Excelsior Class Starships 

The biggest, baddest ship in the Federation arrives at Khitomer to save the Enterprise and the peace conference Chang: Sweet, a new punching bag!

@@Sephiroth144 Overrated ship you mean. The only gain to infamy is the fact the Excelsior class did something not even the Klingons could do. It killed Kirk. The class as far as I m concerned is a curse and should have been completely scuttled.

@@valor1omega Except, Kirk didn't die on the Ent-B, he died falling off a bridge. And given that the Duras sisters were helping Soran, hell, the Klingons might get an assist for the kill. And the Excelsior was the Big Dog of the Alpha Quadrant when it debuted- facts are facts, whether you like them or not.

Agreed. Great line.

@@Sephiroth144 No, the B is the reason Kirk was sent to the nexus and there for it is what got him killed. So how did you say it? "Facts are facts no matter how much you dislike it" The only thing it got going for it is that it bit*h slapped the supposed pimp hand of Sisko and put it in it's place. That's the only thing it's got going for it. Outside of that it is well known for killing Kirk.

Ooh, that's a good way to look at things

I've always considered it a success that led to two outcomes. First was, as you say, the recalibration of the Warp scale. The other was that starships no longer needed to "climb" through lower warp factors to reach the desired goal, they could instead "jump" there.

I think Starfleet transwarp was different than Borg transwarp. It's unfortunate the writers reused the term. I've heard that Starfleet transwarp was more about going directly to higher warp factors without having to build up or nest warp fields by passing through each factor. This is actually seen in canon quite often. In TOS you can hear (and sometimes its even spoken) that the ship going to warp 1 then climbs up through the factors. In TNG they can go straight to high warp and only then have to start nesting fields, usually after warp 8 (new scale).

The idea that it was largely a failure always made sense to me. Sure a few advances may have led to the new scale, but ships didn't really get that much faster. From 2285 to 2365, starship speeds only increased by a factor of 2 or 3. There were greater advances than that in the single decade that followed contact with the Borg. The idea that it meant you jump straight to certain warp factors never made much sense either. Sure you don't hear them talking about climbing the factors much in TNG era and on, but the way acceleration works, those call outs never made much sense in early trek. Warp 8 was five hundred times faster than warp 1. If you could reach warp 8 in a couple minutes, warp 1 should have taken a fraction of a second. This is where TNG era call outs have always made more sense, starting at higher warp factors and climbing from there. Reaching warp 8 might only take a minute or less, but doubling up to warp 9.6 could take a lot longer.

That's how I've always seen it. Calling it transwarp was a misnomer for security purposes

Time wars?

I think Scotty might have something to say about that "bucket of bolts" lol, but Enterprise was his baby so I understand! Love the Excelsior and her sibblings!

@@johnkinnicutt4509 Scotty was right though. "The more advanced the drain the easier to stop it up" Besides the Ambassador fixed all of it's glaring issues look wise among other things.

@@johnkinnicutt4509 Scotty's first and only love is the Enterprise. That said I suspect the line was said in mild teasing at best. Sulu is one of his friends and it honestly would surprise me if Scotty hadn't personally gone through the manifests and mantinance reports when he heard Sulu got the post along with recommendations forwarded to that ship's engineering staff. And unlike Scotty in TNG's relics, this is a time and technology he is intimately familiar with and probably literallywrote the book on. So him popping in with recommendations might have been seen as stepping on toes, but his word would carry weight.

@@CursedGuard00 I think they meant to write "time waits for no one".

Or a C-130

What an interesting take. I hadn't considered that at all, but it's perfectly logical. Thank you for sharing that.

Remember. The USS Blue Ridge which is the flagship of the US Navy 7th Fleet is the _oldest_ commissioned vessel in regular service… and it resembles an old cargo ship.

Either that, or the VFX budget for TNG wasn't big enough to allow for many new ships, so they dug out the Excelsior, Reliant, or Grissom models whenever they needed a generic Starfleet ship of the week. 😀 It's too bad they never dug out the TOS or TMP Enterprise models for 'Cause and Effect' or 'The Battle' , probably because those models were apparently cumbersome to work with.

Or most likely the Admirals wanted to keep the ships that they had captained

By the TNG era the Excelsior was basically the work horse of Starfleet "hauling between starbases". In nautical terms this is the equivalent of a channel groper, an outwardly big powerful ship, but in reality old and slow. From naval experience the choice of Admirals for this type of ship is because they would always need to have a ship where they personally had ultimate authority, where they basically had a captain who is a yes man.

Edit: Didn't want to flood your post so I merged the two. Or Star fleet got lazy and seen a below average design and goes "ehhh good enough people, let's mass produced this garbage barge and call it a day." Almost forgot need I remind you that the oberth is older than that ship design and it too is mass produced as well. Just because it's been mass produced for 100+ years makes not a good design.

@@valor1omega the oberth was mostly the sign of their hubris since its role was communication and pure science thankfully the nova takes its role now

That and they could use the already creating filming model and not create a new one in TNG.

@@pitiedvod Lol very true, the real reason we saw it over 100+ years in the series was that the model was conveniently laying around. Though I rather like​ @Valor1 Omega 's rationale that lore reason this ship was around so long could be was it simply easier to produce so it kept getting spit out by the shipyards lol

@@SuperGamefreak18 To be honest I always liked the oberth. There was a reason behind it all and nothing felt out of place or like it was built to look good. The other ship was just bad.

Or was it standing still while moving an T/W 😏

@@EZ-D-FIANT The noise of the engine sounding like a kaput car when it failed, always made me laugh. 🤣 I wish we got to see that transwarp working, or the reason for the new warp scale, though!

@@Naptosis yea that's a perfect example of something else that always get me gripes and that is sound in space, stations go boom, engines go plurpewdodododoooo even warp makes sound, its a sci fi show ffs, if they made the sounds while being in that bridge only it'd be amazing but they always do an exterior shot with the same sound grrrr,I gotta stop before my brain vein starts throbbing.....🤣

@@Naptosis as for seeing transwarp just imagine warp in a badly fitting dress, going prrrrrp 😛 🤣

Agreed Also, I like your profile pic

It's one of the ugliest and worse designed ships to be made. The hull is like the galaxy class's saucer section, way to large.

I've personally always like the Miranda. To me it seems like a more practical and realistic design and looks great from any angle.

It's got too much cut from the secondary hull. The back section of the secondary hull looks so thin that it would make a very thin supermodel say it needs to eat something. The second hull needs to be shortened by 25% if not more and or filled out a bit. Also don't like how the pylons are places as it looks like some lazy designer stuck them there and went "good enough". And it is by far anything but sleek. There is nothing sleek about it.

@@valor1omega My brother in christ, let this person enjoy their favorite starship They were saying things they like about it, so no need to be rude

@@Tigershark_3082 Nothing I said was rude.

@@valor1omega its kinda a 50s car thing, some folks are like "man that's what cars should look like" and others are "its a brick with fins..." It looks thin from the sides, and the pylons could have come off the main hull, but it looks like a leftover from the transwarp project. The whole module pylons and all could be swapped easier if it was add on part (its gonna be easy to point under it on my kit because of this ;3)

@@minasegazi4000 Still too long and flimsy. The ambassador got the secondary hull and pylons right.

Mine is the Miranda class

mine as well

Especially with a Sulu

@@Tigershark_3082 A person with extremely great taste.

@@valor1omega I just like how the Nacelles look underslung

I like that theory. It makes a lot of sense

I don't think the major Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers have anything that would qualify as a strategic weapon for a space boomer to carry, unless I missed something and Starfleet genuinely intended to weaponize the Genesis Device, or the Romulans were mad enough to weaponize Omega, etc? "Starfleet Intelligence operatives... hijacked the [Romulan starship] Tomed, ramming it into [an abandoned] asteroid base [with the singularity core at warp power, causing a violent spatial distortion that would have killed thousands throughout the sector]" - Memory Beta Oh... Still.

@@fluffly3606 I believe the idea, as posited by VGM was those Enterprise variant Excelsiors equipped with Feddie reverse engineered cloaks while carrying Tri-Cobalt devices, the Big Ones before the creation of Quantum Torpedoes. As for the actual incident, he played it as remnants of the war hawks from "Undiscovered Country" trying to provoke the Romulans so as to keep the Starfleet from going soft by the actions of the Council.

Same here.

Compared to the Enterprise refit she sucks but I like the Enterprise B modifications in the secundary hull.

I never liked the Excelsior either.

I came to the conclusion that the Kelvin timeline Starfleet is using Borg Transwarp that the USS Kelvin scanned from the Narada's engines. Warp drive in the Kelvin timeline is VASTLY faster than the prime timeline. Scotty said the Enterprise could get Spock to Vulcan in a few days in The Motion Picture, in ST09 they made it in a matter of minutes. Part of that is JJ's predilection for completely ignoring travel time, see Hyperspace skipping in Rise of Skywalker, he typically treats FTL like teleporting. But warp drive in the Kelvin Timeline looks and functions like transwarp. In the TNG era through Enterprise if you lost warp drive while at warp speed, you just gently returned to normal speed, or you would just pop back out to sublight. In the Kelvin timeline you're thrown out of a tunnel of FTL. Like a Borg Transwarp Conduit. Starfleet Warp speeds in the prime timeline is accomplished via asymmetrical warp bubbles not corridors, Borg Transwarp and Quantum Slipstream Drives create tunnels.

I really want to see what the rest of Starfleet would do with the technology from the wreck of the USS Vengeance. She was just kinda there in San Francisco, and had to be broken up and hauled off, so while the Enterprise was repaired I can imagine much of the Dreadnought-class was declassified. Seeing the Dreadnought would be interesting too, since there presumably was one.

@@3Rayfire "Part of that is JJ's predilection for completely ignoring travel time" Don't forget also that JJ seems to think that Earth's gravity is so strong that it could pull both ships out of orbit of the moon and send them crashing down to Earth. And that the Enterprise was somehow able to not only survive an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere which should have turned both ships into a molten mass, but it was also able to stop its decent with nothing but some aux thrusters, totally negating the speed at which they were falling. But who am I kidding? This was the same director that said a beer brewery would make a perfect engine room (which got retconnned in the second movie, btw).

@@cujoedaman So basically don't take anything from JJ's movies as feats of canon, other Starfleet ships can replicate. I also don't like how new Trek seems to be bringing old ships in just so we can see them get thrashed, or replaced like the _Titan-A_ for the original _Titan_ . I've basically chosen to ignore post- _Enterprise_ Trek outside of _STO_ . I love what Cryptic Studios decided to do with Sela and the Romulan Republic, and the overarching story with the Iconians was pretty good. I just wish they'd rebuild the game with a new engine. Similar to how SEGA did with _PSO2_ . New stories ain't hitting the same anyway.

@@BNuts Yep. It is nice that that fusion reactor ended up making history.

Scotty calls it a Transwarp Computer Drive, which to me implies that the computer aboard the Excelsior was capable of doing something while the ship was at warp which allowed the ship to travel faster than previous generations of warp drive. This is hinted at by virtue of the fact that the computer systems on the Excelsior are more advanced and "interactive" than those on the refit Enterprise (Scotty getting annoyed at the talking turbolift for example). My own headcanon is that the computer was able to make fine adjustments to the warp field while the ship was at warp. We see in ENT for example that the field can be adjusted on the fly but it's extremely difficult and required a skilled pilot to do so. Perhaps Starfleet developed a new computer system that could make finer/faster adjustments to the field allowing the ship to reach higher warp velocities or to accelerate to those velocities faster than a helmsman could?

Star Trek VI & STO really cemented my love for the ship class. It looked and performed great in both. In STO I especially loved having a cruiser class ship that could use cannons so effectively.

It reminds me a bit of the F-16 in a way

In my story ( In the early 25th C ).....the Excelsior class was about to be finally mothballed......and then the Great Shadow War breaks out!!!!!......Starfleet Directive....All Excelsior class ships due for retirement is to be put on hold. ;)

It also served during the "Monster Maroon" era, which was the uniform most living characters in the galaxy would remember and recognize as *the* Starfleet uniform during the TNG era. The crisp red jackets were Starfleet's uniform of choice from _Wrath of Kahn_ until "Encounter at Farpoint," a span of something like 80 years! So, for most civilian characters, red jackets aboard an Excelsior is the image they would conjure up when they think "Starfleet."

Agreed. I can almost imagine a federation citizen saying "If there is a crisis.....a Starfleet vessel will turn up in less than 24 hours ......and that vessel will be an Excelsior class!"

@@irregularassassin6380 I’m pretty sure the season one flashbacks to the Stargazer indicate they’d switched to the early TNG uniforms for at least 12 years. Since the hologram Jack Crusher records is younger than when he died in the attack, so maybe that’s more or less exactly when they switched. Give or take a couple years.

@@kaitlyn__L Oh, hello again! It's been a little while since I've seen the Stargazer episode with the flashbacks, so I could be wrong. Either way, they lasted for a very long time. How have you been keeping, Kaitlyn?

I’m still kind of dubious about the Obena’s status as a class unto itself rather than a refit variant. Mostly because of that line, where Captain Freeman doesn’t want her ship “coming back looking all Sovereign-class” like certain people she knows. So I interpreted it as a heavily refit Excelsior (the nacelles were modular from Jeffries’ first sketches after all, and so were the saucers) in the whole episode. But then all of the production material which was released after the fact is like “no no, this is a totally brand new class”, so I dunno.

@@kaitlyn__L From what I could tell the Obena is quite a bit larger than a normal Excelsior or the Excelsior II. Looks like it has to be a new ship class. If it was like the difference between a TOS Connie and the Refit... which is like a measly 16 meters... eh... I'd say refit all the way.

@@terrywest111 which scenes are indicating its scale? I would note also that at the scaling of the Constitution and on the MSD, the Excelsior windows don’t line up with the decks, but if you scale it up it works. Scale has always been screwy in Trek. The Nebula class grew and shrank depending on the scene, as did the Defiant, and even in the first episode of DS9 the station is about twice as big as it “should” be (based on Ops etc) because otherwise the Galaxy class would only barely fit. Like, if there’s just massively more deck windows visible on the Obena I’d pretty much have to accept that. But if it’s based on the ratio of the nacelles to the engineering hull, or shots inside Spacedock, I’d be inclined to take those with a grain of salt if that makes sense.

@@kaitlyn__L It has three rows of decks on the saucer rim, which bumps her up (maybe) to the 600 to 690 metre scale. Mind you, the same could be said of the Excelsior, depending on how you count the window rows! A case has been made on Trekbbs forums for it being intended as 622 metres, initially. Including the smallish bridge dome. But that may also be due to varying deck heights. Anyway, see Ex Astris Scientia site for more on the Obena.

Not as big as her Captain.

It's not big at all, it's secondary hull is more fiction than fact. Get rid of that long as hell board and move the pylons and warp nacelles up after getting rid of that wasted section and it would be about 25% smaller.

I think a TNG Excelsior would have an interior similar to the Centaur class USS Resolute froms Star Trek Resurgence. Centaurs are Excelsior kitbashes, so would make sense that interiors would be similar. Hallways similar to a Galaxy or Intrepid. LCARS in the blue green color palette of the TMP era. Bridge is a hybrid between the Excelsior and the Galaxy.

Secondly, as transwarp is considered faster than warp, but warp 10 (not transwarp!) is also defined as infinite velocity in TNG, transwarp speeds (whatever that means) must also be on the TNG warp scale in the high warp 9.x-regime. Therefore, I propose that "transwarp" refers to technologies radically different from, and faster than, standard warp travel - for concrete on-screen examples, see the Quantum Slipstream drive and the Borg's transwarp network. As such, the Federation may just use the term "transwarp" to differentiate more advanced propulsion technologies from the standard technologies in common use throughout the Federation. (Admittedly VOY:Threshold somewhat contradicts this theory by calling warp 10 the transwarp threshold, and als calling it infinite velocity, but if we define warp 10 as transwarp, then the Voth's transwarp drive which was fast but not infinitely fast doesn't make any sense among other things, so let's just chalk this inconsistency up to badly used jargon in that episode and then collectively forget that that episode existed again) If we take this definition (transwarp := advanced propulsion method different from and faster than warp technology currently employed throughout starfleet) and apply it in the 23rd century, I think it makes a lot of sense to call the Excelsior's propulsion system transwarp. It clearly was a hugely innovative system which promised a revolution in faster than light travel (I think something like this was even said on screen) and, at least according to the Excelsior's captain, would have broken the old warp speed records if not for Scotty's sabotage. By my definition, it *was* a transwarp system, but it may have turned out to be so useful and economical that it ended up being adopted throughout the fleet, not only necessitating an overhaul of the warp scale, but also effecting a change in the common use of the term - as the Excelsior's transwarp technology became the norm, people started dropping the "trans" and just called it "warp". Another data point that might point in this direction is that the TOS Enterprise managed to reach warp speeds higher than 10 under exceptional circumstances but, as far as I remember, never under its own power. Maybe, just before the Excelsior's launch, the highest theoretically attainable velocities with standard warp engines were just shy of warp 10, and everything beyond warp 10 was simply called transwarp. This might also explain the use of the term "transwarp threshold" for warp 10 - maybe it was a common term for TOS scale Warp 10 among scientists and engineers in the mid-to-late-23rd century when the Federation was trying to crack that barrier, and Tom Paris picked it up and wrongly used it for TNG scale Warp 10 in the episode I just told you to forget.

It would make no sense. The secundary hull "border" should have at least 4 decks. As far as I know, there are only 2, as the Constitution class.

Not even the 'D' or the 'E' was that length.

I agree, the Ambassador is by far a better ship.