USS Enterprise, NCC-1701
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This article or section requires an update. |
| USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 | |
|---|---|
| Class | Constitution-class |
| Registry | NCC-1701 |
| Affiliation | Federation/Star Fleet |
| Status | Destroyed (2285) |
The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) was a Constitution-class heavy cruiser launched in 2245. In the course of her career, she became the most celebrated Federation Star Fleet vessel of the 23rd century.
In her forty years of service and discovery, through upgrades and at least two refits, she took part in numerous first contacts, military engagements, and time-travels. She achieved her most lasting fame from the five-year mission (2265-2270) under the command of James T. Kirk.
The Enterprise was destroyed in 2285.
Contents
Lineage
"Enterprise" (a Human word for a venture of scope, risk and promise) has a long Earth lineage, from the age of sail through the warp 5 engine. l'Entreprenant (Enterprising) was a French sailing ship in 1671. A subsequent ship, l'Entreprise was captured by the British Royal Navy in 1705 and renamed HMS Enterprize, a name used in British and American navies through the 21st century. A prototype for NASA's space shuttle fleet was named Space Shuttle Enterprise (OV-101) by popular demand in 1976. The first Earth Star Fleet vessel commissioned Enterprise NX-01 launched in 2151 under the command of Captain Jonathan Archer, initiating the era of Humanity's deep space exploration.
Early history
In the early to mid-23rd century, at least twelve heavy cruiser-type starships, the Constitution-class, were commissioned by the Federation Star Fleet. The vessel registered NCC-1701, which was constructed in San Francisco and launched in 2245, was christened the Enterprise. Larry Marvick was one of the designers of the Enterprise.
Captain Robert April oversaw construction of her components and commanded her during her trial runs and early missions.
Captain Christopher Pike commanded the Enterprise from the early 2250s into the 2260s. His missions included voyages to the Rigel, Vega and Talos systems. Pike's half-Vulcan science officer, Spock, who served under him for over eleven years, would become the starship's longest-serving officer.
Kirk's five-year mission
In 2265, the Enterprise was assigned to a five-year mission of deep-space exploration, and command passed to the youngest captain in the fleet, James T. Kirk. The ship's primary goal during this mission was to seek out and contact alien life. Captain Kirk's standing orders also included the investigation of all quasars and quasar-like phenomena.
Beyond her primary mission, the Enterprise defended Federation territories from aggression, aided member worlds in crisis, and provided scientific expeditions and colonies in her patrol area with annual examinations and support.
Discoveries
From 2265 to 2270, the Starship Enterprise visited over seventy different worlds and encountered representatives of over sixty different species. More than twenty of those were first contacts with beings previously unknown to the Federation, including stellar neighbors like the First Federation and Gorn, voyagers from the Kelvan Empire in distant Andromeda, and powerful non-corporeal entities like the Thasians,Trelane, and the Organians. Two discovered species were the first known examples of silicon-based lifeforms, the Horta and the Excalbians.
The five-year mission began less than auspiciously. An extra-galactic probe attempted on stardate 1312 led to the Enterprise 's collision with the previously-undocumented galactic barrier, critically damaging various ship's systems and killing nine crewmembers. Effects of the barrier's unusual energy on Humans led to the death of three officers, Helmsman Lee Kelso, Doctor Elizabeth Dehner, on extended duty to the Enterprise as an observer of human reactions to the stresses of space travel, and Kirk's personal friend, Lt. Cdr. Gary Mitchell.
After the ship was upgraded with Kelvan technology in 2268, she was able to survive the barrier crossing before turning back. In her final crossing that same year, the Enterprise was temporarily stranded in a void region just beyond the barrier, before she could return to normal galactic space.
The reality of time travel, externally influenced, had been known for over a century, but following two accidental temporal displacements, the Enterprise became the Federation's first deliberately-controlled timeship. Observing the death-throes of Psi 2000, the crew suffered from polywater intoxication and the Enterprise nearly lost orbit after an engine shut-down. A previously untested "cold start", via controlled matter-antimatter implosion, saved the ship, but the high-speed escape from the planet's gravity well caused the ship to travel three days into the past.
In 2267, while escaping the gravitational pull of a black star, the Enterprise was hurled through space and time to Earth of 1969. The crew developed and executed a method to return to their own time, by warping around the sun's gravity well in a slingshot maneuver. A year later, the Enterprise was ordered to repeat the recently-proven slingshot effect, and returned to Earth's past on a mission of historical observation.
Some missions of discovery confronted Enterprise with entities and mechanisms that threatened great swaths of Federation and neighboring space.
An ancient "Doomsday machine", fueled by the consumption of planets it destroyed with its antiproton weapon, approached Federation population centers in 2267. It required the combined efforts of the Enterprise and her sister ship USS Constellation, NCC-1017 to destroy it.
A single-cell organism of colossal scale emitted negative energy toxic to humanoid life, killing the entire Vulcan crew of the USS Intrepid, NCC-1631 . The Enterprise penetrated the cell interior and destroyed the organism before its imminent cell division threatened to overwhelm the rest of the galaxy.
Battles
The nature of her mission of exploration meant that the Enterprise was frequently the only Federation military asset in a little-known, otherwise undefended frontier. When she was called into harm's way, she regularly did so with little chance of immediate support against previously unknown enemies and threats.
Happily, her earliest engagement of the five-year mission, against the deceptively powerful starship Fesarius, ended with an amicable first contact with the First Federation in 2266. Following the destruction of the colony on Cestus III, a surprise attack from a previously unknown species led to the battle and pursuit of an evenly-matched Gorn starship in 2267.
The Enterprise played fox to the hounds of her four sister starships in a war games exercise on stardate 4729.4. Equipped with the new M-5 computer and stripped of most of her crew, the Enterprise became a killing machine – crippling the USS Excalibur, NCC-1664 and killing her entire crew – before Kirk could re-assert control.
Klingon engagements
The warships of the Imperial Klingon Fleet were frequent opponents of the Enterprise. Commander Kor held the Enterprise and Kirk in high professional regard, and relished the prospect of battle. Lower ranks chose to mock the starship, as when Korax compared her to a "garbage scow", before he corrected himself, adding, "it should be hauled away as garbage".
While Star Fleet rallied its forces at the outbreak of the Federation-Klingon War (2267) in 2267, the Enterprise was sent forward to secure a border region anchored by the planet Organia. She destroyed a Klingon attack ship and prepared to engage an approaching Klingon fleet before the Organian Peace Treaty precluded a full-scale war.
The Enterprise sporadically engaged Klingons throughout her voyage. A warship failed in an attempt to blockade the Enterprise from Capella IV in 2267. Sabotaged during a diplomatic mission to the Tellun system in 2268, the ship successfully fought off the assault of a harassing D-7. After the Enterprise was forced to destroy Kang's abandoned battle cruiser, the rescued Klingons (influenced by the Beta XII-A entity) attempted to wrest control of the the starship from Kirk in 2269.
Romulan engagements
The Romulan Star Empire reemerged from a century of isolation to antagonize the Federation with the Neutral Zone Incursion of 2266. The Enterprise responded, and was victorious over a new Bird-of-Prey equipped with a cloaking device and plasma torpedo system.
In later encounters, the Romulan fleet used strength of numbers in their efforts to overwhelm the Enterprise. When Commodore Stocker took temporary command and violated the Neutral Zone in 2267, up to ten Birds-of-Prey swarmed and pummeled the starship until Kirk's "corbomite" bluff inspired their withdrawal.
In 2268 the Enterprise violated the Neutral Zone for the purpose of espionage, and was quickly surrounded by three Romulan battle cruisers. She escaped by becoming the first Federation vessel to install and successfully utilize a (stolen) Romulan cloaking device.
Near Tau Ceti, Kirk employed the Cochrane deceleration maneuver, allowing the Enterprise to defeat Romulan forces.
Casualties
Service aboard the Enterprise proved to be hazardous duty. At least fifty-eight officers and crew were killed between 2265 and 2269 – 13.5% of the standard complement of 430. Incidents with multiple fatalities included five security guards killed by the dikironium cloud creature on Argus X in 2267, and the four security guards and two engineering technicians killed by Nomad in 2268. An outbreak of Rigelian fever in 2269 killed three crewmen and imperiled the rest until a source of ryetalyn could be obtained.
Refit and further service
The Enterprise's first documented refit occurred sometime between 2254 and 2265. Minor changes were made to the ship's exterior (most notably the impulse engines, warp nacelles, running lights, and hull markings). More substantial changes were made to the interior color scheme and layout of the ship.
A second, more extensive refit occurred at some point after her encounter with the "galactic barrier" in 2265. It involved replacing the bridge module, a newer, smaller deflector dish, and refinements to her warp nacelles. The ship's interior was also upgraded.
At the end of her five-year mission, the Enterprise returned to Earth in 2270. Following her success, the ship had become a recognized symbol of Star Fleet and the Federation. Star Fleet's array of unique assignment patches were abandoned for the universal adoption of the Enterprise delta symbol.
The stalwart vessel herself was by then twenty-five years old and returning from a deployment that included a unprecedented number of warp-speed records, hull-pounding battles, and frame-stressing maneuvers.
System upgrades with new technologies after long deployments weren't unusual in her history, but the Enterprise's overhaul of the early 2270s became a keel-up redesign and reconstruction project.
The very heart of the ship was replaced with a radically different vertical warp core assembly, linked to new warp engine nacelles atop swept-back pylons and integrated with the impulse engines. The new drive system allowed for an expanded cargo hold in the secondary hull, linked to the shuttlebay.
Weapons system upgrades included nine dual-phaser banks with power channeled directly from the warp engines. A double photon torpedo/probe launcher was installed atop the secondary hull.
Multiple egress points now included a port-side spacedock hatch, dual ventral EVA bays, four dorsal service hatches, and a standardized docking ring port aft of the bridge on the primary hull; four more docking ring ports, paired on the port and starboard sides of the launcher and secondary hulls respectively, and service hatch airlocks on the port and starboard sides of the hangar bay's main clamshell doors.
A new bridge module reflected the modern computer systems, operating interfaces, and ergonomics that ran throughout the ship.
Following Kirk's promotion to Rear Admiral as Chief of Star Fleet Operations, his hand-picked successor, Captain Willard Decker oversaw the refit, assisted by Chief engineer Commander Montgomery Scott.
After two-and-a-half years in drydock for refit, the Enterprise was pressed into service, weeks ahead of schedule, in response to the V'Ger crisis, once again under Kirk's command.
Decker was temporarily demoted to commander and served as science officer because of his familiarity with the new design. Incomplete systems had to be serviced during her shakedown cruise en route to V'Ger, including the first test of the new warp engines.
A matter/antimatter intermix malfunction led to the Enterprise's entry into an unstable wormhole. Commander Decker belayed an order from Admiral Kirk to destroy an asteroid in their path with phasers. Using them would had blown up the Enterprise since the ship's phaser banks now drew their power directly from the warp engines; a design change that Kirk was unaware of. Decker ordered the use of photon torpedoes instead. The timely arrival of Commander Spock brought correction to the intermix problem.
Once the V'Ger threat was averted, Captain Decker was listed as "missing in action" and the Enterprise remained under Admiral Kirk's command for an interim period. At some point, Kirk passed command on to Captain Spock.
The new designs and components tested and proven aboard the Enterprise influenced a generation of starship design, from the Miranda-class to the Constellation-class, as well as other retro-fitted Constitutions.
Final days
In 2285, the Enterprise was in a low-tempo training cycle, based in the Sol system. Admiral Kirk boarded his old command to observe a cadet training cruise.
Meanwhile, Khan Noonien Singh had escaped from his exile on Ceti Alpha V and hijacked the USS Reliant, leading to his theft of the Genesis Device from the Regula I space station.
The Enterprise was tasked to investigate, and Spock deferred his command to Admiral Kirk. The subsequent engagements with Reliant left the ship badly damaged with cadet and crew deaths, including Captain Spock.
Upon her return to Earth, Star Fleet Commander in Chief Admiral Harry Morrow announced that the starship, then forty years old (although Morrow mistakenly claimed it was twenty years old; he might have been referring to the length of time that passed since her massive refit), would be decommissioned. When Morrow denied Kirk's wish to return to the Mutara sector, Kirk conspired with his senior officers and stole the Enterprise from Earth Spacedock, in order to recover Spock's body from the Genesis Planet; to bring it, and his katra, to Vulcan.
At her destination, a Klingon Bird-of-Prey's attack left the Enterprise disabled. After setting an auto-destruct sequence, Kirk and his crew abandoned the ship for the surface. Demolition charges in place throughout the ship 's saucer section exploded, killing the Klingon boarding party. The secondary hull (with what's left of the saucer) fell from orbit and immolated in the planet's atmosphere.
Crew
Commanding Officers
- Captain Robert April (2245)
- Captain Christopher Pike (2250s through early 2260s)
- Captain James T. Kirk (2265-2270; as Rear Admiral in early 2270s)
- Captain Willard Decker (during refit in early 2270s)
- Captain Spock (2281 through 2285)
- Admiral James T. Kirk (during the Khan crisis of 2285)
Command crew under Kirk's command
- Commanding Officer
- Executive and Science Officer
- Lieutenant Commander/Commander Spock
- Captain Willard Decker (briefly in 2273)
- Chief Engineer
- Chief Medical Officer
- Doctor Mark Piper (2265)
- Doctor Leonard McCoy (2266-70, 2270s)
- Helmsman
- Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell (2265)
- Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu (2266-2270s)
- Communications Officer
- Lieutenant Alden (2265)
- Lieutenant Uhura (2266-2270s)
- Lieutenant M'ress (2269-70)
- Navigator
- Lieutenant Lee Kelso (2265)
- Ensign Pavel Chekov (2267-69)
- Lieutenant Arex (2269-70)
- Lieutenant Ilia (2272)
- Security Chief
- Lieutenant Commander Giotto (2267)
- Lieutenant Pavel Chekov (2270s)
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