Star Trek (DS9): The Sound of Her Voice

[Madner Kami]

That's a good Doylist explanation, but it doesn't provide a Watsonian explanation. My best guess is that the Federation began expanding quickly, but the military budget didn't grow with it, so Starfleet refit the Excelsiors to pick up the slack.

You can always go for a reallife analogy. Building ships is a long and expensive endeavour and the biggest cost is building the base frame. Modern steel navies all over the world hung onto their ships for several decades, refitting and altering them several times over their lifetimes for that exact reason: It's cheaper and faster to retrofit ships instead of replaceing them and if you think about how large space and the Federation is, you better have 1000 ships now, than 250 in 10 years.
In reality, pretty much the only reason to get rid of ships always was a technology-breakthrough, that obsoleted the old vessels in such a fundamental way, that they could not be recycled anymore, or the increase in gun-caliber- and armor-need obsoleting old armor-schemes and armament necessities.
USS Missouri, BB-63, for example was built from 1941 to 1944. The ship fought the Japanese and was used as the place where the Empire of Japan signed the surrender to the United States. It took part in the Korean War and after that, was placed in the reserve fleet and used, to some degree, as a museum ship, only to be reactivated in 1984, refitted with, among other things, Tomahawk cruise missles and Harpoon anti-ship missiles plus, of course, the Phalanx CIWS, in effect making it and it's Iowa sisters the largest guided missile vessels ever built and, if memory serves me right, the only guided missile battleships ever. It used that power to bombard Iraqi forces during the First Gulf War and is currently placed in the reserve fleet again, which means it's still there and ready to go to war in a moment's notice, 76 years after it was "born". She also "starred" in a movie, where the protagonists do exactly that to great effect against an alien invader, in an absolute spectacular sequence of fire and fury, but I digress.

This is just one example of "recycling" a ship over a long period of time and this isn't even an example where the ship was truely extensively rebuilt. There are examples of ships that didn't just get new armaments, but were rebuilt to a degree that they don't resemble their original form at all. Have a look at the Kongo class for example, which started out as midly armored dreadnought-type battlecruisers in 1911 and ended up as a major threat in the Pacific Theatre of World War II as true battleships. Or the italian Giulio Cesare, built in 1910 as a 3x3 + 2x2 305mm armed ship at 175m length and ended her life in 1955 (after being struck by a german WWII mine of all things) being armed with 2x3 and 2x2 320mm rifles and a length of 186.4m. That ship got a whole new prow attached during a refit, where the old bow actually remained and was part of the armor behind the new prow (to get a nod to the refit of the Constitution-class ). And none of these ships were designed to be rebuilt in the first place. Now think about the service-life of a ship that has a more modular base design, being built with the advancing technologies in mind...
And this really makes a lot of sense if you think about it, because a battleship throwing 9 16 inch armor-piercing shells in your face, will hurt any target as much today, as it did hurt it 76 years ago, unless the target in question comes up with a major technological breakthrough like energy shields, but even then, the kinetic energy of the impact and the heat- and pressure-energy released by the explosion of the filler is still a tremendous amount of energy to deal with even for an energy shield ala Star Trek, because physics is a bitch yo. And even then, if your guns aren't enough anymore, remove them and the turrets that are housing them and replace it by high-yield energy weapons. Instead of having to built a new ship within 5 years, you can get a similarly powered ship for a fraction of the cost in one year. Why waste a perfectly viable and available resource?

[SuccubusYuri]

Hell, we're STILL using B-52s and they were state of the art before the Beatles formed. Yes there will always be need of higher techs, but a lot of tasks, at war or science, still don't require more than the bare minimum.

We had a pretty crazy technological run between 1850 and 1950, but prior to that combat ship design hadn't changed significantly since Henry VIII. I can't remember the gentleman who did an NPR interview, I believe, where he pointed out "its the 1900-strata that meant something. Go from 1850 to 1920 what do you have? Electric lights, cars, planes, radio, plumbing. But take away the cell phone and the internet, and what does your house have now that would freak out someone from 1950?" His point wasn't to diminish how impactful the internet can be, but just stating, as technology marches on, its actually quite rare for such massive shifts in the way we interact with the world to occur all the time. The Excelsior probably represents that for Starfleet as, while its transwarp drive didn't quite cut it there were MASSIVE increases to FTL and communications tech from those projects.

[TGLS]

I don't know. I tend to look at it like this. The Excelsior is in service for at least 90 years. This is a period where three replacement ship classes are introduced. I don't know if it makes sense for a ship that many generations behind would still be in use.

[Madner Kami]

I don't know. I tend to look at it like this. The Excelsior is in service for at least 90 years. This is a period where three replacement ship classes are introduced. I don't know if it makes sense for a ship that many generations behind would still be in use.

It isn't that many generations behind though, is it? We've got at least one Excelsior that trashed a Defiant after all and they clearly had a large part in taking the fight to the enemy during the Dominion War. Your mistake is in assuming, that the age of the basic frame is what determines the capabilities of the ship, when it actually is the tech inside that sets the limits for the most part.

[TGLS]

This is a fair point. It's just that the frames are really old at this point, and plenty of newer frames should be floating around out there, but the excelsior keeps popping up. If starships are more like naval ships, I suppose this works. If they're more like planes, it becomes slightly implausible.

[CharlesPhipps]

I go with the fact the Hulls are modular in Watsonian terms.

There's nothing preventing you from taking out the computer systems, warp drives, and phasers and replacing them while keeping the hull. It's not like they're rusting away.

Shave off however many months it takes to assemble a new Hull.

It does mean the Excelsior went from being a top of the line ship to a scouting vessel.

[Durandal_1707]

The Excelsior probably represents that for Starfleet as, while its transwarp drive didn't quite cut it there were MASSIVE increases to FTL and communications tech from those projects.

The transwarp drive didn't quite cut it because Scotty sabotaged it. And apparently that unexplained failure caused Starfleet to decide it was unworkable. Scotty set back the Federation's propulsion technology by 100 years, just to rescue one Starfleet officer. Nice going!

[Admiral X]

Pretty sure Lisa's ship was the USS Olympia, not Olympian. Maybe it was Olympic-class as well?

Nope. A part of the wreck is seen, as far as I am aware, showing a large saucer-section, which rules out the Olympic's sphere-design. Further investigation reveals, that they reused the model of the wrecked Enterprise from "Search for Spock", technically leaving the USS Olympia as a Constitution II-class.

Yeh agree it won't be Olympic-class, be kinda confusing. Plus we don't know if the Olympic-class really actually exists outside of Q's anti-time future, Encyclopedia entries notwithstanding.

Nice they used the Enterprise, but would a Constiutition-class, which would be on the order of 120 years old by the time of Olympia's departure, really be up to an 8 year long range voyage? The original Enterprise only did 5 year missions after all.

Alternatively, it could also have been a Miranda class, which has a very similar saucer shape.

[Madner Kami]

I go with the fact the Hulls are modular in Watsonian terms.

There's nothing preventing you from taking out the computer systems, warp drives, and phasers and replacing them while keeping the hull. It's not like they're rusting away.

Shave off however many months it takes to assemble a new Hull.

It does mean the Excelsior went from being a top of the line ship to a scouting vessel.

A scouting vessel that can act entirely independent from resupply for 8 years and has enough room for a flexibly large crew, multiple laboratories and other sciency, as well as recreational facilities and supplies for that amount of time. Oh and the ship is capable of high warp speeds and can carry it's own weight in a fight. It may not be top of the line anymore, but the true heroes are always the workhorses. Besides, ships like the Galaxy are a misstep anyways, which waste way too much space for no benefitial return.

Alternatively, it could also have been a Miranda class, which has a very similar saucer shape.

That'd be even wierder. We know that the Reliant was built in 2267. The TOS Enterprise is about 20 years old by that time and she's one of the original batch of 12 or 13 Constitutions. We do not see any active Constitutions by the time of TNG, which suggests that they were phased out (except for this outlier, but let's ignore that for a moment). The Miranda, however, still sees extensive use during the time of the Dominion War and is clearly still in favourable use during the time of the Battle of Wolf 359 at least (though in it's Soyuz-configuration). That gives the Miranda a service-life of, at the very least , 108 years (the Dominon War ends in 2375), assuming that Reliant was one of the first Mirandas ever built, with lots more service life in the hull to be expected (they were just refitted and upgraded for the Dominion War, StarFleet is not going to throw them away now). Assuming that it could be a Miranda instead of a Constitution, argueably supports it being a refitted and upgraded Constitution even more

Also, at the "Scotty killed Federation Transwarp"-theory: LOL Best fan-theory ever.

Gawd this discussion is so geeky. I love it.

[Dînadan]

I go with the fact the Hulls are modular in Watsonian terms.

There's nothing preventing you from taking out the computer systems, warp drives, and phasers and replacing them while keeping the hull. It's not like they're rusting away.

+1

And even if this wasn't the case for some reason* there's nothing to suggest the Excellciors seen on screen have lasted that century rather than having been built at a latter point with newer tech; the basic design probably still filled the desired function (even if that function had changed from the original one, such as dropping from a heavy cruiser to a light cruiser or whatever).


Also, another thing to consider is what Starfleet does when they mothball a ship. From what we see in TNG (e.g. the Hathaway, the Vulcan ships the Romulans steal in 'Unification') it's likely that they leave old ships relatively intact rather than disassemble them (possibly due to replicators eliminating the need to disassemble old ships for raw materials). As such it's plausible that some of the Excellciors we see post-359 are ones brought out of mothballs, which would explain why they were able to rebuild the fleet so quickly and why they were able to build extensively enough to be able to field the large Dominion War-era fleets that we see onscreen, which adds credence to the idea that they're able to keep older ships in service just by replacing the interior tech as needed.



*for example, I imagine the change over from duotronic to isolinear computers may have been too extensive for a simple refit as its probably require replacing every terminal, station and so forth and the main computer core(s), and stripping out all the hard lines and network wiring and so forth, which would probably require so much dismantling^ that it'd be easier to build a new one from scratch, and keep the old one in service until it's replacement was ready. Or, if for some reason a ship was due to have 'everything' replaced, I imagine it'd be easier to build a new one from the ground up as the work would be so extensive that it'd require pretty much dismantling the ship and reassembling once all the new stuff is in place, and dismantling will probably reveal parts of the frame that have buckled, fractured or whatever under stress that have gone unnoticed til now and will need to also be replaced.

^unless of course transporter tech would allow you to just beam out the old hardware and beam in the new stuff in its place.