Star Fleet vessel registration numbers?

[Admiral Kirk 1]

I remember reading somewhere that the letters NCC on the original Enterprise did not really mean anything and that Roddenberry thought NCC 1701 was easy to film with the cameras of the day. Years ago I read a Star Trek novel called Final Frontier and it gave a good explanation. I know those old novels are not canon but the explanation is very beleivable. It stated that NCC stood for Naval Construction Code. Of course we all know that NX stand for Naval Experiment. I think that's canon. TOS Enterprise number was NCC 1701 and Excelsior's was NCC 2000 but a century later your average vessel reg. number was five digits long such as Voyager's NCC-74656. Does that mean that not counting the later Enterprises that Star Fleet constructed 72,995 vessels in the Century between TOS and TNG or VOY? What do you think?

[jdigs 0]

:o uh..beats me

[Captain Jean-Luc Picard 1]

It's been my impression that registry numbers work like this:

 

U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701

U.S.S. Reliant NCC-1864

U.S.S. Excelsior NX-2000 (later changed to NCC)

U.S.S. Grissom NCC-638

 

Now, as you see, the registry numbers keep going up. This leads me to believe that the original Enterprise was the 1,701st ship will the Excelsior was the 2,000th ship built. As for the Grissom? Well, perhaps it was the 638th ship build and is very old?

 

That's how I allways thought it worked. Take the Defiant and Voyager for example.

 

U.S.S. Defiant NX-74205

U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656

 

Based on this, we could conclude that Voyager was the 451st ship comissioned after the Defiant.

 

However, the TOS ship's numbers are all over the place. :o Go figure.

[Ezri Dax 0]

Well, they could have introduce a system AFTER TOS for the new series...