| |
| Caption: | The USS Enterprise |
| Affiliation: | United Federation of Planets |
| Registry: | NCC-1701 |
| Class: | Constitution-class |
| Type: | Heavy Cruiser |
| Length: | 289 meters |
| Beam: | 132 meters |
| Draft: | 73 meters |
| Mass: | <1,000,000 metric tons |
| Crew: | 430 (43 officers, 387 enlisted) (2260s-2270s)
(203 under the command of Captain Pike) |
| Maximum Speed: | Warp 9 (Cochrane scale) |
| Armament: | 8 phaser emitters (4 banks of 2), fore and aft photon torpedo launchers |
| Defenses: | Deflector shields |
| Transportation: | Shuttlecraft Transporter |
| Launched: | 2245 |
| Refit: | 2270-2272 |
| The mission patch of the USS Enterprise. | |
| Caption: | The mission patch of the USS Enterprise |
| Status: | Destroyed (2285) |
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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 Starfleet vessel of the 23rd century.
In her forty years of service and discovery, through several upgrades and a comprehensive refit, 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.
Early History
In the early to mid-23rd century, at least twelve heavy cruiser-type starships, the Constitution-class, were commissioned by the Federation Starfleet. The vessel registered NCC-1701 was constructed at the San Francisco Fleet Yards in Earth orbit and launched in 2245, christened the Enterprise. Larry Marvick was one of the designers of the Enterprise. (TOS: "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "Is There in Truth No Beauty?")
Captain Robert April oversaw construction of her components and commanded her during her trial runs and early missions. (TAS: "The Counter-Clock Incident") (Dialogue given in the episode claims the Enterprise was the first Starfleet ship equipped with warp drive, however, this not only violates canon established by Star Trek: Enterprise, but also dialogue given in TAS: "The Time Trap" claiming that the Bonaventure was the first Starfleet ship equipped with warp drive.)
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. (TOS: "The Menagerie, Part I")
Kirk's five-year mission
In orbit, 2260s
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. Kirk's standing orders 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. (TOS: "Balance of Terror", "The Cloud Minders", "Journey to Babel", "The Galileo Seven", "The Deadly Years")
Discoveries
From 2265 to 2270, 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 life forms, the Horta and the Excalbians. (TOS: "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Arena", "By Any Other Name", "The Devil in the Dark", "The Savage Curtain")
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In the barrier void in 2268
The five-year mission began less than auspiciously. An extra-galactic probe attempted on stardate 1312 led to 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.
After Enterprise 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 starship was temporarily stranded in a void region just beyond the barrier, before she could return to normal galactic space. (TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "By Any Other Name", "Is There in Truth No Beauty?")
The reality of time travel, externally influenced, had been known for over a century, but following two accidental temporal displacements, Enterprise became the Federation's first deliberately-controlled timeship. Observing the death-throes of Psi 2000, the crew suffered from polywater intoxication and Enterprise nearly lost orbit after an engine shut-down. A previously untested "cold-restart", 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, Enterprise was ordered to repeat the recently-proven slingshot effect, and returned to Earth's past on a mission of historical observation. (TOS: "The Naked Time", "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "Assignment: Earth")
The space amoeba in 2268
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 to destroy it. (TOS: "The Doomsday Machine")
A single-cell organism of colossal scale emitted negative energy toxic to humanoid life, killing the entire Vulcan crew of the USS Intrepid. Enterprise penetrated the cell interior and destroyed the organism before its imminent cell division threatened to overwhelm the rest of the galaxy. (TOS: "The Immunity Syndrome")
Battles
The Enterprise just fires a proximity blast
The nature of her mission of exploration meant 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 Cestus III, a surprise attack from a previously unknown species led to the battle and pursuit of an evenly-matched Gorn starship in 2267. (TOS: "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Arena")
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, Enterprise became a killing machine – crippling the USS Excalibur (NCC-1664) and killing her entire crew – before Kirk could re-assert control. (TOS: "The Ultimate Computer")
Klingon engagements
Tellun system battle of 2268.
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". (TOS: "Errand of Mercy", "The Trouble with Tribbles")
While Starfleet rallied its forces at the outbreak of the First Federation-Klingon War, Enterprise was sent forward to secure a border region anchored by the planet Organia. She destroyed a Klingon vessel and prepared to engage an approaching Klingon fleet before the Organian Peace Treaty precluded a full-scale war. (TOS: "Errand of Mercy")
Enterprise sporadically engaged Klingons throughout her voyage. A warship failed in an attempt to blockade Enterprise from Capella IV in 2267. Sabotaged during a diplomatic mission to the Tellun system in 2268, Enterprise successfully fought off the assualt of a harrassing D-7. After Enterprise was forced to destroy Kang's abandoned battlecruiser, the rescued Klingons (influenced by the Beta XII-A entity) attempted to wrest control of the the starship from Kirk in 2269. (TOS: "Friday's Child", "Elaan of Troyius", "Day of the Dove").
Romulan engagements
The Romulan Star Empire reemerged from a century of isolation to antagonize the Federation with the Neutral Zone Incursion of 2266. Enterprise responded, and was victorious over a new Bird-of-Prey equipped with a cloaking device and plasma torpedo system. (TOS: "Balance of Terror")
In later encounters, the Romulan fleet used strength of numbers in their efforts to overwhelm Enterprise. When Commodore Stocker took temporary command and violated the Neutral Zone in 2268, up to ten Birds-of-Prey swarmed and pummelled the starship until Kirk's "corbomite" bluff inspired their withdrawl. (TOS: "The Deadly Years")
Enterprise violated the Neutral Zone later that year for the purpose of espionage, and was quickly surrounded by three battle cruisers. She escaped by becoming the first Federation vessel to install and successfully utilize a (stolen) Romulan cloaking device. (TOS: "The Enterprise Incident")
Near Tau Ceti, Kirk employed the Cochrane deceleration maneuver, allowing Enterprise to defeat Romulan forces. (TOS: "Whom Gods Destroy")
Casualties
Service aboard the Enterprise proved to be hazardous duty. 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 crewman and imperiled the rest until a source of ryetalyn could be obtained. (TOS: "Obsession", "The Changeling", "Requiem for Methuselah")
Refit and further service
Reaching the end of her five-year mission, Enterprise returned to Earth in 2270. Following her success, Enterprise had become a recognized symbol of Starfleet and the Federation. Starfleet's array of unique assignment patches were abandoned for the universal adoption of the Enterprise delta symbol.
The stalwart vessel herself was now 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 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 hanger bay's main clam-shell 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 Starfleet Operations, his hand-picked successor, Captain Willard Decker oversaw the refit, assisted by Chief engineer Commander Montgomery Scott.
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. The timely arrival of Commander Spock brought correction to the problem. (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Once the V'Ger threat was averted, Enterprise remained under Admiral Kirk's command until his brief retirement in 2281, when command of the starship passed on to Captain Spock.
The new designs and components tested and proven aboard Enterprise influenced a generation of starship design, from the Miranda-class to the Constellation-class, as well as other retro-fitted Constitutions. (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Final days
In 2285, 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 Enterprise badly damaged with cadet and crew deaths, including Captain Spock. (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Her final moments in 2285.
Upon her return to Earth, Starfleet Commander in Chief Admiral Harry Morrow announced that the starship, now forty years old (although Morrow mistakenly claimed it was twenty years old), would be decommissioned. Denied his wish to return to the Mutara sector, Kirk conspired with his senior officers and stole 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 Enterprise's hull exploded, killing the Klingon boarding party. The hull fell from orbit and immolated in the planet's atmosphere. (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock)
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 (through 2285)
Command crew under Kirk's command
- Commanding officer
- Captain James T. Kirk
- executive and science officer
- Chief engineer
- Chief medical officer
- Doctor Mark Piper (2265)
- Doctor Leonard H. McCoy (2266-70)
- Helmsman
- Lieutenant Lee Kelso (2265)
- Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu (2266-70)
- Communications officer
- Navigator
- Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell (2265)
- Ensign Pavel Chekov (2267-69)
- Lieutenant Arex (2269-70)
- Lieutenant Ilia (2272)
- Security chief
- Lieutenant Commander Giotto (2267)
Appendices
Background
HMS Enterprize, 1705
The CGI Enterprise from the "remastered" opening credits
The Enterprise as it appeared in Airplane II: The Sequel.
- "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'Enterprise 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 Starfleet vessel commissioned Enterprise (NX-01) launched in 2151 under Captain Jonathan Archer, initiating the era of Humanity's deep space exploration.
- The design for the Enterprise refit was the basis of a Design Patent issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
- The Enterprise itself, as well as its interiors, was designed by Matt Jefferies. The refit was designed by Andrew Probert, based on the designs for the vessel made by Matt Jefferies for Star Trek: Phase II.
- The Enterprise appeared in the motion picture Airplane II: The Sequel; when Commander Buck Murdock (played by William Shatner) gazes through a periscope at the Alpha-Beta Lunar Base, he is shocked to find the Enterprise moving through space. This gag was added due to Shatner's obvious connection with Star Trek as Captain Kirk.
- The Enterprise was recreated as a new physical model for the DS9 Season 5 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". The CGI model of the Constitution class USS Defiant created for "In a Mirror, Darkly" was relabled as the Enterprise for the final scene of "These Are the Voyages...", the last episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise". A new CGI model, built from caliper measurements of the original 11' physical model, was created for use in the remastered and recreated version of "Star Trek: The Original Series".
Appearances
- Star Trek: The Original Series
- Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (shown on recording)
- TNG: "Relics" (bridge shown on holodeck)
- DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations"
- ENT: "These Are the Voyages..." (closing montage)
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