Way back in the 20th Century, my father, who had been a Trekker from the first run of the original series, purchased a Star Fleet Technical Manual which I poured through until it fell apart. One odd detail I remember is that Star Fleet ships are built under a joint contract with the United States Navy and Curtis Industries out of San Fransico. N.C.C. stands for Navy-Curtis Craft. It made sense to me that the U.S. Navy, which has experience building large war ships, would be involved in building large space-bound vessels.
Very much enjoying the detail of ship-manufacture here, including SupShip and BuShips - details I had never thought of. (And there are tons of such details in the Star Trek Hunter series, which was posted to the old Ad Astra. At some point soon I will repost it to the new.)
I actually remember that being in one of the "making of" books (not sure if it's the Whitfield/Roddenberry one or not). Franz Josef, in his TOS Technical Manual, first used Naval Construction Contract over Navy-Curtis for the notion that the first C in NCC would have to change between the different heavy manufacturing corporations. This holds up since Antares (NAC), Yoyodyne (NYC), and a bunch of other manfs eventually come to light in Star Trek, but they still use NCC. Back in the 90s, Diane Duane had mentioned at a convention that there was general agreement amongst the writers, editors, and producers (I think during the Harve Bennett era) that Naval Construction Contract was more appropriate, so I chose to adopt that for my writing for the logical reasons above. In my personal opinion, I'm a fan of the old Hull Classification system of BB, CA, CV, DD, etc, so that there's a clear delineation of the ship's design and purpose in relatable naval parlance, but I suppose in a Federation of multiple races it would prove difficult to match or explain equivalence between Vulcan starships and Andorian starships with those from Earth. So the generic terms are used instead...
(Whatever happened to good ol' Curtis Industries, anyway?)
I wish I could take credit for BuShips and SupShip but those are straight out of the US Navy structure that I co-opted for the purposes of this short.
Thank you very much for continuing to read! Appreciate the comments!
Comment on Reserved for Those Willing
LordRobertBruceScott on Chapter 3 Thu 19 Sep 2024 09:29PM UTC
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LordMcCoveyCove on Chapter 3 Thu 19 Sep 2024 11:29PM UTC
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