http://www.8ung.at/fitz/other_ships/pics/display10.jpg

Two interesting things here. First, it appears that we have the earliest known date for a vessel with a NAR registry (SS Seattle, NAR-18834, launched in 2120).

Second and more interesting is the DY-class ships in operation, and their launch dates. From Kirk & Spock's comments in "Space Seed" it's obvious that DY-class ships are chronologically numbered. What makes this chart interesting, however, is that as the years progress, the DY ship types don't. Not counting the RT & BB class ships, the DY numbers go as follows:

500-C, launch date 2102
732, launch date 2105
500-B, launch date 2120
500, launch date 2123
732 (N), launch date 2135
430, launch date 2146
1200, launch date 2160
950, launch date 2183
245, launch date 2187 (26 years after the Federation was founded!)

It's possible that for some reason, the DY 500 class ships had a reverse order of lettering, which is the only explanation for why the C type came before the B type, which came before the -nil type. Either that, or all three types were in use at the same time. In fact, for this to work chronologically, ALL nine types of DY class ships had to be in operation at the same time. Even more intriguing, this chart makes perfect sense of the whole "DY-100 Botany Bay from 1996 being the same class as the Woden from 2266" thing. These ships sure do last long! (There's also the DY-750 from the Encyclopedia. Who knows were that comes in...)

And yes, before anyone says anything, I realize that there are several in-jokes on this list, and that it shouldn't really be taken seriously.

[ August 23, 2001: Message edited by: Dukhat ]

1988 "Up the Long Ladder" premieres. This is the first use of NAR-18834. It is named as a ship type, with the SS Seattle being of this type.

In any case, I'd suspect that sublight or low-warp vessels in the DY category would only experience one or two manned journeys in their entire lifetime. They'd take a bunch of colonists to a location in a decades-long trip, then sit there until the colony had something worth selling, and would then return stocked full of that sales article, in another multi-decade trip. If the salable was ore or some other bulk of that sort, the ship could continue these slow journeys until its engines wore out - demand of the product would not change much, faster ships would not be more competitive, and automation would negate the need to maintain life support systems.

In a rare case, a ship that returned from a colonization trip would be refurnished for another. The DY-245 might have reached a colony site and found it uninhabitable (apparently, preliminary scouting wasn't always possible, as Harry Kim's anecdote about his forefather's U-turn reveals), then returned to Earth (the only habitable planet of which it had reliable knowledge of), and sent out again, perhaps 50 years after the initial launch.

The crew need not have aged, since Kim's forefather hauled colonists in stasis in 2210 or so. Apparently, the sleeper ship concept did not become outdated in the 2020s yet - perhaps it was only abandoned in interplanetary missions, or perhaps "stasis" does not equal "sleep" here.

The table might be biased, too. Perhaps Ficus sector only received older-than-usual ship types for some reason. Perhaps it was extensively colonized in the 21st century already, and the 22nd century launches were all second missions for the first-wave ships. Or perhaps Ficus was mainly colonized from locations other than Earth.

USN aircraft carriers have had, at various times, registry prefixes of CV, CVA, CVB, CVL, CVN, CVS, and CVT (among others not of this scheme). But that doesn't mean CVs came before CVAs, which came before CVBs, which came before a hypothetical CVC, and so on. They were just designations. For example, the 'N' in "CVN" means "nuclear".

I suspect that DY is a manufacturer name, something like Dinyan Corporation or Detroit-Yorkshire Space Industries. The company would produce dozens of spacecraft types across a century or two, and hold something of a monopoly (with NAR and BBI possibly competing). The ships would be given these nondescript numbers, like Vosper-Thornycroft or MEKO number their "commercial warship" designs - but the users would apply more traditional names, so that, say, DY-3200 might be known as the Icarus class, and DYs from 240 to 290 collectively as the Harper's Ferry class.

The DY company would then flounder in face of interstellar competition when the UFP was founded, or something. But DY would still be a phenomenon Kirk's crew would be familiar with - they would think of pretty much all commercial starships in terms of what DY model they were comparable to, much like we speak of Windows 4.1 or Windows '98 when discussing computer models.

I wouldn't wonder if the various TNG freighters with their underbelly containers were actually DY ships, too - the basic design is very similar. There must be many ways to build a space freighter, but for some reason the DY-100 configuration has been perpetuated well into the TNG era. This *could* be because the single company is still churning out these things.

I think you'll find that NAR is just a registery code for Earth ships in general, and DY-### is a class, although of course DY could be the company that built all these things, possible even Yoyodyne, since this company seams to be still around in the 24th century it is possible that DY ships are still being made.

BTW, this is a DY-500....whoops your right, its a DY-750...I think...

[ August 29, 2001: Message edited by: Reverend ]

Spike: After realizing that the Vico had the NAR-18834 registry, I'm inclined to agree with you that NAR18834 is the class of the Seattle.

And Jesus, those pics are big! Couldn't you link?

quote:

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And here's the DY-245
http://fleetyard.virtualave.net/ships/noncanon/dy245.html

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Sounds like a plausible line of development to me. The TMP ship could very well be DY-this-or-that.