posted
Another possible reason for the retirement of the Soyuz. Around 2280, Starfleet was having a major "groth spurt" with ships. Now, it's possible that the Soyuzs require refit around 2280. But, since Starfleet didn't need them all that much anymore, instead of wasting the materials required to refit them, the materials could be used for newer ships, and the Soyuzs would merely be retired.
An example of this is that recent Los Angeles (688i) Class Submarines are being decommissioned only 5 or 10 years after launch. The Navy's reason for this is simply that the massive number of LAs are no longer required, especially with the new Seawolf and Virginia classes coming in. Therefore refiting these ships would be futile, so they just scrap them.
------------------ "The things hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of stars!" -David Bowman's last transmission back to Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey
[This message has been edited by The359 (edited December 15, 1999).]
posted
Bernd: I disagree that the Bozeman would have been sent back, since she would have been recorded as missing. Sending her back would contaminate the timeline.
IP: Logged
posted
Interestingly enough, the registry of the Bozeman actually reads NCC-1841 on the lower hull, falling smack in the middle of the pool of early Mirandas.
And for those familiar with fanfic registries, there is a nice gap between, was it 1832 and 1843? All we have there are very old Mirandas - the transport-converted Lantree and a couple of "SF Academy" game ships. NCC-1941 in turn would conflict with some fanfic registries I'd hate to lose - Knox class I think. For those with good stop-motion VCRs, both 1841 and 1941 get equal screen time...
My favorite theory wrt the fanfic ships of "Ships of Star Fleet" has the 1850-range Suryas accompanied by ten 1830-range Mirandas back in the 2240s. The former get refitted to Avengers as stated, while the slightly inferior Mirandas become roll-bar-less ships or are partially modified into sigint Soyuzes. The modifications wreak havoc on the structural integrity of the ships - the added boxlike aft hulls and the relocation of the impulse engines create so much stress that the ships are all bent and twisted by the 2280s. They cannot be modified back into Avengers because of this, and are retired before they'd be torn apart.
Thus, the sigint mission seals the fate of the ships only indirectly - Starfleet still needs sigint ships in the mid-2280s in the cold war against the Klingons, but the Soyuzes are shipwrecks that just haven't quite sunken yet. The regular Avengers succumb to old age only decades later, and are replaced by those 31000-range variants that are all called Mirandas in an effort of simplification and streamlining (in my version, USS Miranda predates USS Surya by a few weeks and thus gets to give her name to the whole superclass).
posted
Yup, signals intelligence is one form of electronic warfare that fortunately does not have the anachronistic word "electronic" in it. It would be awkward to speak of "duotronic warfare" or "optronic warfare"...
And 1841 is visible when the Bozeman hits the nacelle of the E-D. Not very clearly, perhaps, but I happen to have a good recording of that episode. Seems like a very odd mistake for the modelers to make, especially since 1941 was an in-joke made by Jein himself. Perhaps an underling was given the task of scraping away the old lettering (which might still have been that of the old Saratoga from STIV, since the Lantree and the Br*ttain were only filmed from above), and only removed and repainted the last two? It would be interesting to see what the nacelle registries say: are they still 1867 for the Saratoga, or perhaps 1864 for the Reliant?
OTOH, the model would have been photographed with the ventral side up for those scenes, so the incorrect registry would have been easy for Jein to see if he took part in the shooting. Perhaps it was too late at that stage. Strange in any case.
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