On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

The talks to start building that infrastructure HAD to have begun at Stark's funeral. Potts, Hogan, Fury, Hill, T'Challa, Okoye, Shuri, Danvers, Quill (okay, maybe not Quill), Strange, Secretary Ross...

Am I wrong?

We're not seeing much of that in WandaVision or Falcon/Winter Soldier but we do seem to be seeing it in Spider-Man: Far From Home...

Okay, I've had this idea percolating in the Trekkish corners of my brain for a little while. I'm sharing it now before this grind/whine noise in the right ear distracts me completely: the Constitution class of starships has been in service since at least two decades before Enterprise NCC-1701 was commissioned.

You want evidence. That's good.

What I have is the confirmed - in the episodes and movies as shown on TV and in the cinema and via subscription-streaming - registry numbers of the Federation starships we know for certain to be of that class. I'm sourcing this from Memory Alpha...

NCC-956 USS Eagle
NCC-1017 USS Constellation
NCC-1631 USS Intrepid
NCC-1659 USS Potemkin
NCC-1664 USS Excalibur
NCC-1672 USS Exeter
NCC-1700 (Unknown)
NCC-1701 USS Enterprise
NCC-1703 USS Hood
NCC-1707 (Unknown)
NCC-1709 USS Lexington
NCC-1764 USS Defiant
NCC-1856 USS Emden
NCC-1895 USS Endeavour
NCC-2014 USS Korolev
NCC-2048 USS Ahwahnee

I discount Greg Jein's theory - "The Case of Jonathan Doe Starship" - that all starships docked at Starbase 10 during Kirk's court-martial re: the death of Benjamin Finney were Constitution-class. The odds of such a happenstance are too small for me to consider. And thanks to Star Trek: Discovery in general and the work of designer John Eaves in particular, we now have other options for the registries listed there.

I also prefer to assume - based on over 50 years' worth of evidence from the various series - that Federation Starfleet ship registry numbers are issued on a chronological basis, without interruption.

Up until now, I chose to believe that (1) the Constitution herself was NCC-1700, and that all ships with registry numbers prior to hers were salvaged from previous starship classes. No longer.

It may still well be that NCC-1700 belongs to a Starship Constitution...but she need not be either the first of her name or of her starship class. Not with six other starships of the class commissioned before her.

Kirk's claim of "twelve like her in the fleet"? Depends on your point of view. Going by registry numbers as confirmed, I'm willing to hazard a guess of at least three, perhaps as many as five production batches of ships. Kirk's twelve ships would certainly count as one of those three to five batches.

A lot of us have some investment in the mythology as established before DSC. I certainly did. I bought books and deck plan sets and stuff - not all of it officially licensed, but that's okay, because multiversal theory allows us to keep enjoying what we've bought as if it were official in some other version of Starfleet, somewhere in that multiverse.

Anyway, there it is. I think I wrote it out coherently enough. Fellow Treknology fans are welcome to debate whatever parts they like.

Putinists might be more than a little pleased with this consequence of DT-45's installation as US president.

Why?

Because Bombardier is Canada's main aircraft manufacturer. And it's headquartered in Montréal, Québec. One of its main extranational plants is in Northern Ireland. Both QC and Northern Ireland are national unity faultlines of their respective "parent" nations. (Yes, I am using "parent" in a dangerous way here. Understood. Let's move on for now.)

If Bombardier gets killed as a company because of this mess, that means major high-tech job losses in Canada and the UK, each in their respective national unity "faultline" zones. Which can lead to NATO's internal political cohesion taking a hit due to Canadian and British resentment of Washington's siding with Boeing.

So, two NATO countries internally disrupted, resenting a third which is itself already disrupted. Defence supply chains within NATO also messed up.

Am I wrong about this theory?

There's an old quote that's been coming back to mind after reading news and opinion pieces from places ranging from CBC News to iPolitics.ca. It comes from a book about a TV series - one of the earliest examples of what we now call "dramedies" - a portmanteau showing the blending of comedy and drama - on American television that won many Canadian hearts as well.

“I think there is a misconception on the part of a lot of people in this country that Frank Burns is unusual. My hope is that they see he is not unusual. He is fairly ordinary. He comes in sleeker packages, God knows. I hope when people think about who they are going to vote for, or who they’re going to work for, or whatever, they cast an eye toward Frank Burns and say ‘Now, does this person behave the same way? Am I dealing with this kind of monster?.’ Watch for him, be careful of him. There are Frank Burnses everywhere. Learn to know the type. Don’t elect them. Don’t make them chairman of the board. Frank is a dangerous man because he acts without reason, often without true intelligence, and, perhaps more importantly, with no real knowledge or perception of what consequences an action will bring out. He is not a man with perception and, consequently, he is incredibly dangerous.”

- Larry Linville, interviewed by David S. Reiss for the book M*A*S*H - the exclusive inside story on TV's most popular show (1)

Putting that quote into a more recent, Canadian-minded context: I wonder if those who supported Stephen Harper and his fellow believers might not have had a certain dislike for M*A*S*H while it aired in first-run on TV. Certainly, they had problems with CBC, which had the Canadian first-run rights for the series.

(1) Well, the people at Bobbs-Merrill weren't exactly shy about picking a sub-title for promoting that book, were they?

Some of you on my friendlists here and at Facebook have noticed articles on the subject. I think this comment will step in Agents of SHIELD spoiler turf, so...
( Herein lie the spoilers and my thoughts on some implications. )