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Why The Excelsior Never Ends...
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- čas přidán 14. 08. 2024
- Thanks to the 4th Combined fleet for their beautiful renders of the Excelsior II
At the request of @tullyDT i once again investigate the Iconic Excelsior class. this time asking why we see so many future iterations of this one ship from the 23rd century. is there something fundementally good about the design? or is there a secret cabal of admirals conspiring to ensure that the excelsior remains eternal? is there an "Excelsior Mafia"
Music:
• Deep Space
• Leaving Home
• Secret of Tiki Island
• Sneaky Snitch
• Kool Kats
All I can think of is the narrowing it down meme
Crewman: "Sir the enemy ship appears to be an Excelsior class"
Captain: "Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?"
And the added fun of "Is it the one we could sit here and tank for days, the one that could vaporize us with an alpha strike, or the one of the insane prototypes that may outrun us or break down at the drop of a hat?"
Got a chuckle out of that one. Lol.
I love how this channel has slowly turned into the love child of Trekyards and LazerPig.
"The Sovereign Class is an expensive waste of time!" - Adm.Sprey, the "Designer" of the Excelsior Class, in an interview with Cardassia Today
I was looking for a comment like this
Lol
A tip of the hat to you good sir.
He is regulary also cited by the Romulan Times.
"Listen. My Grandfather flew Excelsior. My Father flew Excelsior. The Family's been in business for ten generations. We ain't gonna let no wise guy from Utopia Planetia push us out. So ya got a choice, see? I'll make ya an offer you can't refuse. You fly an Excelsior, or the family breaks your legs. Coppice?"
Yes yes, she's a wonderful, time tested design that just works. But isn't wonderful to picture Old, Heavy-set Gentlemen Admirals of a Sicilian background intimidating poor little ship designers?
Wonderful as usual. Spot on Churchill impression!
Excelsior simply refuse to die, do you know why ? because it still chasing its original dream/directive : "Im gonna transwarp one day! and I refuse to decomision before that!"
I would imagine Starfleet Cadets would've been told, "If you do well enough in your Command Training, you might see yourself Captain-ing a Excelsior"
I genuinely was wondering if there was going to be a form of Excelsior Class show up in the 3000s or with the Enterprise J, the Excelsior gives off such a "Starfleet" vibe and would imagine Starfleet's Ship Designers using pieces of the Excelsior to invent / Design new ships.. Because they can
@@tommyp4961 To be fair, that's basically the Sovereign class. It's effectively an Excelsior successor.
More like "you will be assigned to a Obirth class" but still funny 😂
There's enough of the things around that I bet by the late 24th century, EVERY command officer has had a round commanding one, then either get moved to newer designs if they perform well, Mirandas if they perform badly, or Oberths if they do something catastrophically stupid like accidentally cause a friendly fire incident or nearly start a war.
@@KertaDrake - "Sir, we have a message from the captain of the U.S.S. Yunger." "The Yunger? That's an Oberth! Pull up her captain's service record."
Starfleet made so many Excelsior ships it probably lasted so long because they were able to use swap out older parts. Also, because the Excelsior was so abundant, many cadet's had served on the previously and so they would feel more at home on a similar ship. Instead of designing and learning the ins and outs of a new design, Starfleet kept them around for convenience, nostalgia and familiarity.
in other words the Excelsior is what the Miranda and Nebula are. the Third in a line of Modular star trek ships. Ships with the ability to swat parts out and change parts in and out in their designs
After that "throughout time" comment, i now want to see a kitbashed NX-celsior.
I second the motion.
The next time I get my hands on an NX I'll make one
Like a WW1 B-2 stealth bomber?
@@nathanielmeade5731 Let me know where to see it.
STO’s legendary Excelsior is a disco era version
I kind of figured that the Excelsior design hit a sweet spot in terms of size and ease of upgradability in lore to a point it was always more economically viable to keep upgrading the existing fleet than to go about creating a totally new class of ship.
Yes, it´s probably exactly that. And we see enough examples of such things in the real world too..... Aircraft and Ships that just don´t die because upgrading them is just to cheap in comparison of building a new system... or building a new one would just take to much time.
@@joesheridan95 It is not just the physical support network but it is also about retraining the personal too. This is why the US still keeps the F-15 and has now moved on to the F-15 EX.
@@ChairmanMo Yes that´s correct to. Absolutely, and it´s a fact that the F-15 can still give something the F-35 can´t: Range. And it can bring in this range with much more flexibility incase of armament then then F-22 can. The crews are there, the maintenance is there and the need for exactly those capabilities is there and will probably not be met by another aircraft then the F-15 until the 6th Gen-Aircraft really start to be fielded.
Reminds me of the old US Standard Battleships. A series of battleships with the same general performance, but differing only in guns, sensors, and size.
More or less that is what excelsior is
The old US Standard Battleships were nice. It allowed the US Navy to stay in the game of naval power without creating a military industrial complex that breaks the bank. Ah....back in the days when the US was fiscally responsible.
Or the Arleigh Burke class. There are 72 and still growing numbers of them in the US Navy in three different versions: Flight I. Flight II, Flight IIA, and the latest version Flight III, The older versions are being fitted so that they can be brought up to the same capabilities of the Flight IIIs. Just because the Federation does not use money, it does not mean they and Starfleet have unlimited resources. Just like the Burke-class is cost-effective and can be used in different roles, it might be the same reason why there are many Excelsior and Excelsior derivative ships around.
@@bermanmo6237 But the ABs are going to be gradually phased out since the ship cannot generate enough electricity for future computer and radar systems.
@@bermanmo6237 An even better example would be the Omaha class of scout/light cruisers. These were built just around the end of WW1 and served as the most numerous US cruiser for the interwar years and the first half of WW2 (classification was changed in 1922, I think, by the Washington Naval Treaty). These were the workhorses of the USN, doing all the rear line duties that required a cruiser (convoy escort leader, comm relay, radar picket, etc) that were too important or too specialized for a destroyer, but not valuable or dangerous enough to justify a more modern Atlanta, Brooklyn, or heavy cruiser for.
Short answer is, a well-designed engineering section that makes it easier to integrate better warp cores for more powerful equipment. There's a reason the Excelsior class continued production for decades and remained in service for well over a century.
Better proof of that every frame that’s the most successful and long lasting has a design layout similar to the excelsior like the sovereign
The Volvo 240 of Starfleet....
@@globalcitizen8321 i was thinking its the B52 of Starfleet. It just WORKS, so we will keep upgrading it waaaaaaay beyond its expected service life, even as newer designs come into production, then fade to obsolecence
The secondary hull is weird though, I'm not sure it's particularly well designed since basically nothing of the design has survived to later classes.
The warp core is almost entirely in the neck, with hust 2 decks worth in the engineering hull proper, below the core is the cove for the deflector dish, behind that is a bay for auxiliary craft, the main shuttle bay protrudes from the dorsal side along with that weird mound where the pylons mount. The remainder of the engineering hull is like a 2 deck thick giant surfboard. The layout is confusing at best and limiting for future upgrades. Since we see relatively little exterior changes it's hard to see where 80+ years of improvements could possibly live.
I had always thought the engine mount was to allow easier replacement and upgrades, and the flat underbelly and aft opening where modules could be mounted... even if we never saw that space used as such. My first PC had a processer chip mount that could fit something bigger than the 486... that ended up irrelevant as the first Pentium was a rectangle too long to fit the mount. Sometimes something is so beyond cutting edge that tech ended up going a different direction.
Well, it is also possible that both those theories could be true at the same time, In fact the two could be a positive feedback loop.
The Excelsior is on its way to being the 2nd class of craft to serve in Starfleet for an indefinite time. The 1st being the B-52.
So would that make the Mirandas Starfleet's version of the C-130? 🤔
Only works is we can have an USS Love Shack
I've always believed that the Federation citizens also helped in creating the legend of the Excelsior..."If there is a crisis, Star fleet will be there within 24 hours.....and it's an Excelsior"
The halls of Starfleet Academy echo with rumors of the legendary Loyal Order of Excelsior and their strange rituals. The fact that well over half the Admiralty served on board an Excelsior (including one who was on the original NX-2000) is viewed as mostly responsible for this.
They sacrifice Ensigns upon The Altar Of Captain Sulu...😏
Particularly old vulcan admiral who just won't die: I do love being ferried in my saladin class
I always loved in VI when Chang's BOP fired a photon torpedo on the Enterprise A, it left scorch marks on the hull even through the shields. When the Excelsior shows up and comes under fire, no such scorch marks. I know it was only one torpedo, but still, greatest ship design and greatest practical effects battle EVER!
Personally I think the Obena class is basically “a budget ship using new tech but on a affordable platform considering the expense of a Sovreign” that or they didn’t have a replacement so they just created the Obena as a temporary placeholder
Ships made in 24'th century like Obena and Georgyu were most likely new classes inspired with Excelsior (Centaur is small escort, facing Defiant for a reason). Lakota was true Excelsior derivative.
Kind of like the Sherman Firefly.
@@ChairmanMo or the refitted Iowa class
It's still a massive ship - maybe equal in length to a Sovereign, mind.
@@chrissonofpear1384 Not exactly. Excelsior is clear middle size ship. It is just long.
The Excelsior is federations b-52 Bomber
There's two other reasons that come to mind: One is that the excelsior design may happen to be a particularly good frame for new technologies which made refitting and upgrading the initial runs easier, and may have meant that successive designs building from the Excelsior blueprints had shorter and cheaper cycles. The USS Lakota seems like a good example there - being able to upgrade to much more powerful defensive and offensive systems hasn't been something we see to that degree with any other class.
The other is logistics. Any parts you need that can't be simply replicated would need to be produced, shipped across the Federation to Star Bases, and then stored there. If you have designs that have significant parts commonality then you have incentives to keep building that because you already have: massive stocks of spare parts, long times optimizing production of the spare parts, low cognitive load for introducing minor changes, and alllllll of the tooling needed for the common parts. That can easily mean that iterating on a design is preferable. Look at the F-16. There's around 70 blocks of them - constantly improving systems incrementally. But they have so much parts commonality that they're still basically the same plane in people's heads.
Another interesting thing is that the Excelsior basically went from being the High End Cruiser in the Federation fleet when it was first developed to the Low End Cruiser in a lot of ways. If the Federation doesn't need more expensive Ambassadors, Galaxies, Sovereigns, etc to achieve the missions that require exactly the capabilities that can be found there and the Excelsior can be easily fitted to perform the missions that need a lower end (combat|exploration|diplomatic) Cruiser, then why build other ships for that role when you can spend the R&D time on other classes that need specialized or higher end ships?
The Excelsior class is one of my favorite, Classic yet modern design. The B52 of federation starships.
Lol, Admiral Pierre Sprey be like "A-1O PHASER LANCE GO BRRR!" I am enough of a Galaxy fanboy to slap a meme cannon on front of one after all... Seriously though, SF probably just consider it a fast Miranda. Workhorse role, it's pretty good! Not frontline, but still pretty good. Also I always just imagined Excelsior's transwarp to simply mean a warp speed surpassing that era's maximum warp threshold, technically being "Transwarp" to the engineers of that time, requiring the warp scale to be re-written by the time of TNG. The Constitution's warp 10 is around the Galaxy's Warp 7. In TOS the Enterprise even achieves a dangerous speed of warp 14 for a moment although barely survived it. So the Excelsior being a ship designed to regularly surpass maximum warp or "Transwarp" is merely a vessel capable of regularly breaking warp 10 or I guess warp 8 nowadays...
Excellent and hilarious video! I really enjoy these Lazerpig style (dare I say Phaserpig) videos. After you pointed out the warp geometry of the Excelsior, I couldn’t help to notice that the Odyssey-class, Shangri La-class and Constitution III-class all have similar warp geometry. This may also be a case of the Excelsior kind of becoming a bit of a symbol of Starfleet, almost like a Jeep, Land Rover, or Humvee to the point where you can’t imagine the force going without it in some capacity. Good work as always keep it up!
In my canon, Admiral Lieber was a founder of the Great Experiment. He worked with Admiral Rittenhouse, who was a proponent of the Federation-Class Dreadnought, and tried to include Commander Scott - who was thinking of incorporating Kelvan warp technology into a third generation Constitution. Lieber was the man who split the difference. And he named the culmination "Excelsior"!
Wasn't Admiral Rittenhouse killed?...🤔
@@charlestaylor253 ATM I don't recall if it was killed, killed himself, or arrested.
I think it’s a old Vulcan admiral that can’t let go of the ship
Great and entertaining vid, I love your "Stuffy old British Admiral" impression LOL! The vid made me think of two things, the B-52 bomber that first flew in 1954, and the "Fighter Mafia", a sub group of old USAF Officers in 1970s that were mostly ignored but made a fair bit of noise during their time.
Only 1 person of the "Fighter Mafia" was a USAF officer, the rest of the people didn't have combat experience.
I just figure Starfleet finally made a cruiser it could mass produce in large quantities (also leading to not many Centaurs becuase they didn't need a budget version like with the Constitution and Miranda as much), it was future proofed enough to keep up with modern tech, with the Klingons as allies and the Romulans sulking behind the Neutral Zone the Federation didn't have any peer rivals to necessitate building a lot of newer ships, so it ended pretty much carving its own niche out to the point that when the Excelsior finally got too old they needed a replacement and just decided to make the Obena as a simple solution. The Excelsior II was Starfleet entering a nostalgia phase after a decade and a half of bad shit so they started making new ships based on designs from back when things weren't constantly on fire.
Another way to look at it is the Cold War analogy. When the Cold War ended, the US, NATO, and Russia all cruised for almost two decades on ships and aircraft that they had already designed and built, and there wasn't much call (or desire to divert budget) to make more than a handful of newer ships. So you keep the most numerous, newest, and most capable thing you had on hand, for as long as you can.
When the Khitomer Accords were signed, I imagined that description fit the Excelsiors to a tee, and why you'd see so few Ambassadors, Nebulas, etc. It also might explain why the Galaxies were finally authorized: the Exies were finally wearing out/getting too outmoded/hitting their limit on retrofits, and things like the Cardassian Border War were waking the Federation to the realization that oh yeah, you still might have to fight, so you better have the best thing around to do it with...ironically the same tech/military logic that VenomGeek says started the Excelsior project.
My feeling is that the Excelsior just happened to be the perfect size for it's era. It needed far fewer people or resources than a Galaxy class or D'Deridex, but it was big and powerful enough to go still head to head with a Klingon Bird of Prey or a Cardassian cruiser. Maybe the test-bed nature of it's concept also just lended it to continual upgrades. LIke it was just designed to be more adjustable.
Another possibility is the idea that they were (like the Miranda) more adaptable to being retrofitted with new technology than other shops of the period.
Rather like the Iowa Class fast battleships in the 80s and early 90s.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't care how old the Excelsior is, the Enterprise B variant still looks the best of the lot.
On a more serious note it was not unheard of for older BB of WW1 vintage to go through major refits (especially because of the limitations imposed by the London naval Treaty) to make them dangerous combatants in WW2 (Warspite comes to mind as a prime example). Were they deficient in some ways compared with the newer designs ? Sure but they were available, ready to go at the start of the war, some of the more modern designs started after 1939 weren't even finished by the end of the war.
So if a "navy" has hulls that can still do the job is not that far fetched to see them refitted multiple times or even striped to the frame and rebuilt. If you accept STO as canon the Excelsior (B variant / 2 whatever you want to call the Enterprise variant) can still fly around as a T5X ship well past the Terran invasion.
In all seriousness there could be an analog of sorts to the "Bomber Mafia" and "Fighter Mafia" officer blocs that dominated the USAF at different times and would alter the overall USAF strategic doctrines to match their design priorities. The success and preponderance of the Excelsior would have meant there was a huge block of officers who had served on them and/or had spent careers developing strategic initiatives that used the Excelsior as a fundamental building block and thus developed a bias in favor of it. Instead of being a shadowy organization you could easily contemplate the formation of an "Excelsior mafia" as an informal community that expressed this shared background and preference.
Fighter mafia was bunch out of tough weirdos, who actually didn't serve in military. I think it was closer to Bomber Mafia, so Excelsior was last true not-military ship from time of Klingon War. It was preserved same way as B-52, simply because Starfleet didn't have proper replacement until Sovereign.
@@TheRezro Oh some of them did, but most didn´t. And yes: it was a crazy group. But to NATO´s luck things like the F-16, F-15 and A-10 got introduced as or upgraded to designs that worked out pretty well.
And i disagree incase of what you said about Excelsior and Sovereign: I don´t see Sovereign as a replacement for Excelsior: Those big ships are brilliant and they are capable, but they are just too costly to be build and run in numbers that could replace the Excelsiors. Starfleet knew that and build the fully upgraded Excelsior II. Sovereigns are nice to lead in some Excelsiors into a large Battle, but not even the Federation could afford to build multiple fleets of Sovereigns alone. Those are long range diplomacy vessels and Fleet Flagships, okay more on the latter side then on the former. Sovereigns are Battleships with Diplomatic capabilities while the Excelsior´s became a long range alrounder.
Starfleet needs those alrounders, for low-end missions they have the Mirandas and California´s (Yes i love Lower decks), and when there is the need for a medium-tier ship with more capabilities there comes the Excelsior into play. If the mission takes even larger capabilities in some areas then it´s time for the specialised ships like the Intrepid´s, Galaxie´s and Sovereign´s.
Overall Starfleet is a pretty good representation of a Navy that grew based on it´s needs instead of beeing packed with a bunch of ultracapable super-ships that can do everything. The Enterprise E is better for Combat then the D, but it defenitely lost Capabilities as an evacuation and transport vessel and i think it´s probably a lot less capable as a science vessel. But it´s still a great ship, in fact in my eyes it´s (together with the NX-01) the best looking Enterprise yet, with the -F comming close behing those two.
They threw this great number of brilliant designs a bit out of the window when they presented us the copy-and-paste fleet in Picard Season 1, but they really learned out of that and we had the real Fleet back for the later two seasons, especially for the brilliant third one. That´s Starfleet and as long as they don´t build a ship that fit´s the same spectrum of capabilities the Excelsior can bring into the fleet, they just don´t need another design.
@@joesheridan95 A-10 was completely unrelated. Guy just take a credit for idea of Blitz Fighter, but that has zero impact on the design as anyone with basic knowledge about A-10 know that gun was first. BTW it was the same crazy person from Bradley Wars.
Fighter Mafia has zero impact on design of F-16, outside declaring early aerodynamic prototype as they perfect fighter, and then complaining that government break it, by making it what it always was meant to be (multi-role). And they downright hated F-15. And then claim that government listen to they complains when it actually was good. To be clear, they didn't.
Fighter mafia was always a joke, with zero influence.
@@TheRezro Yes i know that. There were close to no cases where they were really involved into anything they claimed to be.
And yes i know, And IIRC the book on which the Bradley Wars is based upon wasn´t only about that IFV but about a lot of projects.
They were pretty angry about the facts that the F-16 got a radar AND mid-range air to air missiles and guided bombs.... what idiots? What the Airforce needed was basically a next gen F-100 and F-4 Phantom replacement and they got it.
Fighter Mafia were idiots, stuck in a pre-radar and pre-missile time. I think they could ( at maximum) build a nice aircraft in 1935, but not in the 1970´s oder 80´s.
And the person who held up all those crap, Pierre Sprey even had some vehicles in his "target list" that can be criticised, but not for the reasons he gave. The best example is the F-35: Is that thing tooo expensive and was the design-project an overly long and absolutely catastrophic dumpster fire? Yes, defenitely. Is that aircraft already needed? 10 years ago i would have said: You can argue about that, but today: There is defenitely a place for that thing, not as the "one thing can do all" aircraft, but there are a lot things that thing can do at least as good as it´s predecessors if not better. Facts are: Modern sensors are extremely important and the sensor fusion that thing has is definitely a way forward. The F-35 maybe not the final and best sollution regarding to building a 5th-gen fighter yet, but it is the best one NATO and it´s allies have right now and i am pretty shure that thing can mature further in the same manner that the F-16, F-15 and the F-18 did. Even the Tomcat got so much more effective in it´s final years. Aircraft need some time to be flashed out until they work in an optimal manner.
I have even settled with my former grudge against the fact that the airforce of my country, the German Luftwaffe will get F-35A´s for it´s nuclear delivery roll. Just because that aircraft, maintenance and training have matured in a big way over the last years.
So the Excelsior is like the B-52 as long as it can take the upgrades to make it do what you want it to do then why not use it? Then you can just keep using it as its a fundamentaly sound space/air frame. Like the B-52 an Excelsior before you get the Excelsior 2 in the 24th century probably isnt anywhere near what it was when Sulu is flying the original. You have new warp engines, new impulse engines,new computers, new phasers new shields torpedoes etc(the Lakota for instance). Like the B-52 starting of as a nuclear deterrent and transitions roles to just being able to carry a lot of bombs and fly a long way/hang around the battlefield and used in support. The Excelsior starts as a big nasty battleship deterrent is a general cruiser around the Federation. Sometimes it makes first contact, sometimes it flies the flag and reminds the Klingons/Romulans/Cardassians etc that there are a bunch of Soverigns Defiants etc over the hill as its still a fairly big ship compared to a bird of prey and bigger then a Galor for example.
Less buttons, more LCARS???
Yes that as well. Interestingly it wasnt just the engines of the B52 which got upgraded again it had a big computer suite renewal(hey theirs lots of space in the thing). I agree with the sentiment that if something fits a good space niche then you should go with it. (For example in the UK lots of Fiestas got brought in every generation until they stopped making it because it was the right size and efficiency for the UK's roads.)
@@hmsverdun It must be funny to upgrade ships like that. There is always the tech cycle of having more/newer/more capable things added to a platform, increasing its load, then saving weight mass as more efficient components get added, the boosting for more capability AGAIN by adding even MORE gear. Also, you end up with very idiosyncratic refits across what are nominally the same ship. Must have been very interesting to be an engineer on an Exsie. Maybe they are the Y-Wings of Star Trek!
My favorite in STO is the Arbiter. Tell me that isn't another refit. It looks to me like an Excelsior purpose built for war, but that makes me love it even more.
Um the Arbiter is more like a smaller war built Sovereign and is the big brother of the Avenger
Venom sitting over here channeling Lazerpig on the Excelsiors, I love it!
When you were discussing the Excelsior Mafia and the Admirals who formed it, you were veering to LazerPig territory with your characterizations.
Bravo!
Except... the Mafias LazerPig talks about are, by and large, incompetent.
You nailed it when you mentioned the Klingons. I see the Excelsior as the Starfleet version of the D7 or K't'inga class.
Sure, the shell might seem the same, but once you open it up you might be surprised.
The Excelsior and its evolutionary variants appears to follow the good ship design more than a admirals Cabal. Its sturdy, its reliable, the design keeps holding up despite its age, and I think one major important thing is that its probably the one design that is easy enough to work with and large enough to put new tech still giving it a edge. We know of one modified excelsior during the Dominion war that appears to give a hell of a fight with the tech it received so perhaps these ships really are that good. Excelsior II's appears to be the end result of this.
It looks like the excelsior, but its a whole new generation.
Plus there is something classical about the excelsior class. Not that its a classic ship of the Golden Age of the Federation but that it seems to look more nautical than the majority of other Federation ships. You look at a Excelsior from the bow up at a angle and its gives off a classical age of sail or modern warship (21st century ships) feel to it.
As for admirals Cabal I don't think they exist. For the excelsior at least. That ship is just a good design. No I think the ship that has a cabal following is actually the Miranda class. Its a holdover from the TOS era and is the last connection to the Constitution Class, its stable mate. These ships are older than the Excelsiors and it appears that the Miranda's were in greater numbers and filled a variety of roles. They served up to the Dominion war and although it appears they did leave service after, they do appear to have variants that pops up later in some form, or size in a desperate attempt to stay in the fleet. I think they stuck around due to the fact that they might have been a common starting vessel for most new crews or captains. So many had fond memories of the plucky ships. decades later to a century later they still were common enough that they got the Excelsior treatment and indeed had old admirals basically saying to keep the design relevant despite clearly long past its expiration date. I pity the engineers that had to think of a way to make a miranda advanced enough and yet recognizable enough to not piss off a old admiral with dreams of ships long past.
I do believe a miranda class of some form was running around in Picard, and STO seems to have a never ending supply of variants with at least the last current one being the ship that ushered the new design look of modern Federation Alliance ships in the game and potentially Picard.
Be funny if it turned out its the Miranda with the hidden admiral cabal :P
It's major advantage in my mind is that it effectively skipped at least one whole generation of starship development. It was an early 24th century ship in the late 23rd century giving it an unnaturally long effective service life. The Miranda was arguably a superior ship in many metrics to the Constitution and that along with the economics of its production gave it a respectable service life, but where the Miranda was well past its prime in the 2360s, relegated to much lighter duty, the Excelsior endured as a capable largish cruiser. Not comparable to a galaxy or even Nebula but still more than capable of front line duty when not staring down the distruptors barrels of a peer adversary to the Galaxy style ships. Which meant it was more than capable of holding its own against most threats. Certainly the common Cardasian ships, Klingon BOPs in less than overwhelming numbers and even the still common k't'inga.
@@DrewLSsix Plus it was designed during Klingon war and as such has lot of military design elements, what many more recent ships lacked. That was also another reason why more level headed officers, wanted it to stay in service.
Good point. I hadn't thought of the Lakota.
In addition to the stated reasons the Excelsior was a very powerful design for its time and remained a very capable ship well into 24th century. It wasn't until the Wolf 359/Dominion War era that they started to really show their age.
And even then you have lakota refit
I mean their major rival at the time was The Cardassians and they couldn't even handle one Nebula.
It is still, by far, my classic ship class. STVI was my first Trek at the cinema, and it hardwired the class into my brain. The Centaur appearance in DS9 had young me giddy.
My theory is the excelsiors long service was an accident. It designed around the traswarp drive and the great experiment. My theory is that the ship went through constant changes and redesigns throughout its constuction as the science and technology behind the traswarp drive was still being figured out. This led to the engineers making the ship extremely modular becase they were constantly having to move, change or replace things as the scientists kept coming up with new changes and requirements for the transwarp system.
When the experiment failed and the engineers were tasked with converting it to a regular warp ship, it was incredibly easy, they had got so annoyed with constantly making changes that the workers built in easy ways to remove or swap out every componet or system becase there was a good chance they would have been ordered to a week after it was installed anyway. The constructions workers desire to be lazy or just make their job easier in long run, accidentally created the most adaptable and easy to upgrade ship starfleet had ever seen, it became eaiser and cheaper to simply uprage or refit an exelcior than build a whole new starship to meet new standards, why design a whole new ship around your new warp core or sensor system when its so easy to rip the old stuff out of an excelsior and just replace it? This is why so many excelsiors were built and why the lasted so long, they were just so easy to work on.
I also think this hurt the federation after a while, the development and experimentation of new technology would slow over time as there was always someone in the room to ask if it was compatable with the excelsior. I didnt reach the point of true stagnation but if you look at the ships coming out the golden age there seems to had been a focus of refinement of technology rather than experimenting with new stuff, the galaxy was big and powerfull but it wasnt exactly creative, it was just an improvement on already existing tech. This stemmed from the exceliors design philosophy at the time spreading across starfleet where for years the focus was on refinement and refits for a decent chunk of the fleet while the new and experimental designs that originally created the execsior were pushed to the side in favour of the cheaper and safer system upgrades to an already existing space frame. It was only after the borg showed up that starfleet corrected course, we saw new experimentations with gel packs, phase cannons, ablative armour, quantum torpedos, modular warp feilds, multi vector attacks. Star fleet could have been doing all this before but it was the war time setting that shifted their focus from simple upgrades to brand new ideas.
You also passed over one blatantly obvious in-universe reason. With how long the Excelsior was in service, how much of the Fleet - not just the admiralty - came up serving on Excelsior-class ships. This actually is probably the reason: So many people served on the Excelsior-class that they all have a good opinion of it AND it is a solid, reliable design.
Flag Officer: "We need to design a new ship class to replace the aging Excelsior class... any ideas?"
Senior Officer: "How about an Excelsior class, but newer, larger, and using the best tech currently available?"
Flag Officer: "Excellent! Get your staff on the design pronto!"
tbf, I'd probably have a similar attitude towards the Prometheus to your hypothetical admiral from around 12:30. My first question as an admiral would be "okay, so one ship turns into three smaller ships...why don't we just build more Defiants or Sabres that can do the same thing if working together in squadron, but if we lose one it doesn't compromise the functions of the other ships they're operating with?"
As for my theory on the Excelsior, I think it's probably a bit of column A and a bit of column B. A long range, heavy cruiser is an extremely versatile ship that you can use for a wide range of wartime and peacetime roles, and for a ship intended to be a workhorse like that, generally speaking the best mindset to have is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." This also makes it a better idea to keep upgrading your workhorse ships rather than replacing them as soon as something new and shiny comes out that might not even work at all. This would also explain why ships like the Miranda and the Oberth have stuck around for so long too - they're versatile, reliable, cost-effective, and have plenty of potential for upgrades.
Well from the early 80's when my parents got me my first Star Trek Di-cast metal "toys" the old NX-2000 is the one I still have today. :)
The prominent feature of the Excelsior class was speed and good allround capabilities, especially tactical.
The Federation is ever expanding, thus in need of ever more fast ships to patrol its vast space and have quick reaction forces for emergencies and force projection.
The Excelsior is simply a good, mature workhorse design that fulfills exactly those requirements. Same as the Miranda class and its many iterations for the light support cruiser role.
I'm not sure if Lazerpig will object, but you're impression of the Excelsior Mafia is pretty good
Honestly, in my headcannon, the design is simply good for every era beyond the far future and far past.
They're not too big and can be supported by every station.
They can do roughly the same job as any other exploration cruiser can.
They are well armed and amored, so in wartime are excellent heavy cruisers.
Easy to maintain and build.
Relatively low crew requirements for a ship its size in the TMP era, and a very low crew requirements thanks to the automation tech in TNG.
Designed to be very fast, even though the transwarp program failed, they still had a sports car on their hands.
Plenty of space for upgrading. The ship was designed for transwarp, and when that failed, the large and clunky systems could be swapped with more powerful and efficient reactors. The warp core could be swapped for one that could see service on an ambassador or galaxy class.
They were very modular and could support cloaking devices, added armor, and more powerful weapons that matched a galaxy class, ie the lakota varient.
Well deck that supported both peaceful scientific and humanitarian operations, as well as military operations, including planetary invasions, combat support, and rearming.
Finally, most captains and flag officers served on one. This left a preference for the design in any considerations. This is why they may have received more upgrades and refits. Additionally, because so many people have served on one before, they knew their capabilities and the general layout, meaning the transfer of crew to newer versions was quick and smooth.
Essentially, I belive that the ships fit a goldilox zone of requirements throughout the various series we see them in.
*Edit* Changed TOS to TMP
I bet the Excelsior was basically Starfleet design ideals perfected. A perfect balance between combat and exploration ability with the weaknesses of prior designs fully ironed out like replacing the spindly neck and pylons with sturdier versions, and reaching a level of plug-and-play that allowed easy upgrades with modern tech without actually having to dismantle the entire frame. The Ambassador was just a similar ship but upsized. The Galaxy was a step in the wrong direction induced by peace and arrogance. Then came the Sovereign, which had all the same basic details as the Excelsior, but in a larger, somewhat elongated shape.
I can just imagine how many shipwrights banged their heads against the wall because their designs were turned down in favor of sticking with the Excelsior.
I like the Excelsior. It was like the Ford Panther platform car of space (in terms of North American car references anyways). It lived way longer than expected, was tweaked to fulfill multiple roles, and after years of fine tuning became one of the most reliable vehicles you could get. The R&D had long been paid for and police and taxi services loved their robustness, so they just kept cranking them out of the factory. It ultimately had limitations due to its old platform and eventually could not keep up with more modern requirements in terms of fuel consumption, performance, and safety.
My first love was the refit Constitution. But if I was a commander of a Battle Group or just a captain I would have wanted an Excelsior. I always felt like she balanced aesthetics, durability and firepower. When an Excelsior shows up you cannot count her out and you know you're in for a fight. You'll have to bring more than one ship to guarantee victory.
I feel like the cabal theory I think it’s a situation of the excelsiors were SO common most officers and commanders either commanded or was apart of the crew of an excelsior at some point in their career so there’s a bias to the layout. It’s a bonus that most long lived classes follow the rules of the excelsior design.
Plus by then they were pretty much the backbone cruiser that was probably used for anything too big for a California that felt like they never really thought they needed a replacement for. So they probably just decided its easier just to make a new version.
Look up the story of the B-29 bomber and how the generals got an updated version by changing the name to B-50. I think this is the same idea.
Exactly and that thing worked out pretty well for the time it was used before B-36´s and later B-47´s came in. Why build a new thing from scratch when you only need some tweaks to the original proven design to get the same capabilities you could get out of a new design?
Channeling a bit of your inner LazerPig for a bit there, haha.
Doylist: They had the model, it looked great, so they used it over and over.
Watsonian: Because it was a proven tough design. A workhorse. It was cheap and effective.
My head canon has it that the Excelsior was for decades the biggest ship Starfleet could build, perhaps even research, dictated by the Khitomer Accords. Enforced or not, the class was enormous when it first appeared and would have the resources to use it for multiple purposes for a long time. The big bump up in size with the Ambassador might have been a reaction to the size limit being lifted, but also a desire to have fewer colossal ships doing multirole assignments than lots of Miranda and Excelsior variants.
But yes, the Constitution casts a long shadow in the fandom, but 'In Universe', I expect that the Excelsior was the wonderful, futuristic, and bad-ass ship of its era, which overtime became the 'new Connie' of Starfleet, even when they are becoming the common heavy cruiser, they maintained a mystique about them, the Miranda and Excelsior being 'default' images of a Starfleet starship in the minds of many. The smaller one being the universal workhorse, the larger the universal cruiser.
For practical reasons, your observation of the Excelsior being Starfleet's 'universal cruiser' sort of says it all. As does the idea that most shipyards would have scaled up to build Excelsiors, but that scale being the biggest most shipyards could build. The Excelsior was built for speed as well as size and technology, in terms of tactical prowess and response time, it made anything else obsolete. It may have been the true Dreadnought of Starfleet, and while the real Dreadnought became a necessary threshold to exceed even as the ship itself became obsolete in its own right, the Excelsior would remain unmatched for some decades due to being such a leap forward and due to treaties.
Even in the post Next Gen world, being reduced to a 'small' ship. The Excelsior frame is still large enough to DO stuff with, but small enough to make refits not such a large commitment. And there's a LOT of Excelsiors, and a LOT of mothballed ships, parts and old shipyards. The Excelsior prototype was a longtime testbed, maybe the class also lends itself to easy refits?
Cabal - given how many excelsiors there were, it’s very likely that a huge number of admirals served on one at some point or even commanded one. There are probably a lot of officers who have very fond memories of their time on an excelsior.
I forgot how much I liked the Excelsior until I recently started rewatching all the old Star Trek movies.
From what I’ve seen from beta canon, the NX-2000 was much larger than the Constitution class because the NX-2000 had to hold a much larger warp core, TWO larger duotronic computer cores, and a transporter array directly tied into both the warp core and computer cores.
Personally, I think the ship was over-designed because as soon as the transwarp tech was removed, she immediately set a new bar for federation ships.
I also think there is an aspect of nostalgia for Excelsior ships. So many were constructed and served for so long, the crews and citizens of the federation and starfleet grew up with the class.
I see it as a vote of confidence for the Excelsior class that admirals, captains, and veteran crews still wanted to serve on Excelsior even as newer ships entered service.
I can see how this started with the Excelsior. I think what might have happened is that the configuration of the original Excelsior (Pre-Enterprise-B refit, or simply Block A) was worked out very carefully ahead to be the optimum of a vessel that could handle Warp and Transwarp with few problems (let’s not talk about the teething problems and the later refits) and have a general utilitarian layout for it’s mission. The design worked so well as a general purpose Heavy Cruiser that during the Golden Age it worked actually rather well, but with diminishing returns as time went on.
The Cardassian Conflicts, Federation-Klingon and later The Dominion War was the writing on the wall for the design, with various attempts to update the design that had proven a staple workhorse for the ‘Second Contact’ Fleet and Support rolls, which after each conflict, was desperately needed. So the Obena-Class is an attempt at Modernization with 6th generation components and Sovereign-based technologies
The Excelsior II I think is a combination of wanting to exploit the warp geometry layout of the original class while scaling up and replacing the original while paying homage. It has a very ‘Things are Normal among the Fleet’ again vibe to it, with a starfleet that saw a not insignificant chunk of the older designs (Miranda, Excelsior, Centaur, etc.) get clay pigeoned during the Dominion War. I suspect it is morale building symbol as well as just using a very solid design for a ship, but updating it to bleeding edge technology and ability.
Why does a pickup truck always look like a pickup?
Because it is built to purpose.
The Excelsior has a large flat back end with a module to support Warp Nacelles welded to it.
It has a well warp streamlined engineering hull able to support big powerful reactors to power the latest and greatest warp drives.
It has a very thick neck that is very much NOT a weak point that can be loaded with 'ALL' the torpedoes (srsly! 4 fore tubes in the neck is STOCK!).
It has a long oriented Saucer that works well with the systems to not damage subspace at warp (unlike the wide Galaxy class).
New engines? Slam a new nacelle set on an Excelsior! Oh... it worked! Upgrade the rest!
New reactor? it fits in an Excelsior, test it there we have plenty. It blew up?! but you know why it blew up because everything else was stock? well Mk2 that thing and upgrade the rest!
...etc.
The Excelsior isn't perfect, heck it isn't even the best in in most categories. What it is: Big enough to test almost anything, easy enough to make the changes to do the testing, and valuable enough to be worth upgrading with the results of that testing. And given that the testing was done on that frame anyway... well pretty easy to roll out to the rest of the fleet.
Yesterday i had a random thought about the never ending D7 / K'tinga and i think it applies to the Excelsior as well, "Size matters" :).
All navies have a tendency, over time, to increase tonnage for any given class (Drach made this point in one of the chats): the Vorcha < Mogh / Kamarang < Bortasque. On the FED side the increase in size is even more dramatic: Odyssey, "Excelsior II".
So what happens with the shipyards ? You expand some of them sure, but clearly you can't upgrade them all.
So for the "smaller" shipyards that can only build something the size of an Excelsior or a K'tinga it makes a kind of sense to keep pumping out these solid, proven frames that then get outfitted with modern systems. The economy of scale must be a factor especially after the Dominion War and all the other conflicts STO added on top of that.
A class of starship that is reaching immortality.
The music in the background. Somebody is a fan of the ensigns log. 7:43
I kind of assumed it hit that balance for a multi role cruiser that could go out on it's own.
It’s really pretty simple. Refits and upgrades are faster and less resource intensive than new builds. New tech and designs are fantastic, but work still goes on while these new things are being developed.
Two reasons, the studio had several models available, second constitutions would remind viewers of the original cast, so they couldn’t add that.
Omg the going to the admiral with you new design or another excelsior bit. killed me
The Excelsior Cabal is clearly the future manifestation of Carnival Cruise Lines. It pretty obvious how they keep making the ships bigger and bigger but still somewhat all the same.
🖖😎👍Very cool and very nicely well done and executed and informatively explained in every detail way shape and form possibly provided indeed, And I myself have always been a big fan of the Excelsior class starship's and own the Xl versions by Eaglemoss and various other designs of it as well and have the AMT/Ertle Phase 2 model kits of it as well,👌.
I feel it's like the Constitution class.
For 20+ years, all Star Fleet produced was Constitutions.. but after 30 years it was time for a refresh... And Came the Excelsior.
Now, by Encounter at Far Point, the refresh was meant to be by the Galaxy Class (after all now the Excelsior was 30+ years).. But the Borg happen, so we never got the Galaxy class 30 year old fleet.
I love the Excelsior Class and the design legacy
I still hold the headcanon that the "transwarp" drive of the excelsior was actually the ability to jump immediately to a cruising speed, instead of accelerating thru lower factors. This is how TNG era ships behave, whereas the TOS/TMP slowly accelerate.
The part about the drawdown reminds me of how the US Navy practically eliminated its plethora of Cold War era vessels in favor of only a few types.
So the Excelsior’s were pretty much either the Arleigh Burke or Ticonderoga of Starships in that they were modular *enough* to be kept in service but are soon approaching the end of their utility in terms of room for growth.
Excelsior is such a beautiful design. It's my favorite ship in all of Star Trek. It's what ties older fans of the TOS era to TNG, in my view. I think of the Excelsior as something akin to the Browning M2. It's a solid design that's rugged, reliable, and battle tested. Why would you discard it or change it in any serious way? Excelsior is continually used because it works better than a replacement alternative.
I still come across videos I never saw…this is so crazy but great video
All the old coot Admirals: “They can pry my Excelsior out of my cold, dead hands!”
Excelsior was designed to handle a transwarp drive, which had to have been similar to the later quantum slipstream drive, so it’s design is better keyed to higher warp speeds.
It's not a cabal of admirals, it's a cabal of enlisted crew. Excelsior is sleek and sexy but also proven, chonky, and affordable. The enlisted are like "yes, build fields of the non 'expendable' ship and we can all live out our tour of duty"
So Starfleet's equivalent of the E4 Mafia?
Loved this. First rule of Excelsior Mafia is you don't talk about Excelsior Mafia. The Excelsior is my second favorite ship with the D7 being first.
The Excelsior Mafia segment had a very strong Lazerpig feel to it
(Also that latest Excelsior II class just looks awesome. :) )
In her yard at Utopia Planitia, dead Excelsior waits dreaming.
IE! IE! EXCELSIOR FHTAGAN!
The Prometheus Class too considering it was active in the 26th Century. Shows how great both spaceframes were.
The Thicc Experiment
Eh. The loooooong time the Excelsior was in service is quite hilarious by the time of Lower Decks or Picard but the Excelsior II / Odena Classes don't strike me as too hard to explain. Starfleet likes to experiment with weird designs almost as much as it loves to keep design lines going. For example i'm convinced the Steamrunner is a modern offspring of the Oberth Class (flat Primary, giant unexplained hole, underslund Secondary, integrated Nacelles; it ticks all the boxes with the one exception that i *like* the Steamrunner). Then there's the whole Constellation - Cheyenne - Prometheus / Sagan progression. Using the Excelsior's general design but making it a modern ship from the ground up seems to have worked fine with the Sovereign so an even closer version was probably a no brainer when they were rebuilding the fleet.
Amazing analysis like always
It should be noted that despite the standard talking point that transwarp failed, we saw a completely new warp chart after the introduction of Excelsior. I believe that the TNG scale IS transwarp. And that speed became the most important resource that set the Federation up for success throughout the rest of the Lost Era.
Because it is the equivalent of a Fletcher, or in army terms, an M1 Abrahms. Fletcher served 70 years, M1's for 43 years, F15s over 50. Easily upgraded with new sensors, weapons and power suppliers
I think B-52 would be batter compensation. Starfleet didn't really have replacement.
Given how structural vulnerability was a hallmark of Starfleet up until the Intrepid/Sovereign, I think it’s actually surprising there wasn’t more classes in the Excelsior lineage, and it’s a shame Starfleet seems to have gone back to voluntary vulnerability with the likes of the Neo-Connie. Whatever the issues with the Abrams Treks, I liked how in Beyond they highlighted this glaring weakness when Enterprise was decapitated. Let’s see you try that on an Excelsior.
Plus, she just looks so damn good. Sexiest ship they had until Sovereign
Abrams trek was just silly, they mentioned shields but they never seemed to actually shield anything.
"Even thicker neck" lmao hilarious!
The Excelsior Class was analogous to the Essex Class aircraft carriers.
From the 2290s-2320s, there were a limited number (probably Mark II) serving as the Multimission flagship. When these were retired and replaced by the Ambassador Class, a much larger number of Excelsior Mark Is were built to serve in more utilitarian roles.
Nebula was a universal heavy cruiser - and quite a lot of them :). Also with time Excelsior in size/power dropped from kinda battlecruiser/heavy cruiser to at best a cruiser or even light cruiser i think.
They got stuck on the Connie for years then the Excelsior Starfleet just gets stuck on what works best and keeps it for centuries
Looking at the Excelsior II, I imagine it could also be built in the same shipyards as the original given the perceived width of the new design.
My take has been that as a necessity of the class being the testbed for a revolutionary new FTL system the Excelsior was designed to take upgrades and modifications extremely well. This lead to making each successive production block being built with new technological advances a relatively minor effort and upgrades could be integrated into existing ships also relatively easily along side the normal maintenance and overhaul schedule. This then leans into the lack of a Miranda or Nebula-class style companion design for the Ambassador-class--hypothetically it could have been more effort to design a smaller derivative class than just upgrading the existing Excelsior design and without a significant performance improvement to make said additional effort worthwhile.
As support for this take I'd like to point to the fact that the Lakota--an Excelsior class upgraded to the nines--gave the Defiant a run for its money when the two ships engaged each other, albeit with both pulling their punches. A ship design that can be upgraded that much and demonstrate that level of effectiveness probably has something going for it. As for the Obena and Excelsior II-classes, I look at them as thorough overhauls of the base design to still have the desired functionality--the extreme receptiveness to modifications and upgrades--but incorporate newer construction and spaceframe developments (e.g. incorporate the most effective mutations from the Sovereign-class' seemingly Excelsior-inspired design--dat neck and engineering hull). The Excelsior II may also exist as a separate design from the Obena-class as Starfleet of that era seems to start getting an obsession about "the good old days" (see the contemporaneous Constitution III-class).
Also, I recognize the lazerpig influence there! A person of class, I see.
I wrote a short 50,000 word fan-fiction novel about an Excelsior-class ship, the USS Shanghai, NCC-18777-B. The ship is commanded by Captain Kurtis El-Fajid, as he took it out on training maneuvers with a skeleton crew of three commissioned officers and a ship-full of Academy cadets deployed on a final exam mission. This story takes place 8 years before the events of "Yesterday's Enterprise", approximately 14 years after the loss of the Enterprise-C at the battle of Narendra III.
Enroute to one of Starfleet's training regions, an expanse lying within several lightyears of a pre-contact star system (with a two inhabited, industrialized, and presumed pre-warp planets, Y'rghe IV and V), the Shanghai detects a warp signature emanating from the space between the two inhabited planets. The information on the two planets indicates that they have been in conflict with one another for several decades, using relatively primitive sub-light spacecraft and weapons to attack one another. However, Federation experts believed that they were many decades (possibly as much as a century) away from discovering subspace, warp drive, antimatter production methods, and FTL physics. As well, the only source of dilithium within a reasonable distance of either planet was Y'rghe IX, the outermost planet of their star system, and far beyond the range of even their most advanced vessels.
Reporting this to Starfleet, Captain El-Fajid is ordered to enter the system and investigate, gathering as much information as possible on this development, as it is theorized by Fleet Command that some tampering has happened, in violation of the Prime Directive. Captain El-Fajid, his First Officer, Commander Eleanor Tomen (half-human, half-Deltan, and all kinds of distracting), and his Science Officer, Lt. Commander T'Galensa (a Vulcan with all the charm and whimsy of an Arctic winter night, having completed the Kolinahr discipline) along with a crew of cadets green as spring grass, must now enter into an ancient interplanetary war that has raged for longer than the Federation has existed. They must determine what...or who...is trying to upset the balance of power between two age-old adversaries, and why. They must discover the truth and unmask the face of the true enemy...before a world is obliterated, and a people are exterminated from the cosmos forever. It's a locked-room whodunnit, on a cosmic scale...and the Excelsior-Class USS Shanghai is on the case!
The way I think about it is that the Excelsior generation was the last militarized line of ships. When they went into the golden age vessels became larger and softer due to the lack of tangible threats. I have always thought that starship design is influenced by both the political side (the federation) and the military side (Starfleet). I believe it is Starfleet that pushes for ships like Excelsior as they want to be prepared for potential dangers.
Agree. Make sense. At least until 25'th century.
That is an interesting point, one emulated by real history. (witness all the 'interwar' and 'prewar' ship designs between the world wars that were quickly discontinued in favor of more realistic, combat-focused ships)
I did like the idea that FASA had about multiple marks/blocks of Excelsiors. Like for example the mark 1s were built in the 2290s, mark 2s in the late 2290s early 2300s, mark 3s around Tomed , and pehaps the mark 4s in the 2330s/40s (Like the Hood from which has like NCC-40k+ , higher number than the Ambassador class).
Of course each mark was almost indistinguishable internally from eachother and more advanced. Perhaps Starfleet kept the late marks after the dominion war for a decade or so (The Hood was an easter egg in Lower Decks).
This does make sense in real life. The US is cooking up a brand new F-15 model right now. Which is completely different from what they were building in the 60s/70s, and will probably stay in service for a few decades from now.
The USAF has signed the contract for the F15 EX and it will be deployed soon. The F15 is not dead yet.
@@ChairmanMo that's exactly my point. The EX is practically brand new in every way but basic appearance. And its probably gonna serve for decades to come when (or if ) it gets produced. The F15 platform is still not dead
I think that a smidgen of both theories are correct, on the one hand you have a very good design that rides a warp bubble better than most of the fleet whilst also being nigh future proof, on the other hand you have a lot of senior admirals in Starfleet who most likely have served on and probably commanded an Excelsior in the past and who still view the design as viable when compared to newer more experimental designs which run a higher chance of failing than the good 'ol "rough and reliable" Excelsior.
If this is true, then I'd also like to imagine that at one point there was a Constitution Mafia before the Excelsior came to prominence.
That end part had me laughing, going "No! No! No way!...no...well, maybe yes...no!"
The Excelsior class was such a huge upgrade to the constitution in size. It had tons of room for upgrades. No Klingon or Romulan politics to cause concern. The design of the refit constitution, Miranda and Excelsior that hooks up the warp core with the phasers, shields and impulse drives makes it more powerful than later ships or close to parity even though damage to the warpdrive causes mass lost of capability compared to newer ships that only lose some functionality. Probably a warpcore upgrade would improve most systems cheaper than upgrading other systems with more expensive independent designed ones.
Yes the Galaxy class can tie in warp power to other systems, but the TMP era always had them tied in. The TOS to TMP jump was "our tech can beat the Klingons during the cold war, but our fusion reactors, phaser banks, and many other ship systems just did not have enough power. We got this new fancy warp core that produces massive power, why not use it everywhere"
The ship probably only became decommissioned due to the war where the fragility of the ship's overdependence to the warpcore was brought to the forefront.
Gotta love the supply chain! There are a ton of Excelsiors, ergo they keep on doing Excelsiors because they already have so many.