Star Trek: Armada III begins with the first stirrings of the Dominion War and allows players to take command of five unique factions, the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Cardassian Union/Dominion Alliance, and the Borg Collective. Explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.
Lakota/Enterprise-B
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We'll thats her also updated ;)
Dat Aft Again.
Man, I'd love to get my hands on her ample nacelles, if you'll forgive the engineering parlance
I always liked the extra impulse engines, improved nacelles and overall increased bulk of the Lakota refit. Made the ship appear much more...muscular.
Canonically, I wonder why Starfleet produced so few of them?
He knows to much!
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Supposedly the cannon arguments I've herd is how, while advanced, it was rather costly and became cost prohibitive when newer ships, such as the ambassador, came into service that were just as good. This happens a lot in real life militarys now where they build a great ship, tank, or plane and even make a newer improved version but that is more costly and when the next newer item is made they retire the more advanced one.
The interesting thing to consider is that the Excelsiors were apparently "refitted" less than a decade after they were launched. Note that the USS Excelsior NX-2000 is undergoing trials in 2285, and less than 10 years later the Ent-B is launched.
In contrast, the Constitutions were refitted over 30 years after launch, and the Mirandas were seemingly not extensively refitted at all. Yet, despite this, base Excelsiors (without the refit) still made up a large part of the fleet in the 2360s and 2370s, nearly 100 years after the USS Excelsior entered service. This suggests that there was nothing really wrong with the Excelsiors, so any refit that was done was not done out of necessity.
My theory is that a select few of the Excelsiors were designated for refits (or custom built) to serve as "elite" vessels for the Federation. We can use both the Ent-B (which got a hell of a lot of press at launch) and the Lakota (which was specially outfitted with advanced quantum torpedoes - something standard Excelsiors certainly did not have). Under this suggested timeline, Excelsior refits served as flagships/battleships of the Federation (much like the later Galaxy or Sovereign) until the commissioning of the Ambassador class in the 2330s. Although an official date has never been stated for the commissioning of the Ambassador, I would argue that a c. 2330 commission date makes the most sense, giving the Excelsior/Excelsior refit a prime lifetime of approximately 30 years.
An interesting theory.
I think the real reason is a bit more boring however. The "Ent-B" Lakota refit was made for Generations, which was around Season 3 of DS9. So for the entirety of TNG, the regular Excelsior model was used in the show, and if they ever showed up in DS9, until the Lakota episode, it would have been standard Excelsior too.
I'm pretty sure once the Lakota showed up in DS9 it was that model used going forward, I'll have to rewatch the fleet engagements again. If it was only for that episode then it was probably because they used the superior studio model from Generations because in that episode there was a lot of close ups of the Lakota. And then in other episodes, the Excelsiors were seen from farther away, often in the background so they would have used the old smaller model from TNG.
I always thought of the refit model as the true excelsior, and just ignored on screen evidence. The NX 2000 Excelsior was the prototype, and Enterprise B was the production model with the improvements.