OHM USS Enterprise NCC-1701 Command Cruiser

[Lucy]

Is it weird that I like your version better? Maybe edit that Memory Alpha page...

 

[Andy44]

Wow, that's some interesting Trek lore. Too bad Mr. Jeffries isn't around for us to grill him about it anymore. His wiki page says this: "According to Jefferies, the Enterprise was Starfleet's 17th starship design and it was the first in the series, therefore the ship had the number '1701."

It also says his Waco plane is in the Virginia Aviation Museum in Richmond. That's only a couple of hours from me; I'll have to take a look at it one weekend.

Star Trek, was, to a large extent, a Heinleinian space opera, and the technology was at least partially "hard SF", which is why the Enterprise was designed with external engines, etc., although they compromised on so much that we now associate Trek with cheap handwavium: artificial gravity, transporter, dilithium, etc. But as NukeET has pointed out, Spock's death in Wrath of Khan was straight out of Heinlein's short story The Green Hills of Earth, in which a guy exposes himself to a lethal dose of radiation in order to save the ship.

 

[Lucy]

I remember also a line from the TNG technical manual. Something like "The starship is a vehicle to serve drama"... the technology compromises, the handwavium, chucknorriseum, unobtanium... all of them were put in because it simplified using the Enterprise (and other ships) as a stage, without having to add in effects like weightlessness and similar.

That makes sense, though there were the odd episodes in TOS and TNG which featured technology as the central element. Voyager episodes tended to feature the ship's systems quite a lot, mainly because the ship was such a central part of the underlying plot, and the crews' insane dependence on that one vehicle integral.

I lost my thread halfway through this post. Hopefully, it made some sense.

 

[ChristopherT]

Is it weird that I like your version better? Maybe edit that Memory Alpha page...

NCC - Naval Contact Code, is another interpretation that is used by some fandom sources too. I pretty much agree with anything put out by Matt Jefferies and the other members of the design team. Here's his version based on a BBC interview...

NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It’d been pretty much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with NCC.

The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused. I don’t think anyone’ll confuse a one and a seven, or the zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one, the first bird.

That scheme was slightly modified by the assignment of the USS Constitution, NCC-1700, as the class ship.

ChristopherT



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