, culturally speaking?
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
About MinutiaeMan's original theory: just take one step more (or actually n steps). The events of "FC" could have been the nth iteration of a time loop, a loop that began with Cochrane inventing exactly nothing. Then the meddlesome Borg created this time loop in order to slowly nurture a technologically advanced Federation, which they thought would present much richer pickings than the separate Vulcan, Andorian etc. cultures. This plan then either backfired, or is proceeding as planned and the seeming Borg setbacks are of no real consequence...
But I agree that the failure to mention NX-01 is no great anomaly. It's a far greater anomaly that NCC-1701 was mentioned so many times in TNG and even DS9 and VOY...
posted
Once? Once? And, uh...well, more than once, I think?
Really, I would have liked a handful of Kirk references from TNG, ideally of the "Your ship is part of a grand legacy Picard. And it's an election year! You have to make time for the Betazed Annual Flotilla." But I suppose an episode about Council candidates swarming the ship while in port, eager for a photo op, probably fell outside of anyone's conception of the show.
But, you know, not mine.
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posted
Most people in the US Navy if asked about the "first" Enterprise are going to talk about the "Big-E" during WWII. Only very few are going to know (or care) that there were ships with the name before that or if some other service is using the name.
It is easy to figure that the corporate memory of Star Fleet isn't going to go back past the creation of their service. At least not in casual conversation or ship lineage. Of course that leaves us with the TMP wall-o-ships, but hey it is just a TV show...
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posted
A predestination paradoxon is definitely an option here. Maybe rather for the name than for the shape of the ship (after all, it wasn't the Akira top view he saw through the telescope). And for the Starfleet arrowhead on Friendship One.
I think that it is in fact remarkable that NX-01 was never shown or mentioned. At least on TNG it made a lot of sense to have references to NCC-1701, considering the name of the ship.
Anyway, if we go with the time travel explanation, we could at least maintain the USS Dauntless NX-01. :-) While I'm usually opposed to messed up timelines, it would make a nice side remark (from Daniels, for instance) that NX-01 was not supposed to be named Enterprise in the original timeline.
-------------------- Bernd Schneider
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Why we've never heard of the NX-01 before...?
I don't have a problem with that. Until First Contact we didn't know that Cochrane's ship was named Phoenix. One should think that Earth's first warp ship is far more important than the first Warp-5 ship.
And I don't think the Dauntless has anything to do with the Enterprise. The Dauntless was probably the first ship of the Federation Starfleet. And regarding the registry: We've learned that Earth Starfleet uses another registry-system than Federation Starfleet.
It is possible that the Federation Starfleet used NX as prefix for prototypes, because the NX-class was the first starship class equipped with the experimental Warp 5 drive.
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posted
I agree with your theory Spike, but imagine how confusing it could get seeing as the foundation of the Federation is only a few years away.
Joe Officer: I was just assigned to the NX-01. Fred Officer: The Enterprise? Joe Officer: No the Dauntless. The Enterprise is now NCC-07.
-------------------- "Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It?s us. Only us." Rorschach
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posted
But, if Joe Officer were a normal person, he would simply have said "I was just assigned to the Enterprise" in the first place.
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posted
I just don't think the NX-01-A Dauntless is worth worrying about. We've seen that even in the future people don't have perfect recall of history, so might not immediately think that any A-variant of an NX-01 should necessarily be called Enterprise, especially when the NCC-1701 registry is much better known.
posted
Add to this the fact that while externally it was the NX-01-A, but the MSD said NX-01A:
. . . and they might think that while the registry would have been meant to evoke the first Enterprise, the name itself had to be different as the data from Starfleet might have told them there already was a new NCC-1701.
posted
One wonders if the crew of a Los Angeles-class submarine stumbled across the USS SeaWolf (SSN-21) they'd immediately decide that it came from the sixties or that it bore the number of a sub named the same thing from the sixties.
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posted
Sonar would say it was newer than the 60's....
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posted
I don't think it's that hard to believe that the NX-01 Enterprise was never mentioned before. All the other Trek shows have been about Federation Starfleet and we all know that the 1701 was the first Federation Starfleet Enterprise and the most significant historically (to the Federation).
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And since it's clear that the previous series -- specifically TOS, TNG, and DS9 -- were "before" the interference, and so in the 24th century timeline there's no history of the NX-01. But for Voyager (specifically the Friendship One ship which carried Cochrane's message) was apparently influenced by the Starfleet interference...![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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