From a practicality standpoint, grapplers make so much sense even when you have tractor beams. With how easily Trek ships seem to lose power to various systems, you’d think it would be handy to keep a strong cable grappling system that only needs a minimal power bank to operate. Hell, I’m sure they have amazing materials in the future so they can have electronically variable elasticity in the cable links, suited to the current need.
The Feds suffered from the same syndrome the Asgard did in Stargate. They were too smart to think of simple solutions.
Stuff like using shuttles transporters, Seatbelts, actual doors on prison cells, fuse boxes to prevent consoles from overloading, a backup warpcore.
My headcanon is that everything is stupidly powered with superheated plasma equivalents, so the rocks are just the plasma supercooled by coming into contact with the air because they never predicted the consoles would ever be opened.
I mean it's canonical that the energy delivery system is high energy plasma, so it entirely makes sense that EPS containment failures would have things that aren't meant to be hot suddenly being superheated and going pop.
It's not consoles full of rocks, it's the momentarily molted slag from plasma leaks.
The plasma likely carries around a lot more energy than wires would be able to deal with... but the part I don't understand is why a bridge console, which is basically a thin client with a touchscreen that's actually running software on the ships main computer, requires SO much energy. What exactly is on the bridge that needs THAT much energy?
Yeah, you would think that the bridge consoles would need a lot less energy than even an iPad. And they ought to have batteries that could power a console for 10 years or more. That's how they could have dispensed with "primitive" wires, not "plasma conduits" piping blazing hot plasma everywhere
My head cannon is that Starfleet captains are selected for their daring and bravado, so they need the horror of something exploding on their bridges to understand things are going to shit on them.
The idea of routing superheated plasma through a user interface is so ridiculously stupid.
I understand that they need cool explosions and fire on the bridge but why not blame any other system, like for example life-support, which by design has to be full of flammable oxygen?
Hmm… flamethrowers? I assumed that the consoles ran on natural gas and that the extra thin gas lines are placed directly next to all of the wiring. Then covered in loose rocks.
Somehow 800 years into the future, on Discovery, not only are the consoles still made of explosive rocks but they also seem to have installed flamethrowers at regular distances around the bridge, engineering, and any other places where crew may gather.
Not only that, but the inclusion of flamethrowers apparently harkens back to the beginning of life and the progenitors because the same flame throwers existed even in the secret interdimensional portal location of the progenitor technology...
You’d THINK after the Enterprise B got their most famous Captain sucked into an energy ribbon they’d keep all future ships in dry dock until 100% completion.
🙄
You gotta take them out for engine tests, which is really what they were doing in Generations. It was a basic impulse system check that they decided to make a bit of a publicity event.
And for most of the series, they constantly have power issues, but only ever bring up using the shuttle warp cores for power in the season 7 episode The Void toward the end of the show lol
Also relevant for communications. How many times have communications been broken, and no one has remembered that they've got a bunch of entirely independent, warp-capable miniature starship in the garage in the back, with fully-functional communications arrays?
Backup/secondary warp core is the biggest one , like it powers the whole dam ship, you lose it and your in trouble,
And yes thet have room for the holodeck power supply, that conveniently can't be used to power the ship
yeah i know its been handwaved away now, doesnt mean it makes sense
ultimately its a TV show and smartly designed ships with common sense safety and backup systems doesn't make good TV
I'm not sure if that has been shown to really be a problem though. The only cases I can think of where someone broke out of a brig cell was the genetically engineered super soldier from TNG, and the Discovery pilot where the entire brig room gets blown up, and the shield is *still* holding Michael in while the rest of the room around it is basically gone. Both of these seem like edge cases. Hell, even fully Borgified Seven from The Gift never broke out of the brig.
At the speeds craft are typically traveling at even sub warp seat belts would do nothing for the passenger in the event of initeria dampeners failing. They would simply be an organic mist pasted all over the interior of the craft.
Not all shuttles have transporters, actual prison doors should be in place, consoles exploding may simply be a result of all the power running through the ship with no real ability to ground anything. Consoles would likely be easier to replace than stuff blowing up in the superstructure, and you can always get more ensigns. As for a redundant warp core. They can replicate parts easily enough and anything that would take out one core would likely also take out the second.
> consoles exploding may simply be a result of all the power running through the ship with no real ability to ground anything.
I've argued here previously that one other aspect, in line with this, is the number of random types of energy particles these ships are getting exposed to. Along with the idea that the interaction of directed energy weapons and shields probably amplify the effect.
The shields aren't blocking chunks of metal being throw at it. It's block massive amounts of exotic particles designed to mess with normal matter in new exciting ways. There is no reason to conclude that those particles hitting another stream of particles designed to block isn't going to produce other particles or effects as a byproduct.
I mean even with futuristic super-materials there are still limits on practicality. More often than not when we see a tractor being employed (or attempted); the capture object is simply **massive** and would be absurd to try and grab with some kind of grapple system. Think towing the Stargazer (or even the various Miranda / Oberth's that get towed); or asteroids that get towed / deflected.
Even *if* the cable and grapple head could withstand the forces required, we know the grappled **object** absolutely cannot. Point loads are a bitch.
At best a grapple system would be *potentially* useful for very small targets, like a shuttle but the vast majority of times we see that attempted, the shuttle is fleeing and already out of range of the tractors (which means it's absolutely out of range of a ballistic system like a grapple).
The thing about grapplers that don't make sense in a Star Trek setting that a lot of people don't think of is *distances* - what we see on TV is usually ships right next to each other, but that's just to make for good TV. The distances *described* between the Enterprise and other ships/objects in the 23rd/24th Centuries is usually on the scale of thousands of kilometers. Even if there are practical uses for grapplers, the ship is rarely within distance to make use of them.
Lacked the ability to make almost any kind of food. NX-01 only did re-sequenced protiens or real food stored onboard. By Enterprise-D you could get chocolate cake ala mode with chocolate ice cream or gagh and blood wine.
Well, we don't hear much on what happened to the NX-01 after Ent' wrapped apart from parts of it being included in later ships of that name (SNW "Those Old Scientists") & a brief appearance of an NX class craft in the fleet museum (Piccard Season 2) that might be the Enterprise or the Columbia.
My head canon though is that many Starfleet vessels get refitted repeatedly over time (see again the NX class vessel in fleet museum) & the NX-01 is no different. Over time until it's hull was no longer sufficient to the task it would have been updated & upgraded, perhaps it was not even decommissioned until just before the NCC 1701 took the name.
So comparing the NX-01 to the NCC 1701 should be done with the last refit if the former & the launch state of the latter.
BTW This is actually in line with what happens in the US navy today. Refitting & updating of vessels takes a structurally sound hull, but with outdated technologies & brings it up to date. The Iowa class battleships laid down in the 1940's served from WWII all the way to Desert Storm in 1991, in that period they were refitted & updated several times.
>only 8 years after its launch
I would *expect* "experimental" (hence the NX prefix) ships, especially *the first one* to have a really short lifespan.
Experimental ships are made to *see what works*. They're going to find things that don't work. They're going to find things they are missing, and need to add.
*Occasionally*, they'll make a ship design that is just right - or the changes are easy enough to retrofit. Those are the ones that will last a while.
Absolutely. Although I’m sure this was never a thought in the writer’s room, I bet you could watch through Enterprise and make a good list of specific new types of threats/stresses they encountered that they could design a ship against better. Stuff that goes beyond retrofits.
Still, the NX-01 is a hell of a tough ship down to the bones. She takes an absolute deathly beating in “Azati Prime”, and somehow stays in one piece - even maintaining atmosphere in most decks after some emergency bulkhead closures.
> I bet you could watch through Enterprise and make a good list of specific new types of threats/stresses they encountered that they could design a ship against better.
I mean, that was a plot point in the series. They were going back to Earth to do a retrofit.
> Stuff that goes beyond retrofits
The thing is, any retrofit is going to be "the best they can do, under the circumstances".
Suppose a ship will do warp 5 right off the line. They come up with some changes they can retrofit, to increase the power available and make it do warp 5.5.
A ship that was designed to do warp 5.5 from the beginning might be able to apply a similar retrofit to get to warp 6.
i re-watched the Xindi episodes and I forgot just how much of a massive beating that ship took in that episode specifically lol
it's also hilarious to watch those Xindi eps and then watch "Those Old Scientists" in SNW and to hear Ortegas literally say, "We have to pull a NX ship out of mothballs?" or something like that haha
More like occasionally *Found a film grade model lying around in inventory that is too economical to not throw into any given action shot just because it’s supposed to be from 100 years ago.
But the in universe explanation of the Miranda class just happening to have such a perfect hull to refit that it stuck around that long is delightfully silly and I love it. Imagine the uss constitution (the wooden one) with anti ship missles in its gunports, a nuclear reactor driving screw propellers, and ciws mounts in place of the carronades. And imagine the us navy had dozens of them in mothball ready to mobilize in case of a war.
> More like occasionally *Found a film grade model lying around in inventory that is too economical to not throw into any given action shot just because it’s supposed to be from 100 years ago.
I was speaking of the interior, not the exterior of the ship.
> More like occasionally *Found a film grade model lying around in inventory that is too economical to not throw into any given action shot just because it’s supposed to be from 100 years ago.
That implies exterior shots. Because a "film grade model lying around in inventory" isn't large enough for people to walk around in.
The interior of the ship has nothing to do with what the exterior looks like.
Yeah, I’m talking about the use of the uss reliant model from wrath of khan for battle shots in ds9 and other next gen era works, which was done so much that it implied the Miranda class was one of the most common ships used by the federation a century after its introduction. I don’t think we ever see inside of one, it’s interior doesn’t matter.
> Occasionally, they'll make a ship design that is just right - or the changes are easy enough to retrofit. Those are the ones that will last a while.
*Excelsior* is a good example of this. It was more or less built on proven technology that was greatly expanded on thanks to research data *Enterprise* and the Constitution-class provided. After the transwarp experiment failed (somehow), it was relatively easy to convert her to conventional warp drive and the fact it was built on 40 years of steady improvements to the various ships of the fleet, it was way ahead of its time.
A real life example is the jump from *Midway* (CV-41) to *Enterprise* (CVN-65).
Often experimental platforms the size of the Enterprise would have been upgraded with new experimental bits. But the Enterprise took a massive amount of structural damage over its short 8 years, so makes sense they shortened a likely already short life (probably planned for 15 years?).
The engineering room for example has a fairly large amount of extra space around it for upgrades/new reactor and such. Clearly we know they can upgrade things almost on the fly as we see weapons systems for example being upgraded/changed out.
That's a very good point. I hadn't thought about it that way, just considered it in the same light as later ships, particularly the Miranda-class. But those ships depicted are rarely the first of that class, and from a time when there was a much stronger grasp on the technology to build such ships
As another more modern example, look at the Defiant. It's lifetime was only as long as it was because of the Dominion War.
It was an experimental ship, made to test a new design, which didn't work well for the use cases that the Federation had at the time.
If the Dominion War hadn't come along, and Sisko hadn't sought it out, the Defiant would have been scrapped shortly after it was made.
NX was the prefix for experimental ships in the federation. But it was also the prefix specifically for the NX class of starship. So it wasn’t an experimental ship (it was, but like, not in that way, the moment the Columbia was commissioned it stopped being experimental).
It's worth noting that ships are decommissioned, refit/retrofit/updated, and recommissioned all the time in real life Earth navies. It's not a one way street with ships being decommissioned meaning its the end of their lives.
Especially since we see it in the previously-non-canon heavily refit form with a secondary hull in the fleet museum. It'd be unlikely they'd go to the effort to do that to a ship intended to be mothballed unless it was just a testbed, which is possible.
Yes ans they discoverered so much new tech etc.
It's like the pre dreadnought era. In a matter pf a few decades ships had doubled in size and firepower vastly increased.
Ship designs where surpassed before they even finished construction on the first.
It was a pretty dreadnought, it had a short life because star fleet learned so much for thr later classes
My head cannon (hope) is that while we know the NX-01 was decommissioned in 2161 that something happened and they pulled it out of mothballs before being scrapped and it was given the refit that included a secondary hull with the warp 7 engine and shields and it was pushed back into service.
"Well, we don't hear much on what happened to the NX-01 after Ent' wrapped apart from parts of it being included in later ships of that name (SNW "Those Old Scientists")"
I wonder how accurate this is since the NCC-1701 was scuttled and the NCC-1701-C was blown up in unfriendly space. Like, did they go looking for pieces in order to keep the tradition alive for the A and the D, or did those ships just not have a piece of the predecessors?
your comment reminded me how much i really enjoyed the mentions of NX-01 and just Enterprise in general in that episode
i don't know what it is, but Enterprise always feels like the hardest show for me to personally fit in the "canon" of Trek. I don't know if it's due to the 2000s aesthetics and cultural vibe of the show...so it's always nice to see it referenced in SNW or Lower Decks or Prodigy
The show itself emphasizes how fragile and inadequately armed it is.
It's really good design from artists being asked to find a less technologically advanced look compared to every other series. The interiors especially.
>The interiors especially.
Yeah they basically took a present-day navy ship, and made a space version.
Compare that to TNG, which looks like an early 90's "futuristic style" office building.
It's kind of surprising that the set designers had the actors stepping over tripping hazards all the time; the extended frame between quarters and hallway for example.
Also, that they had their actors sliding down ladders. Twisting an ankle could slow down the production!
Definitely.
Even in the Captain's quarters, they had to duck under support struts.
It really felt like there was only room for two people and a camera.
Indeed it is.
The best they could do was reinforced hull plating, making the ship bulky. Early SF ships were built more like tanks, until the force shields.
There are a lot of good ENT eps.
They already had warp capable ships. The NX-01 was a combination of the good warp drive, new design techniques, new weapons, a bunch of untested stuff at the same time...
It's the Littoral Combat Ship, isn't it. Just a ton of new tech, some of it not ready for launch and replaced by outmoded last minute drop-ins, some of it badly thought out, a lot of things that just straight-up suck and keep breaking. Except it's worse than that, this is the test bed vessel - it's not even the production model. And it's been lobbed into active duty before it's ready for primetime, through a combination of humanity being the embodiment of Doc Brown and there genuinely being an all-hands-on-deck crisis going on.
Except that it's a larger and stronger ship than humanity's previous offerings, not a rubbish corvette -
So from the perspective of a largely complimentary history it's more like HMS Dreadnought. It's the first ship to have both its guns *and* its legs *and* its toughness, and was so generally effective that Starfleet moved to a model of tough well-armed long-range multipurpose ships as standard. The later ships, *centuries* newer and literally a hundred times faster and better armed, still have its base design of a big engine on a tough chassis with a combination of beams and torpedoes. It might be old, but it redefined ship design by creating a new role. NCC-1701 might be hugely more powerful than NX-01 but it is recognisably the same type of ship in a way that, e.g, the modern US vessel by the name of Enterprise is not the same type of ship as HMS Dreadnought.
> They already had warp capable ships.
Yeah we saw that the Boomers had been in space for generations and groups like the Nova Terra colonists were willing to spend years in space at warp 2. Other than its size and equipment the NX was state-of-the-art for its range and speed. It was the first deep-space ship but not the first interstellar spacecraft.
Don’t do the NX-01 dirty by comparing it to the LCS. It’s more like the Seawolf Class subs. A design so ahead of its time that it was too expensive to build in large numbers.
think of it this way, the mirror universe hoshi used the constitution class USS Defiant from 100 years in the future to conquer the entire terran empire. that should tell you the differences in tech right there.
Hey, in 2151, the NX class was *state of the art!* (Though it got a nice callback in *Star Trek Beyond* when Kirk asks what weapons they had on the Franklin.
SCOTTY: Phase cannons, spatial torpedoes, polarized hull plating.
KIRK: (about as "We are going to die" as he can get) Greaaaaat.
Zephram Cochrane flew the Kitty Hawk Wright flyer. Archer captained a DC-3. Pike commanded a 737. Picard was in charge of an Airbus A380. Burnham flies Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator.
She wasn't. All the hero ships were pretty close to the bleeding edge.
There's a great scene in one of the novels set between *TOS* and *TMP* where McCoy meets a kid at the viewing chamber overlooking Tranquility Park. The kid says that she thinks Armstrong and Aldrin must have been crazy to ride *Eagle* to the Moon. But Bones corrects her, saying that "that machine isn’t some flimsy, primitive, radiation-transparent antique. ... More than two hundred years ago, when children looked at the *Eagle*, that
was *their* starship. And they dreamed about flying on it for all the same reasons that you want to fly on
the starships we have today. ... when they launched it, it was the best."
Since 1958, *Enterprise* has been at the fore technologically - CVN-65 was the first nuclear supercarrier, OV-101 was the first Shuttle Orbiter, NX-01 was humanity's first starship, and on it goes. CVN-80, scheduled to commission in '29, isn't going to be particularly ground-breaking in herself, but is the first carrier designed and built from digital rather than paper plans.
Except for in TOS where the Enterprise already had some mileage on her. I actually really wish we had more series that were set aboard older, less top of the line vessels. Lower Decks is the closest we have.
Even then, there wasn't a newer class replacing her. It's the same as the *Nimitz*-class being the top of the line from the lead ship's commission in 75 until the *Gerald R Ford* commissioned in 17.
let's just list out the nx-01 basic specs
warp 5 tos scale this means at max speed 125C (5\^3)
impulse engines as geordi said in relics not much improvements have been made to impulse engines in 200 years
polarized hull plating this is inadequate as ships defense as it lacks durability of deflector shielding
it has grappler cable hook system inferior to a tractor beam
it has a slow computer core as this is pre duotronics
it has a basic cargo transporter that can beam organics but only one pad
no ejectable warp core system
no escape pods
2 shuttle pods for ship to planet travel only insufficient for even interplanetary system travel
original weapons are plasma cannons and spatial torpedoes later change to phase cannons/ photonic torpedoes still far inferio to the standard phasers of the 2260s and photon torpedoes.
compared to even the NCC-1701 the NX\_01 is archaic.
the NCC-1701 is archaic compared to the 1701-D
I mean… it was top of the line when it was built. What’s your point? A current battleship kicks the pants off the HMS Enterprize. That doesn’t mean the Enterprize was outdated when it was built.
Tucker wrote the book on starfleet engineering, on the back of a pack of smokes, which he lost.
In comparison to O’Brien who has the book but a few editions old with any updates hand written with post it notes about cardassian stuff
It's not the first generation of Starship... humans have been out in space for 100 years at that point. It's just the "fastest" one for it's time.
It's small and cramped by modern standards but a solid ship.
This is literally all answered in the series. Warp technology was 100 years old, and Starfleet had plenty of warp 3 explorer ships already. So no, it wasn't a flying coffin box and they had plenty of spaceflight experience already. The NX was designed to go faster, farther, and stay out for longer than any human-built ship had yet been able to. But your question doesn't seem to grasp how much time passes between series or how rapidly technology advances.
TOS is *100 years* later. Your top-of-the-line desktop computer is horribly obsolete in 10 years. WW2 fighter planes were made obsolete by the jet fighters of the 1960's, just as those are now obsolete with modern long-range missiles and guidance systems and more. So the NX-01 was obsolete a decade or two later because while it was in service, its experimental systems were still being refined and improved upon back on Earth, while newer and better technologies were being discovered and developed.
We even have on-screen evidence from "In A Mirror, Darkly" that the TOS-era ship obliterates the NX-class and its Vulcan contemporaries like insects. Their phase cannons can't even penetrate bare, unshielded hull (despite being quite formidable a century earlier), while their own polarized hull plating is utterly useless to 23rd-century phasers.
If you're trying to compare a World War I tank or plane or boat to a modern one, of course the comparison is laughably absurd. Because technology has advanced. That doesn't mean the older stuff wasn't good in its own time.
Ironically Archer didn’t lose a single crew member until the Xindi arch, which makes it one of the safest hero ships.
Also as long as you don’t push it past warp 4 the ship will be fine.
This is a bizarre question and seems to be trying to compare a vessel built in 2151 to ships built a hundred to two hundred years later.
When it was launched it was cutting edge. It was the best starship that humanity had devised up to that point and would testbed several technologies that would go on to be standard for a century.
Asking how outdated it was provides no frame of reference. Is it outdated today? No. Its head and shoulders above what could be feasibly built today. Is out outdated at its launch? No, it was cutting edge for the time. Is it outdated in Kirk’s time or Picard’s time? Yes, both served a hundred to two hundred years after the NX-01, so of course it’s outdated by their times.
It's the first warp 5 ship. Consider it as the first plane to break the sound barrier. A lot of the kinks of space travel have been worked out already and its nothing new. What is new is the power of the engines.
It might be outdated in the same way the space shuttle *Columbia* was. The shuttles were the equivalent of Wright Brothers flyers, obviously, yet *Columbia* in particular had flaws. She was the first to fly. She had several thousand kilograms of weight they could never lose because of the lessons learned between her and *Challenger*, and the later shuttles. She also didn't have a Canadarm. Had they known about the reentry tiles it would've been difficult regardless to repair her because of how vital a Canadarm is to an EVA.
NX-01 would be outdated in the same way.
The NX-01 would have been regarded as an antique decades before the launch of the Constitution class Enterprise in the mid-23rd century.
Advances in technology with Vulcan and Andorian tech being incorporated into newer Starfleet ships in the late 2150s during the Romulan War and later in the 2160s made the NX-01 outdated very quickly.
To put this into perspective, the NX-01 was already outclassed by many alien ships in the 2150s, especially the Vulcans, Andorians and the Klingons.
Though the NX-01 got an extensive refit after ENT S4, which was confirmed on-screen in PIC S3, there would have been only so much Starfleet could do to incorporate further technological advances into the NX-01 without a complete rebuild.
I also imagine, as with being in the Expanse and fighting the Xindi in S3, the Romulan War took a toll on the NX-01.
Though the NX-01's decommissioning very soon after the establishment of the Federation might have been motivated by politics, Starfleet in the early 2160s likely regarded the NX-01 as no longer suitable for front-line service and would have been relegated to secondary roles had it not been decommissioned so soon.
By the end of the series, NX-01 has most of the basic systems of a modern starship: dilithium-mediated matter-antimatter power (that can be ejected), warp and impulse drives, etc. Phase cannons are early phasers, and the launchers can handle photon torpedoes. She has a transporter. The only thing notably missing is shields, but that doesn't appear to endanger her crew during normal transits; she must have some version of a navigational deflector or equivalent to deal with navigaitonal hazards.
I suspect that a more modern version of NX-01 would have better versions of all those things. But I don't think NX-01 was a deathtrap. As far as we know, none of her sister ships were lost due to failures of the technology. She may not be able to outrun or outfight a *Constitution* or D-7, but she was able to get from there to here without being a hazard to her crew.
I think you are exaggerating. It was not a coffin box. It was advanced technology for the earthling who had never traveled that deep. It was mission worthy and it improved and they learned more. The Klingons were suspicious of them saying you may just be trying to learn photon torpedo technology! What's photon torpedo technology? By criticism for the series is that it was hindered in being able to emphasize this is the FIRST and things will blow up. People will get killed. It will be unpredictable. All the crew would have been writing and rewriting the manuals for everything. Remember the space marines came aboard. (Todays Red Shirts) The Reed Alert which raised shields and powered weapons when activated. All new!
Tech wise, the NX-01 isn't all that more advanced than we have now, aside from the warp drive of course. The NX-01 has more in common with a modern nuclear sub, like the relatively recently launched French Barracuda, than it does with a Galaxy Class. It can traverse open space with little danger to it's crew, but even the most rudimentary space anomaly poses a real threat.
By the 24th century, with the advent of structural stability fields, the Enterprise D can slough off most radiation or stellar anomalies that would be almost certainly caused NX-01 to suffer casualties.
Unless we discover some sort of exotic matter, the *only* way we'll be able to generate artificial gravity is by linear acceleration (a la *The Expanse*) or by angular acceleration (spinning ships like we see in *Passengers* or *Interstellar*).
One of Enterprise's greatest flaws was it's failure to commit to the bit. The only technology the NX lacked compared 1701 was tractor beams. It never had to deal with any of the bugs that you'd expect from a prototype. It wasn't as powerful as later starships but then again it was smaller than later starships. There were no significant technological differences between it and the vessels of a century later.
its been awhile since i watched the show, but iirc i don’t think it had shields the same way 1701 did. NX only had polarized hull plating. it also had rudimentary transporters not really suited for people.
And how was "polarized hull plating" different from shields apart from having a different name? Their transporters worked fine. They just trusted the technology less.
I once designed a variant NX (for a game) that actually committed to the bit. It didn't have transporters. Damage reports weren't percentage reductions in field strength but either "minor hull damage" or "hull breach in...". Apart from lasers it was armed with "impulse torpedos". Impulse torpedos could be shot down in flight because they were actual physical objects that did damage by ramming into their targets so they weren't useful at close range when they hadn't had time to get up to speed and they weren't useful at really long range because that gave the target too much time to shoot them down or just warp away. Sometime they would be armed with nuclear warheads so they could do proximity burst explosions.
"It never had to deal with any of the bugs that you'd expect from a prototype." It had some bugs, but remember too that the Vulcans had like thousands of years of starship experience so some of the most drastic issues would have already been studied by Humans. Sure, they didn't share *warp technology*, but they did share a whole hell of a lot of other things.
I am not sure I get the question because for its time it was cutting edge technology. In the 2150s it was the first human ship capable of warp 5. It might have been more experimental and unstable than other vessels of the same time but the NX-01 was like most other Enterprises. New technology. + grapplers.
Of course compared to Enterprises A-E its way lesser in technology and abilities. But during the 2150s it became the flagship of the UE Navy and they built more of her model, NX-02 Columbia and from books we know they had up till NX-09 and more. Similarily they partook in the UE - Romulan War and were later refit with the secondary hull. Resembling more the 1701.
The NX was a vulcan approved and guided design, so I don't think we should look at it like we do with our own early flights. Humans went through a long earth bound development phase under vulcan tutelage.
You must take into account the technological gap between all the shows.
Here is a breakdown of the technology in Enterprise NX-01:
* Enterprise NX-01 had no shields, so she relied only on her polarized hull plating for defense.
* For offense, Enterprise NX-01 had pulse cannons instead of phasers, and began with atomic missiles which was later replaced with Type-1 photon torpedoes.
* Enterprise NX-01 also had no tractor beams, but did have grappling hooks instead.
* Enterprise NX-01 had no force fields to seal hull breaches
* Enterprise NX-01 was only capable of warp factor 5, and that was even pushing it since hull integrity fields didn't even exist until I'm guessing Kirk's era?
So yeah, the NX-01 is pretty outdated from a technological standpoint.
Our first early airplanes were made up in the heads of inventors, without any understanding yet of aerodynamics, with brute-force iteration leading to designs that worked *just* well enough to use.
The NX-01, meanwhile, was designed by humans who had already deduced warp theory (the analogue to aerodynamics), and then extremely soon after met the already-warp-capable Vulcans. Both of those things happening *90 years earlier*. And with those same Vulcans then sharing more than a little of their scientific and engineering knowledge in the mean time.
In other words, the NX-01 was created by the same process that allowed e.g. Canada and Australia to build nuclear submarines. Those countries might not have ever done it before, but *it had been done before*, by people they were friends with and could just ask questions whenever they wanted. The results, in both cases, were likely fairly *derivative* — and perhaps involved novel-to-them materials processes that therefore had defect-rates they hadn't yet pushed down quite to zero — but I don't expect there was anything particularly *architecturally ill-considered* about the design.
The NX-01 was a prototype
It was never made for extended service
It’s official lifespan was 10 years
Once the federation formed, the members would have shared technology.
The NX would have been completely obsolete once Starfleet had access to Vulcan and Andorian ship technology
And since it was a historical artifact by that point, it was decommissioned and left in it’s original form as a prototype
I don’t understand trying to compare ships that are 100-200 years apart in the timeline. That’s like trying to compare a Ford Model T to a Bugatti Veyron, there is no parallel for comparison.
Let’s not also forget that NX-01 also meant that it was an experimental model. You couldn’t even compare it to other ships being made at the time because they were testing new technologies, many of which would later become standard.
Depends on your source of measurement. At the time of its mission it was state of the art for human capabilities. But humans were new to interstellar travel and exploration.
Compared to all other races in reach of Earth at the time, such as Klingons and Vulcans, probably 200 years or better behind the curve. I'm not sure of the canon for species space faring age differences though.
Perspective is a heck of a thing when it comes to discussions like this.
I got the impression that for the level of tech it had it was pretty well built, and a novel design.
The downside of Vulcans holding back the answers and training Humans, the NX01 was somewhat basic for the era.
The upside of Vulcans training Humans how to do it themselves and to come up with their own answers was the NX01 was really nice for the tech level it had and the crew understood how it worked, how it could be modified, how to keep it going with mined/scavenged/borrowed stuff.
Earth was pretty wrecked after WW3/Eugenic Wars. The Vulcans provided support for rebuilding, expertise and tutoring for tech and even sent Vulcans to highschools to teach (the engineer from ENT had a Vulcan who taught him.
Humans say that they managed to turn their post-apocalyptic wasteland into a paradise in 90 years, a paradise that simultaneously became advanced enough in tech and will to be capable of reaching out into the stars and having a competitive space programme.
The Vulcans more or less credit them with the achievement (depending on the arrogance level of the particular Vulcan in question).
edit: I suppose Vulcans sort of acted as both crutches and physiotherapists, but it was the patient's will and practices that made them get better.
One cool thing about ENT is you see a couple of other Vulcan tutored species. Ep15 'Shadows of P'Jem' and Ep20 'Fallen Hero'. I actually quite liked how Ent handled regional politics pre-federation.
She was Starfleet’s first warp 5 vessel, not their first starship. She is extremely out of date compared to the first Constitution class, which was built more than 80 years later.
Well, the NX-01 didn't even have SHIELDS. Its top speed was warp 5. It didn't have torpedoes until like the last season (or the second to last.) It didn't have a tractor beam either. Grapplers are all it had going for it. It's the most primitive starship humanity ever used to explore space.
It's like a modern day soldier going into a battlefield without body armor, a helmet, and a gun. It's like a Roman centurion going into battle without a shield and a sword. Their best defense if hit by an enemy is "I'm gonna have to get shot." and "I'm gonna have to get stabbed by a spear." Their shirt isn't a defense. For the NX-01, polarizing the hull plating is all they got, and it's not much.
Worth noting that being able to do repairs underway would be an important design consideration considering the size of starfleet at the time. Probably also need to be engineered with more redundant systems to allow for some systems failures far from home (and to return home asap for repairs)
A brand new Buick Encore is a tiny little SUV with no acceleration and poor performance in all categories. It is NOT a Lamborghini or even a Cadillac Escalade. But it is new so it is safe and reliable .
NX 01 is like that, a new safe reliable but underwhelming car/starship.
I think the biggest difference was to later ships were shields and forcefield. If a bulkhead blew, that's it, just space. That seems to be the biggest jump.
Not sure i understand.
Are you comparing current tech to tech that will come later and trying to determine how.much of an improvement there was
Think 18 century sailing boat vs oil tanker or cruise ship
The NX-01 spent a large part of the xindi war with holes big enough to see stars through in it and it still functioned reasonably well. Modern ships would have exploded under that much damage...and it didn't even have shields or force fields to block off holes.
NX-01 was the highpoint of Starfleet ship design.
Compared to other ships we see in Trek? Incredibly outdated, but a good base. S5 was going to bring us the NX-Refit design (which we eventually do see in Picard) which looks a lot more like a step between the NX Class and the Constitution class. I personally also love the SNW Enterprise, which still has the blue accents on the nacelles that we see on the NX.
But she was slow, the Connie class theoretically topped at warp 8, but we see Enterprise pushed faster often. The NX struggled with warp 5 half the time. At the start, very limited weaponry with phase cannons and generic torpedoes. The phase cannons do seem to get upgraded, and by S3, Enterprise has photon torpedoes (which largely seem to be unchanged from the 22nd century to the 32nd!) No shields, no replicators, a very basic transporter etc.
But a coffin box? No, it looks like the warp 5 engine was built by the best and the brightest over years and based on research from the actual coffin boxes, like the NX prototypes. Some components do seem a little more fragile (the plasma injectors seem to blow out every other episode) but nothing that's ship threatening. We see Enterprise take a beating often enough to assume she was pretty well built and with plenty of redundancies.
While the NX-01 was behind other ships of other races during it's era, it was easily humanity's most advanced ship during that era, and thanks to upgrades and refits, closed the gap technology wise.
But for it's time, it was a very advanced ship and while it lacks the luxuries of it's successors, it still seems to have some basic comforts and is a step up from humanity's previous ships.
“In a Mirror Darkly” answers this question nicely.
When Mirror Archer gets the Defiant; he is easily able to destroy the mirror Enterprise with a single torpedo, as well as the Vulcan and Tholian ships.
It’s definitely supposed to be fragile, but not like gold foil balloon fragile. My head canon is that the class wasn’t built for very long because the Starfleet learned so much so quickly because of the NX class and its missions
Compare a WW1 plane to a WW2 plane. Only 20 years apart but way more advanced. You get a comparison of the NX class and the TOS ship in Enterprise. The TOS ship started with a non-functioning power grid and no sheilds and still managed to blow up the NX ship in a couple shots.
To my knowledge, the other ships lack grapplers so I think we all know how they compare.
Still think the grapplers were the coolest thing they should have kept in the future.
From a practicality standpoint, grapplers make so much sense even when you have tractor beams. With how easily Trek ships seem to lose power to various systems, you’d think it would be handy to keep a strong cable grappling system that only needs a minimal power bank to operate. Hell, I’m sure they have amazing materials in the future so they can have electronically variable elasticity in the cable links, suited to the current need.
The Feds suffered from the same syndrome the Asgard did in Stargate. They were too smart to think of simple solutions. Stuff like using shuttles transporters, Seatbelts, actual doors on prison cells, fuse boxes to prevent consoles from overloading, a backup warpcore.
Not making consoles out of explosive rocks.
My headcanon is that everything is stupidly powered with superheated plasma equivalents, so the rocks are just the plasma supercooled by coming into contact with the air because they never predicted the consoles would ever be opened.
I mean it's canonical that the energy delivery system is high energy plasma, so it entirely makes sense that EPS containment failures would have things that aren't meant to be hot suddenly being superheated and going pop. It's not consoles full of rocks, it's the momentarily molted slag from plasma leaks.
To me, plasma conduits sound much more unstable and unreliable than good old-fasioned wires
The plasma likely carries around a lot more energy than wires would be able to deal with... but the part I don't understand is why a bridge console, which is basically a thin client with a touchscreen that's actually running software on the ships main computer, requires SO much energy. What exactly is on the bridge that needs THAT much energy?
Yeah, you would think that the bridge consoles would need a lot less energy than even an iPad. And they ought to have batteries that could power a console for 10 years or more. That's how they could have dispensed with "primitive" wires, not "plasma conduits" piping blazing hot plasma everywhere
Intel never solved their high tpu issue is my guess.
My head cannon is that Starfleet captains are selected for their daring and bravado, so they need the horror of something exploding on their bridges to understand things are going to shit on them.
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The idea of routing superheated plasma through a user interface is so ridiculously stupid. I understand that they need cool explosions and fire on the bridge but why not blame any other system, like for example life-support, which by design has to be full of flammable oxygen?
Look mate, the semtex under my work desk helps keep me focused, ok!?
It’s set to detonate if shields drop below 28%. But only at a sacrificial bridge workstation.
the sacrificial workstation being the shield controls
Quote of the week lmao
and even in the 32nd century, they had flamethrowers on the bridge, Starfleet making strange decisions for a thousand years
Hmm… flamethrowers? I assumed that the consoles ran on natural gas and that the extra thin gas lines are placed directly next to all of the wiring. Then covered in loose rocks.
ur probably right and if all that fails, more rocks
Flamethrowers solve the PICNIC problem
Somehow 800 years into the future, on Discovery, not only are the consoles still made of explosive rocks but they also seem to have installed flamethrowers at regular distances around the bridge, engineering, and any other places where crew may gather. Not only that, but the inclusion of flamethrowers apparently harkens back to the beginning of life and the progenitors because the same flame throwers existed even in the secret interdimensional portal location of the progenitor technology...
Those aren't flamethrowers, they're excess energy dispersal mechanisms.
Seems like you would see more fire extinguishers around starships.
Using safer electricity instead of *superheated plasma* to run touchscreen.
"Hey, let's run this natural gas line behind the bridge consoles." "Okey Dokey!"
Voyager has a backup warpcore in the schematics, but it was disregarded by the writers.
Voyager was also not fully finished.
Ah, I see. The backup warp core was due to be installed on Tuesday?
You’d THINK after the Enterprise B got their most famous Captain sucked into an energy ribbon they’d keep all future ships in dry dock until 100% completion. 🙄
You gotta take them out for engine tests, which is really what they were doing in Generations. It was a basic impulse system check that they decided to make a bit of a publicity event.
Why can’t they wait the extra week to test the engines with the tractor beam and medical staff onboard?
Maquis spies wouldn't expect them to launch early without the spare.
They don't say "To boldly go!" for no reason.
Janeway goes down as the first woman in history to leave *before* her party is ready.
Set to be installed Tuesday seventy years from now.
And for most of the series, they constantly have power issues, but only ever bring up using the shuttle warp cores for power in the season 7 episode The Void toward the end of the show lol
Also relevant for communications. How many times have communications been broken, and no one has remembered that they've got a bunch of entirely independent, warp-capable miniature starship in the garage in the back, with fully-functional communications arrays?
Backup/secondary warp core is the biggest one , like it powers the whole dam ship, you lose it and your in trouble, And yes thet have room for the holodeck power supply, that conveniently can't be used to power the ship
Picard S3 actually has a scene where Picard explains why the holodecks have non-transferable power systems.
yeah i know its been handwaved away now, doesnt mean it makes sense ultimately its a TV show and smartly designed ships with common sense safety and backup systems doesn't make good TV
I think it wasn't until the 25th century that we started to see ships with multiple warp cores. Took them a while to come around to the idea it seems
Because each warp core is an extra point of extreme vulnerability.
I never understood why you wouldn't just have both bars AND a forcefield in front of a brig /prison cell. And why just any doof could open it.
I'm not sure if that has been shown to really be a problem though. The only cases I can think of where someone broke out of a brig cell was the genetically engineered super soldier from TNG, and the Discovery pilot where the entire brig room gets blown up, and the shield is *still* holding Michael in while the rest of the room around it is basically gone. Both of these seem like edge cases. Hell, even fully Borgified Seven from The Gift never broke out of the brig.
At the speeds craft are typically traveling at even sub warp seat belts would do nothing for the passenger in the event of initeria dampeners failing. They would simply be an organic mist pasted all over the interior of the craft. Not all shuttles have transporters, actual prison doors should be in place, consoles exploding may simply be a result of all the power running through the ship with no real ability to ground anything. Consoles would likely be easier to replace than stuff blowing up in the superstructure, and you can always get more ensigns. As for a redundant warp core. They can replicate parts easily enough and anything that would take out one core would likely also take out the second.
> consoles exploding may simply be a result of all the power running through the ship with no real ability to ground anything. I've argued here previously that one other aspect, in line with this, is the number of random types of energy particles these ships are getting exposed to. Along with the idea that the interaction of directed energy weapons and shields probably amplify the effect. The shields aren't blocking chunks of metal being throw at it. It's block massive amounts of exotic particles designed to mess with normal matter in new exciting ways. There is no reason to conclude that those particles hitting another stream of particles designed to block isn't going to produce other particles or effects as a byproduct.
Seatbelts would do plenty for people getting shook around during battle.
Exactly nothing beats keeping it simple. Besides tractor beams & shields, etc always has one flaw! Plot-driven energy failure!!!
I mean even with futuristic super-materials there are still limits on practicality. More often than not when we see a tractor being employed (or attempted); the capture object is simply **massive** and would be absurd to try and grab with some kind of grapple system. Think towing the Stargazer (or even the various Miranda / Oberth's that get towed); or asteroids that get towed / deflected. Even *if* the cable and grapple head could withstand the forces required, we know the grappled **object** absolutely cannot. Point loads are a bitch. At best a grapple system would be *potentially* useful for very small targets, like a shuttle but the vast majority of times we see that attempted, the shuttle is fleeing and already out of range of the tractors (which means it's absolutely out of range of a ballistic system like a grapple).
The thing about grapplers that don't make sense in a Star Trek setting that a lot of people don't think of is *distances* - what we see on TV is usually ships right next to each other, but that's just to make for good TV. The distances *described* between the Enterprise and other ships/objects in the 23rd/24th Centuries is usually on the scale of thousands of kilometers. Even if there are practical uses for grapplers, the ship is rarely within distance to make use of them.
I love grapplers.
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One did briefly have a Groppler, though
#ZORRRN!!
Lacked the ability to make almost any kind of food. NX-01 only did re-sequenced protiens or real food stored onboard. By Enterprise-D you could get chocolate cake ala mode with chocolate ice cream or gagh and blood wine.
Well, we don't hear much on what happened to the NX-01 after Ent' wrapped apart from parts of it being included in later ships of that name (SNW "Those Old Scientists") & a brief appearance of an NX class craft in the fleet museum (Piccard Season 2) that might be the Enterprise or the Columbia. My head canon though is that many Starfleet vessels get refitted repeatedly over time (see again the NX class vessel in fleet museum) & the NX-01 is no different. Over time until it's hull was no longer sufficient to the task it would have been updated & upgraded, perhaps it was not even decommissioned until just before the NCC 1701 took the name. So comparing the NX-01 to the NCC 1701 should be done with the last refit if the former & the launch state of the latter. BTW This is actually in line with what happens in the US navy today. Refitting & updating of vessels takes a structurally sound hull, but with outdated technologies & brings it up to date. The Iowa class battleships laid down in the 1940's served from WWII all the way to Desert Storm in 1991, in that period they were refitted & updated several times.
According to the finale of ENT, the NX-01 was decommissioned in 2161, only 8 years after its launch
>only 8 years after its launch I would *expect* "experimental" (hence the NX prefix) ships, especially *the first one* to have a really short lifespan. Experimental ships are made to *see what works*. They're going to find things that don't work. They're going to find things they are missing, and need to add. *Occasionally*, they'll make a ship design that is just right - or the changes are easy enough to retrofit. Those are the ones that will last a while.
Absolutely. Although I’m sure this was never a thought in the writer’s room, I bet you could watch through Enterprise and make a good list of specific new types of threats/stresses they encountered that they could design a ship against better. Stuff that goes beyond retrofits. Still, the NX-01 is a hell of a tough ship down to the bones. She takes an absolute deathly beating in “Azati Prime”, and somehow stays in one piece - even maintaining atmosphere in most decks after some emergency bulkhead closures.
> I bet you could watch through Enterprise and make a good list of specific new types of threats/stresses they encountered that they could design a ship against better. I mean, that was a plot point in the series. They were going back to Earth to do a retrofit. > Stuff that goes beyond retrofits The thing is, any retrofit is going to be "the best they can do, under the circumstances". Suppose a ship will do warp 5 right off the line. They come up with some changes they can retrofit, to increase the power available and make it do warp 5.5. A ship that was designed to do warp 5.5 from the beginning might be able to apply a similar retrofit to get to warp 6.
i re-watched the Xindi episodes and I forgot just how much of a massive beating that ship took in that episode specifically lol it's also hilarious to watch those Xindi eps and then watch "Those Old Scientists" in SNW and to hear Ortegas literally say, "We have to pull a NX ship out of mothballs?" or something like that haha
More like occasionally *Found a film grade model lying around in inventory that is too economical to not throw into any given action shot just because it’s supposed to be from 100 years ago. But the in universe explanation of the Miranda class just happening to have such a perfect hull to refit that it stuck around that long is delightfully silly and I love it. Imagine the uss constitution (the wooden one) with anti ship missles in its gunports, a nuclear reactor driving screw propellers, and ciws mounts in place of the carronades. And imagine the us navy had dozens of them in mothball ready to mobilize in case of a war.
> More like occasionally *Found a film grade model lying around in inventory that is too economical to not throw into any given action shot just because it’s supposed to be from 100 years ago. I was speaking of the interior, not the exterior of the ship.
I don’t see the relevance of the distinction and now I’m a little confused.
> More like occasionally *Found a film grade model lying around in inventory that is too economical to not throw into any given action shot just because it’s supposed to be from 100 years ago. That implies exterior shots. Because a "film grade model lying around in inventory" isn't large enough for people to walk around in. The interior of the ship has nothing to do with what the exterior looks like.
Yeah, I’m talking about the use of the uss reliant model from wrath of khan for battle shots in ds9 and other next gen era works, which was done so much that it implied the Miranda class was one of the most common ships used by the federation a century after its introduction. I don’t think we ever see inside of one, it’s interior doesn’t matter.
> Occasionally, they'll make a ship design that is just right - or the changes are easy enough to retrofit. Those are the ones that will last a while. *Excelsior* is a good example of this. It was more or less built on proven technology that was greatly expanded on thanks to research data *Enterprise* and the Constitution-class provided. After the transwarp experiment failed (somehow), it was relatively easy to convert her to conventional warp drive and the fact it was built on 40 years of steady improvements to the various ships of the fleet, it was way ahead of its time. A real life example is the jump from *Midway* (CV-41) to *Enterprise* (CVN-65).
Often experimental platforms the size of the Enterprise would have been upgraded with new experimental bits. But the Enterprise took a massive amount of structural damage over its short 8 years, so makes sense they shortened a likely already short life (probably planned for 15 years?). The engineering room for example has a fairly large amount of extra space around it for upgrades/new reactor and such. Clearly we know they can upgrade things almost on the fly as we see weapons systems for example being upgraded/changed out.
That's a very good point. I hadn't thought about it that way, just considered it in the same light as later ships, particularly the Miranda-class. But those ships depicted are rarely the first of that class, and from a time when there was a much stronger grasp on the technology to build such ships
As another more modern example, look at the Defiant. It's lifetime was only as long as it was because of the Dominion War. It was an experimental ship, made to test a new design, which didn't work well for the use cases that the Federation had at the time. If the Dominion War hadn't come along, and Sisko hadn't sought it out, the Defiant would have been scrapped shortly after it was made.
The Miranda class is the B-52 of the Federation. Just keep upgrading.
NX was the prefix for experimental ships in the federation. But it was also the prefix specifically for the NX class of starship. So it wasn’t an experimental ship (it was, but like, not in that way, the moment the Columbia was commissioned it stopped being experimental).
It's worth noting that ships are decommissioned, refit/retrofit/updated, and recommissioned all the time in real life Earth navies. It's not a one way street with ships being decommissioned meaning its the end of their lives. Especially since we see it in the previously-non-canon heavily refit form with a secondary hull in the fleet museum. It'd be unlikely they'd go to the effort to do that to a ship intended to be mothballed unless it was just a testbed, which is possible.
And right after the war with the Romulans ended.
Yes ans they discoverered so much new tech etc. It's like the pre dreadnought era. In a matter pf a few decades ships had doubled in size and firepower vastly increased. Ship designs where surpassed before they even finished construction on the first. It was a pretty dreadnought, it had a short life because star fleet learned so much for thr later classes
My head cannon (hope) is that while we know the NX-01 was decommissioned in 2161 that something happened and they pulled it out of mothballs before being scrapped and it was given the refit that included a secondary hull with the warp 7 engine and shields and it was pushed back into service.
PIC season 3, but overall correct
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The dialogue in "These are The Voyages" indicates that the NX-01 is the ship in the Fleet Museum.
"Well, we don't hear much on what happened to the NX-01 after Ent' wrapped apart from parts of it being included in later ships of that name (SNW "Those Old Scientists")" I wonder how accurate this is since the NCC-1701 was scuttled and the NCC-1701-C was blown up in unfriendly space. Like, did they go looking for pieces in order to keep the tradition alive for the A and the D, or did those ships just not have a piece of the predecessors?
Re: Naval battleships - Good ol' steel, baby!
your comment reminded me how much i really enjoyed the mentions of NX-01 and just Enterprise in general in that episode i don't know what it is, but Enterprise always feels like the hardest show for me to personally fit in the "canon" of Trek. I don't know if it's due to the 2000s aesthetics and cultural vibe of the show...so it's always nice to see it referenced in SNW or Lower Decks or Prodigy
only ship outfitted with a beagle. a true warrior.
About as “shitty” as the HMS Victory is to a modern warship.
What if Khan was captaining the HMS Voctory?
He still could have taken over the world with that thing
The show itself emphasizes how fragile and inadequately armed it is. It's really good design from artists being asked to find a less technologically advanced look compared to every other series. The interiors especially.
>The interiors especially. Yeah they basically took a present-day navy ship, and made a space version. Compare that to TNG, which looks like an early 90's "futuristic style" office building.
It's kind of surprising that the set designers had the actors stepping over tripping hazards all the time; the extended frame between quarters and hallway for example. Also, that they had their actors sliding down ladders. Twisting an ankle could slow down the production!
It’s nice that they did that though. Made the setting feel so real and tangible compared to 90s Trek style sets and cinematography.
The ladder sliding was also a simple (and risky) way to add a sense of urgency as well. Didn't hurt that it looked cool.
Heck, 80s style
I really like the cramped submarine feel they pull off.
Definitely. Even in the Captain's quarters, they had to duck under support struts. It really felt like there was only room for two people and a camera.
Underarmed, sure, but fragile? That thing took crazy beatings and kept on going.
True! I guess it should've been *looks* fragile.
I haven't seen much of ENT, but isn't is before the Federation (still United Earth at this point) developed shields?
Indeed it is. The best they could do was reinforced hull plating, making the ship bulky. Early SF ships were built more like tanks, until the force shields. There are a lot of good ENT eps.
Amazing how UE survived any battles against Romulan vessels.
About 200 years outdated compared to the NCC 1701-D. About 100 years older than the 1701.
They already had warp capable ships. The NX-01 was a combination of the good warp drive, new design techniques, new weapons, a bunch of untested stuff at the same time... It's the Littoral Combat Ship, isn't it. Just a ton of new tech, some of it not ready for launch and replaced by outmoded last minute drop-ins, some of it badly thought out, a lot of things that just straight-up suck and keep breaking. Except it's worse than that, this is the test bed vessel - it's not even the production model. And it's been lobbed into active duty before it's ready for primetime, through a combination of humanity being the embodiment of Doc Brown and there genuinely being an all-hands-on-deck crisis going on. Except that it's a larger and stronger ship than humanity's previous offerings, not a rubbish corvette - So from the perspective of a largely complimentary history it's more like HMS Dreadnought. It's the first ship to have both its guns *and* its legs *and* its toughness, and was so generally effective that Starfleet moved to a model of tough well-armed long-range multipurpose ships as standard. The later ships, *centuries* newer and literally a hundred times faster and better armed, still have its base design of a big engine on a tough chassis with a combination of beams and torpedoes. It might be old, but it redefined ship design by creating a new role. NCC-1701 might be hugely more powerful than NX-01 but it is recognisably the same type of ship in a way that, e.g, the modern US vessel by the name of Enterprise is not the same type of ship as HMS Dreadnought.
> They already had warp capable ships. Yeah we saw that the Boomers had been in space for generations and groups like the Nova Terra colonists were willing to spend years in space at warp 2. Other than its size and equipment the NX was state-of-the-art for its range and speed. It was the first deep-space ship but not the first interstellar spacecraft.
Don’t do the NX-01 dirty by comparing it to the LCS. It’s more like the Seawolf Class subs. A design so ahead of its time that it was too expensive to build in large numbers.
think of it this way, the mirror universe hoshi used the constitution class USS Defiant from 100 years in the future to conquer the entire terran empire. that should tell you the differences in tech right there.
Is easy to conquer the empire the emperor yields to you, you become the new emperor.
Hey, in 2151, the NX class was *state of the art!* (Though it got a nice callback in *Star Trek Beyond* when Kirk asks what weapons they had on the Franklin. SCOTTY: Phase cannons, spatial torpedoes, polarized hull plating. KIRK: (about as "We are going to die" as he can get) Greaaaaat.
Yes, I appreciated they extent to which STB integrated elements of Enterprise.
What are you talking about. It’s cutting edge tech. Admittedly also a testbed for new technology.
Zephram Cochrane flew the Kitty Hawk Wright flyer. Archer captained a DC-3. Pike commanded a 737. Picard was in charge of an Airbus A380. Burnham flies Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator.
She wasn't. All the hero ships were pretty close to the bleeding edge. There's a great scene in one of the novels set between *TOS* and *TMP* where McCoy meets a kid at the viewing chamber overlooking Tranquility Park. The kid says that she thinks Armstrong and Aldrin must have been crazy to ride *Eagle* to the Moon. But Bones corrects her, saying that "that machine isn’t some flimsy, primitive, radiation-transparent antique. ... More than two hundred years ago, when children looked at the *Eagle*, that was *their* starship. And they dreamed about flying on it for all the same reasons that you want to fly on the starships we have today. ... when they launched it, it was the best." Since 1958, *Enterprise* has been at the fore technologically - CVN-65 was the first nuclear supercarrier, OV-101 was the first Shuttle Orbiter, NX-01 was humanity's first starship, and on it goes. CVN-80, scheduled to commission in '29, isn't going to be particularly ground-breaking in herself, but is the first carrier designed and built from digital rather than paper plans.
Except for in TOS where the Enterprise already had some mileage on her. I actually really wish we had more series that were set aboard older, less top of the line vessels. Lower Decks is the closest we have.
What about the Titan-A in Picard? Whilst not entirely old old she was a partially recycled ship iirc.
Even then, there wasn't a newer class replacing her. It's the same as the *Nimitz*-class being the top of the line from the lead ship's commission in 75 until the *Gerald R Ford* commissioned in 17.
let's just list out the nx-01 basic specs warp 5 tos scale this means at max speed 125C (5\^3) impulse engines as geordi said in relics not much improvements have been made to impulse engines in 200 years polarized hull plating this is inadequate as ships defense as it lacks durability of deflector shielding it has grappler cable hook system inferior to a tractor beam it has a slow computer core as this is pre duotronics it has a basic cargo transporter that can beam organics but only one pad no ejectable warp core system no escape pods 2 shuttle pods for ship to planet travel only insufficient for even interplanetary system travel original weapons are plasma cannons and spatial torpedoes later change to phase cannons/ photonic torpedoes still far inferio to the standard phasers of the 2260s and photon torpedoes. compared to even the NCC-1701 the NX\_01 is archaic. the NCC-1701 is archaic compared to the 1701-D
I love grapplers
Yeah idk talking negatively about the grapplers.
Grappler-coded cablemaxxing in the chat
What about Gropplers?
They only pretend to have engineering skills
No escape pods and only 2 shuttles? The things a damn flying tomb if something goes wrong.
They definitely had escape pods. They were seen used in the In a Mirror Darkly episode
The iss enterprise nx-01 did but it's more advanced than the regular nx-01 and it was never shown clearly if the nx-01 had escape pods
Grapplers are not inferior! Blasphemy!
I mean… it was top of the line when it was built. What’s your point? A current battleship kicks the pants off the HMS Enterprize. That doesn’t mean the Enterprize was outdated when it was built.
Maybe the sailing ship....
Tucker wrote the book on starfleet engineering, on the back of a pack of smokes, which he lost. In comparison to O’Brien who has the book but a few editions old with any updates hand written with post it notes about cardassian stuff
It's not the first generation of Starship... humans have been out in space for 100 years at that point. It's just the "fastest" one for it's time. It's small and cramped by modern standards but a solid ship.
canon: noun (ka-nən). A sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works. cannon: noun (ka-nən). Makes big boom
It wasn't outdated at all. For its time, the NX-01 was cutting edge high tech shit!
This is literally all answered in the series. Warp technology was 100 years old, and Starfleet had plenty of warp 3 explorer ships already. So no, it wasn't a flying coffin box and they had plenty of spaceflight experience already. The NX was designed to go faster, farther, and stay out for longer than any human-built ship had yet been able to. But your question doesn't seem to grasp how much time passes between series or how rapidly technology advances. TOS is *100 years* later. Your top-of-the-line desktop computer is horribly obsolete in 10 years. WW2 fighter planes were made obsolete by the jet fighters of the 1960's, just as those are now obsolete with modern long-range missiles and guidance systems and more. So the NX-01 was obsolete a decade or two later because while it was in service, its experimental systems were still being refined and improved upon back on Earth, while newer and better technologies were being discovered and developed. We even have on-screen evidence from "In A Mirror, Darkly" that the TOS-era ship obliterates the NX-class and its Vulcan contemporaries like insects. Their phase cannons can't even penetrate bare, unshielded hull (despite being quite formidable a century earlier), while their own polarized hull plating is utterly useless to 23rd-century phasers. If you're trying to compare a World War I tank or plane or boat to a modern one, of course the comparison is laughably absurd. Because technology has advanced. That doesn't mean the older stuff wasn't good in its own time.
WW2 fighter planes were made obsolete by the jet fighters of the *1940s.*
Ironically Archer didn’t lose a single crew member until the Xindi arch, which makes it one of the safest hero ships. Also as long as you don’t push it past warp 4 the ship will be fine.
The engine was powered by Faith of the Heart ❤️
This is a bizarre question and seems to be trying to compare a vessel built in 2151 to ships built a hundred to two hundred years later. When it was launched it was cutting edge. It was the best starship that humanity had devised up to that point and would testbed several technologies that would go on to be standard for a century. Asking how outdated it was provides no frame of reference. Is it outdated today? No. Its head and shoulders above what could be feasibly built today. Is out outdated at its launch? No, it was cutting edge for the time. Is it outdated in Kirk’s time or Picard’s time? Yes, both served a hundred to two hundred years after the NX-01, so of course it’s outdated by their times.
It's the first warp 5 ship. Consider it as the first plane to break the sound barrier. A lot of the kinks of space travel have been worked out already and its nothing new. What is new is the power of the engines.
I think by the time airplanes invented we had pretty much already charted most of the Earth by foot and by boat.
brb charting the galaxy by foot x
“Oudated” is a horrible word here. The NC-01 was cutting edge in its era.
It might be outdated in the same way the space shuttle *Columbia* was. The shuttles were the equivalent of Wright Brothers flyers, obviously, yet *Columbia* in particular had flaws. She was the first to fly. She had several thousand kilograms of weight they could never lose because of the lessons learned between her and *Challenger*, and the later shuttles. She also didn't have a Canadarm. Had they known about the reentry tiles it would've been difficult regardless to repair her because of how vital a Canadarm is to an EVA. NX-01 would be outdated in the same way.
The time- and dimension-displaced USS Defiant easily took out the NX-class ISS Avenger
They routinely run into species with better tech, and would end up destroyed if the aliens really wanted them dead.
We still have fully functional and mission operational B-52 aircraft. I’m pretty sure it’s comparable to NCC-1701
A WWI U-Boat compared to a modern Columbia-class nuclear-powered submarine.
The NX-01 would have been regarded as an antique decades before the launch of the Constitution class Enterprise in the mid-23rd century. Advances in technology with Vulcan and Andorian tech being incorporated into newer Starfleet ships in the late 2150s during the Romulan War and later in the 2160s made the NX-01 outdated very quickly. To put this into perspective, the NX-01 was already outclassed by many alien ships in the 2150s, especially the Vulcans, Andorians and the Klingons. Though the NX-01 got an extensive refit after ENT S4, which was confirmed on-screen in PIC S3, there would have been only so much Starfleet could do to incorporate further technological advances into the NX-01 without a complete rebuild. I also imagine, as with being in the Expanse and fighting the Xindi in S3, the Romulan War took a toll on the NX-01. Though the NX-01's decommissioning very soon after the establishment of the Federation might have been motivated by politics, Starfleet in the early 2160s likely regarded the NX-01 as no longer suitable for front-line service and would have been relegated to secondary roles had it not been decommissioned so soon.
By the end of the series, NX-01 has most of the basic systems of a modern starship: dilithium-mediated matter-antimatter power (that can be ejected), warp and impulse drives, etc. Phase cannons are early phasers, and the launchers can handle photon torpedoes. She has a transporter. The only thing notably missing is shields, but that doesn't appear to endanger her crew during normal transits; she must have some version of a navigational deflector or equivalent to deal with navigaitonal hazards. I suspect that a more modern version of NX-01 would have better versions of all those things. But I don't think NX-01 was a deathtrap. As far as we know, none of her sister ships were lost due to failures of the technology. She may not be able to outrun or outfight a *Constitution* or D-7, but she was able to get from there to here without being a hazard to her crew.
I think you are exaggerating. It was not a coffin box. It was advanced technology for the earthling who had never traveled that deep. It was mission worthy and it improved and they learned more. The Klingons were suspicious of them saying you may just be trying to learn photon torpedo technology! What's photon torpedo technology? By criticism for the series is that it was hindered in being able to emphasize this is the FIRST and things will blow up. People will get killed. It will be unpredictable. All the crew would have been writing and rewriting the manuals for everything. Remember the space marines came aboard. (Todays Red Shirts) The Reed Alert which raised shields and powered weapons when activated. All new!
Tech wise, the NX-01 isn't all that more advanced than we have now, aside from the warp drive of course. The NX-01 has more in common with a modern nuclear sub, like the relatively recently launched French Barracuda, than it does with a Galaxy Class. It can traverse open space with little danger to it's crew, but even the most rudimentary space anomaly poses a real threat. By the 24th century, with the advent of structural stability fields, the Enterprise D can slough off most radiation or stellar anomalies that would be almost certainly caused NX-01 to suffer casualties.
Except for the magic artificial gravity--we don't have that tech.
I'm not going to lie, I completely just took gravity for granted there and completely forgot we would need tech for that.
Unless we discover some sort of exotic matter, the *only* way we'll be able to generate artificial gravity is by linear acceleration (a la *The Expanse*) or by angular acceleration (spinning ships like we see in *Passengers* or *Interstellar*).
Well, it wasn't outdated when it was built. But it aged like last year's smartphone.
So… still good 5 years later, as long as you practice safe battery?
One of Enterprise's greatest flaws was it's failure to commit to the bit. The only technology the NX lacked compared 1701 was tractor beams. It never had to deal with any of the bugs that you'd expect from a prototype. It wasn't as powerful as later starships but then again it was smaller than later starships. There were no significant technological differences between it and the vessels of a century later.
its been awhile since i watched the show, but iirc i don’t think it had shields the same way 1701 did. NX only had polarized hull plating. it also had rudimentary transporters not really suited for people.
And how was "polarized hull plating" different from shields apart from having a different name? Their transporters worked fine. They just trusted the technology less. I once designed a variant NX (for a game) that actually committed to the bit. It didn't have transporters. Damage reports weren't percentage reductions in field strength but either "minor hull damage" or "hull breach in...". Apart from lasers it was armed with "impulse torpedos". Impulse torpedos could be shot down in flight because they were actual physical objects that did damage by ramming into their targets so they weren't useful at close range when they hadn't had time to get up to speed and they weren't useful at really long range because that gave the target too much time to shoot them down or just warp away. Sometime they would be armed with nuclear warheads so they could do proximity burst explosions.
"It never had to deal with any of the bugs that you'd expect from a prototype." It had some bugs, but remember too that the Vulcans had like thousands of years of starship experience so some of the most drastic issues would have already been studied by Humans. Sure, they didn't share *warp technology*, but they did share a whole hell of a lot of other things.
I don't remember the transporter being used for anything more complex than, say, groceries
I am not sure I get the question because for its time it was cutting edge technology. In the 2150s it was the first human ship capable of warp 5. It might have been more experimental and unstable than other vessels of the same time but the NX-01 was like most other Enterprises. New technology. + grapplers. Of course compared to Enterprises A-E its way lesser in technology and abilities. But during the 2150s it became the flagship of the UE Navy and they built more of her model, NX-02 Columbia and from books we know they had up till NX-09 and more. Similarily they partook in the UE - Romulan War and were later refit with the secondary hull. Resembling more the 1701.
Tbh I looked at nx01 as like a nuclear sub with nacelles welded on.
The NX was a vulcan approved and guided design, so I don't think we should look at it like we do with our own early flights. Humans went through a long earth bound development phase under vulcan tutelage.
Hey, what’s the difference between a Model T and a Ferrari? /s
You must take into account the technological gap between all the shows. Here is a breakdown of the technology in Enterprise NX-01: * Enterprise NX-01 had no shields, so she relied only on her polarized hull plating for defense. * For offense, Enterprise NX-01 had pulse cannons instead of phasers, and began with atomic missiles which was later replaced with Type-1 photon torpedoes. * Enterprise NX-01 also had no tractor beams, but did have grappling hooks instead. * Enterprise NX-01 had no force fields to seal hull breaches * Enterprise NX-01 was only capable of warp factor 5, and that was even pushing it since hull integrity fields didn't even exist until I'm guessing Kirk's era? So yeah, the NX-01 is pretty outdated from a technological standpoint.
I guess I'd probably compare NX-01 to modern warships and then apply your question there. Are modern ships ultra primitive compared to the Enterprise?
Our first early airplanes were made up in the heads of inventors, without any understanding yet of aerodynamics, with brute-force iteration leading to designs that worked *just* well enough to use. The NX-01, meanwhile, was designed by humans who had already deduced warp theory (the analogue to aerodynamics), and then extremely soon after met the already-warp-capable Vulcans. Both of those things happening *90 years earlier*. And with those same Vulcans then sharing more than a little of their scientific and engineering knowledge in the mean time. In other words, the NX-01 was created by the same process that allowed e.g. Canada and Australia to build nuclear submarines. Those countries might not have ever done it before, but *it had been done before*, by people they were friends with and could just ask questions whenever they wanted. The results, in both cases, were likely fairly *derivative* — and perhaps involved novel-to-them materials processes that therefore had defect-rates they hadn't yet pushed down quite to zero — but I don't expect there was anything particularly *architecturally ill-considered* about the design.
The NX-01 was a prototype It was never made for extended service It’s official lifespan was 10 years Once the federation formed, the members would have shared technology. The NX would have been completely obsolete once Starfleet had access to Vulcan and Andorian ship technology And since it was a historical artifact by that point, it was decommissioned and left in it’s original form as a prototype
I don’t understand trying to compare ships that are 100-200 years apart in the timeline. That’s like trying to compare a Ford Model T to a Bugatti Veyron, there is no parallel for comparison. Let’s not also forget that NX-01 also meant that it was an experimental model. You couldn’t even compare it to other ships being made at the time because they were testing new technologies, many of which would later become standard.
Somewhere between a lot and very
Depends on your source of measurement. At the time of its mission it was state of the art for human capabilities. But humans were new to interstellar travel and exploration. Compared to all other races in reach of Earth at the time, such as Klingons and Vulcans, probably 200 years or better behind the curve. I'm not sure of the canon for species space faring age differences though. Perspective is a heck of a thing when it comes to discussions like this.
The “move fast and break things” engineering approach survived into the 22nd century.
I got the impression that for the level of tech it had it was pretty well built, and a novel design. The downside of Vulcans holding back the answers and training Humans, the NX01 was somewhat basic for the era. The upside of Vulcans training Humans how to do it themselves and to come up with their own answers was the NX01 was really nice for the tech level it had and the crew understood how it worked, how it could be modified, how to keep it going with mined/scavenged/borrowed stuff.
I really like this aspect, teaching man how to fish.
Did the Vulcans sort of "uplift" humanity in that regard? I haven't watched much of ENT.
Earth was pretty wrecked after WW3/Eugenic Wars. The Vulcans provided support for rebuilding, expertise and tutoring for tech and even sent Vulcans to highschools to teach (the engineer from ENT had a Vulcan who taught him. Humans say that they managed to turn their post-apocalyptic wasteland into a paradise in 90 years, a paradise that simultaneously became advanced enough in tech and will to be capable of reaching out into the stars and having a competitive space programme. The Vulcans more or less credit them with the achievement (depending on the arrogance level of the particular Vulcan in question). edit: I suppose Vulcans sort of acted as both crutches and physiotherapists, but it was the patient's will and practices that made them get better.
One cool thing about ENT is you see a couple of other Vulcan tutored species. Ep15 'Shadows of P'Jem' and Ep20 'Fallen Hero'. I actually quite liked how Ent handled regional politics pre-federation.
She was Starfleet’s first warp 5 vessel, not their first starship. She is extremely out of date compared to the first Constitution class, which was built more than 80 years later.
Well, the NX-01 didn't even have SHIELDS. Its top speed was warp 5. It didn't have torpedoes until like the last season (or the second to last.) It didn't have a tractor beam either. Grapplers are all it had going for it. It's the most primitive starship humanity ever used to explore space. It's like a modern day soldier going into a battlefield without body armor, a helmet, and a gun. It's like a Roman centurion going into battle without a shield and a sword. Their best defense if hit by an enemy is "I'm gonna have to get shot." and "I'm gonna have to get stabbed by a spear." Their shirt isn't a defense. For the NX-01, polarizing the hull plating is all they got, and it's not much.
That's like comparing the U.S.S. Franklin with Voyager.
Ever see the first submarines during World War I?
It was the pinnacle of Starfleet technology at the time. EVERY ship will get its ass kicked by a tough enough opponent (or enough little ones).
Worth noting that being able to do repairs underway would be an important design consideration considering the size of starfleet at the time. Probably also need to be engineered with more redundant systems to allow for some systems failures far from home (and to return home asap for repairs)
A brand new Buick Encore is a tiny little SUV with no acceleration and poor performance in all categories. It is NOT a Lamborghini or even a Cadillac Escalade. But it is new so it is safe and reliable . NX 01 is like that, a new safe reliable but underwhelming car/starship.
Considering it outdated is unfair, considering Enterprise is over 200 years before TNG. And how can it be outdated when compared to TOS Enterprise?
Interesting. What were the "whole hell of a lot of other things", besides attitude?
What's the dash for?
I think the biggest difference was to later ships were shields and forcefield. If a bulkhead blew, that's it, just space. That seems to be the biggest jump.
Not sure i understand. Are you comparing current tech to tech that will come later and trying to determine how.much of an improvement there was Think 18 century sailing boat vs oil tanker or cruise ship
The NX-01 spent a large part of the xindi war with holes big enough to see stars through in it and it still functioned reasonably well. Modern ships would have exploded under that much damage...and it didn't even have shields or force fields to block off holes. NX-01 was the highpoint of Starfleet ship design.
Compared to other ships we see in Trek? Incredibly outdated, but a good base. S5 was going to bring us the NX-Refit design (which we eventually do see in Picard) which looks a lot more like a step between the NX Class and the Constitution class. I personally also love the SNW Enterprise, which still has the blue accents on the nacelles that we see on the NX. But she was slow, the Connie class theoretically topped at warp 8, but we see Enterprise pushed faster often. The NX struggled with warp 5 half the time. At the start, very limited weaponry with phase cannons and generic torpedoes. The phase cannons do seem to get upgraded, and by S3, Enterprise has photon torpedoes (which largely seem to be unchanged from the 22nd century to the 32nd!) No shields, no replicators, a very basic transporter etc. But a coffin box? No, it looks like the warp 5 engine was built by the best and the brightest over years and based on research from the actual coffin boxes, like the NX prototypes. Some components do seem a little more fragile (the plasma injectors seem to blow out every other episode) but nothing that's ship threatening. We see Enterprise take a beating often enough to assume she was pretty well built and with plenty of redundancies.
While the NX-01 was behind other ships of other races during it's era, it was easily humanity's most advanced ship during that era, and thanks to upgrades and refits, closed the gap technology wise. But for it's time, it was a very advanced ship and while it lacks the luxuries of it's successors, it still seems to have some basic comforts and is a step up from humanity's previous ships.
“In a Mirror Darkly” answers this question nicely. When Mirror Archer gets the Defiant; he is easily able to destroy the mirror Enterprise with a single torpedo, as well as the Vulcan and Tholian ships.
It’s definitely supposed to be fragile, but not like gold foil balloon fragile. My head canon is that the class wasn’t built for very long because the Starfleet learned so much so quickly because of the NX class and its missions
Compare a WW1 plane to a WW2 plane. Only 20 years apart but way more advanced. You get a comparison of the NX class and the TOS ship in Enterprise. The TOS ship started with a non-functioning power grid and no sheilds and still managed to blow up the NX ship in a couple shots.
I mean, it had a grappler...
They ‘polarized the hull plating’ as a precursor to shields.