My commanding officer told me that when a starship gets really old and has a hard time performing its duties it'll get sent to a nice reserve fleet up-quadrant where it can fly around, and scan things, and there are lots of other starships out there for it to play with so it'll never get lonely...

I feel like "The Dominion War" is the answer to what happened to 90% of old Starships - if that fleet had been much more cobbled together the NX-01 would have been heading it.

“So admiral we have a few older ships, upgraded of course, for your-“ “B-52” “Yes sir, those are still in use....amazingly.” “Thank you.”

I just thought "decommissioning" equaled renaming it Enterprise, giving it to Kirk, and watching the destructive wackiness that ensued.

Everybody knows a Starship starts to depreciate the moment you drive it off the lot 🚀💸

There is also the Starfleet museum where some decommissioned Starfleet ships are sent.

What happens to old starships? They go into a destruction derby and the remaining parts are kitbashed into background ships.

Hmm. Take an old Excelsior class, strip out the warp core and many of the systems, take off the nacelles and replace them with docking arrays, tow it to a fledgling colony and bam. Instant Starbase.

Meanwhile in Stellaris I had 2 corvettes -survive- serve honourably for 600 years after being refit for the 70th time

In the William Shatner Novel "Ashes of Eden", The Enterprise is sold to a small space faring race to use as a system patrol vessel. The Enterprise has been stripped of weapons and other system before being sold. Still having her shields, she is outfitted with Klingon Disruptors. It is a really good book and should be checked out

"Old Starships never die, they just...warp away..."

Just like my Fathers ship he served on the USS Hornet. She was planned to be sold as scrap, but a group stopped that from happening. She is now a museum ship berthed permanently in Alameda Naval Air Station. If you want a tour you need to call ahead to be placed on the schedule.

The modularity of Starfleet ships gives them a pretty big advantage. It's relatively easy to upgrade them to keep up with modern ships. And when they truly become obsolete, it's easy to take out all the modular parts for other uses. Also, Starfleet ships seem relatively easy to break down for colonization. Remember how in "Children of Time," the Defiant's crew were able to break down the ship to build their settlement. Starships have a lot of components that can be used to build planetary infrastructure, fusion generators, replicators, computer cores, etc. I'd imagine Stafleet sends a lot of old ships on one way trips to colonize new planets.

I always liked to believe the Enterprise-A ended up in the Fleet Museum. The only surviving ship Kirk commanded would have been a huge draw.

Well, first when they decommission a ship, they remove the unused explodium for reuse in the newer ships, even though that seems oversupplied on just about every Federation ship. After that they remove the rocks and refit them for the exploding bridge panels, since all bridges needs exploding rocks. After that the warp core breach sensors and generators are striped and added to any new ship that exhibits a tendency to not breach its warp core containment field any time the ship is under stress. Stress being anything more strenuous than sitting in orbit while two crew people talk too loudly.

"Stolen by some farmboy," LOL.

I have to mention, you forgot about museum ships and also ex starships ending up in civilian service. Though the latter isn’t seen as much in canon, the former is directly referenced as vessels like _Enterprise_ NX-01 and a variety of other vessels.

Some of them are repurposed to haul away garbage. Oh my mistake. I mean they get hauled away AS garbage.

Always thought it was funny that upon its return the Delta Flyer was apparently mothballed. You can just imagine the guy that’s in charge of accounting for all the ships in his care struggling to fit it in starfleet’s catalog.

Can you imagine in ST Picard, if instead of Picard flying around in a lame freighter, he stole the Stargazer from some mothball shipyard? It could have been used and upgraded during the dominion war so it could hold its own in a fight.

Actually there is one more option, and we have been told of two examples...museums! Both Enterprise NX-01 and the Voyager (in an alternate future) shared this fate. Oh, and the inspirational end statement you are looking for is, "And these ships, at the end of their life shall be reborn as something much more mundane as most likely their materials are no longer high grade enough to do onto modern ships, and will become the new washing machines and doorknobs of the Federation." Wait a minute...

I like to think there's the occasional ship that gets the honour of becoming an artificial reef of sorts for cosmozoans, giving a home to new life (and maybe even new civiliazations later down the line)

You forgot about one of the most infamous incidences where a cadet had died during a training mission... cadet engineer Peter Preston, the nephew of the legendary Montgomery Scott, chief engineer of the enterprise. Cadet Preston, who during a radioactive warp core coolant leak that occurred after a surprise attack, despite only being a cadet, instead of evacuating with the other training cadets onboard, chose to remain at his post in engineering and actively remained working, successfully reversing that leak. His personal contributions had made a significant impact upon preventing the ship’s eminent destruction but consequently resulted in the unfortunate loss of his own life. Star Trek II - The Wrath of Kahn (1982) kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gdFog8-cnZirqmg.html

In my headcanon I imagined another destination for the ships that are considered outdated: they are sent to civilizations that recently joined the Federation and do not have their own fleet, and they would be dedicated to light tasks, such as commercial transport or border surveillance. Non-Starfleet but highly qualified personnel from the species were allowed to work on them, in order to learn about the operation of an advanced spacecraft, while at the same time being allowed to modify the craft to suit their needs and experiment with your own particular technology. In the hands of a group of motivated engineers, these ships would be refit until they were considered prototypes of new classes. Thus Starfleet would benefit from a different perspective and fresh ideas.

Four hours after the video recording ends: "Starships certainly do stop being used."

I'm sure some ships where used for target practice/weapons testing, or handed over to the SCE for analysis on how there spaceframes and components held up to years of service. Hell, maybe some where fitted with experimental tech to test, why build and crew a new ship when an old one will do? I could even see a situation where it's not practical to build a space station to serve the needs of a far of colony, but an old hulk will do, just park it on orbit and use it as storage or a sensor platform, and to the untrained eye it looks like your planet is protected by a starship. The possibilities are endless.

There was also that one TNG episode were a mothballed Constellation class was used to help in war games.

So, a big reason these ships get used for so long is that, well, let's be honest, it's not hard to refit them in most ways. They're relatively modular, and in all honesty, they're basically small city-ships, or at the very least, great big flying skyscrapers. You don't tear down a skyscraper every time you want to upgrade the HVAC... most of the time. Want better wiring? Replace the wiring. Want to shore up the building to make it stronger? Shore up the building to make it stronger. So it goes with starfleet vessels. As for when they pass their prime, let's look at naval vessels. The Navy began to require that basically everything be a double-hulled vessel. This lead to a lot of decommissionings of vessels, including some vessels that were brand new off the line, mainly because the amount of refit work that would have gone into making single-hulled ships into double-hulled ones was simply not possible without seriously compromising the rest of the structure. So it goes with Starfleet as well, with polarized-hull vessels being decommissioned for being just... not worth saving, and with older vessels being decommissioned after they discovered that warp travel could cause catastrophic damage to subspace without powerful streamlining. In the latter case, some older ships could be maintained, as the warp speed limit for non-streamlined vessels could be circumvented in the case of an emergency, and even without that, Warp 5 would still get you to and from a lot of more local systems in terms of transport and otherwise. All of which is to say, there was a push to replace older vessels, but they could be brought out of mothballs in the case of a major emergency, such as an invasion from the Gamma quadrant, but by the time the late 24th came around, a large fleet of newer ships could be mobilized when the need arose, with the Curiosity, and then then Inquiry class both being able to replace the aging fleet.

Last time i was this early to a video, the Enterprise was the closest ship in the quadrant.

Just wanted to throw this out there. The first Defiant was an NX registry. The second Defiant (The Sao Paulo) was a USS registry. So it was still different.

Never been a Star Trek fan but a friend got me into STO a few weeks ago and I'm pretty hooked on the ship combat. And I gotta say as a person who often enjoys watching history videos about warships and feels genuine sorrow when well served ships get scrapped, this is kinda refreshing in a bittersweet way. The ships serve WELL past what they would in the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries through countless refits and re-purposing it which in of itself is incredibly heartwarming. Though on the flip side of that coin I just...don't understand why they don't properly scrap the ships or repurpose their hulls for something else. I mean that's a lot of material going to waste just being left adrift in space for so long and I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to have a dedicated yard for ship breaking, which itself would be pretty big business.

I loved the ending! It's so much like the present day, when you look at certain navel vessels that have outlived their useful lives. For example the USS Enterprise CV-65, soon to be replaced by the the new Enterprise, CV-80. Everything has it's time and place of service, but at the end of the day needs to be replaced because technology, like life moves on. The old ship has the memories but the new ship has the possibilities.

I wouldn't expect a Starship Captain to go through ships like iphones. Something that massive using that much resources needs to be made to last and have upgrades. Like a house. I wouldn't like having to buy a new house every year because hyper consumerism is hip and all... lol

7:25 - AKA Explaining the Sector 001 fleet and their registries. All those boats look more like something from the time of the Enterprise-C then the Enterprise-E, anyways, decommissioned because their time was over and the grand age of exploration and peace shown by the Galaxy-Class had begun. Cue the Borg and Wolf 359, then the Dominion and Starfleet gets all the First Contact boats back in service because they are, almost literally, soiling their undergarments.

"Every ship will be able to continue to contribute to the fleet even after being decommissioned. Eventually even the very body of the ship itself can be recycled and reincarnated as a later, more advanced class of ship." There, I made it positive for you.

USS Hathaway was a prime example of this. Which was reactivated not long after its TNG appearance to fight the Dominion. You could see she was mothballed for a long time and rendered warp inactive with no operational weapons. It was one of my favorite episodes. I love how Riker loved the ship despite the state it was in. Much like we would consider a rusted, abandoned classic car a "nice car" despite the condition its in. Riker:Shes perfect. But not really. His reaction to Hathaway despite her age and condition was priceless. And I caught myself pulling a Worf when I salvaged an old car. I needed a piece of wire to start an old car once. And where do I get the wire? Yanked from under the dash. 🤣 Where do we find the optic cable? Worf: Reaches up, yanks a bunch from the ceiling. "Anywhere". Also priceless. 🤣

That ending was good ,pure gold.

1:28 The Ahwanhee shouldn't be up on that list as it was salvaged after the battle of Wolf 359 and went on to be a part of the blockade off Starfleet ships between the Romulan-Klingon border during the Klingon Civil War in early 2368.

I've always thought that Starfleet would give smaller member worlds without a standing defence fleet decommissioned ships for intersystem patrol and defence. Say the scores of decommissioned Miranda classes that didn't become transports were derated and given to member worlds to help them defend their area of space, not just relying on a Federation ship being in the area. Space is big.

Probably your funniest video yet. Nice work! Great narrative at the end.

For the Enterprise-A, there's an additional complication: the possibility that she was decommissioned for reasons of Starfleet politics. The opening of Generations had a very strong sense of a "passing the torch" PR campaign going on. Given the speculation that the E-A wasn't a new ship but an existing one (perhaps finishing refit) that had been redesignated as the Enterprise-A as a show of appreciation to Kirk & crew in the wake of the whale probe incident, it is possible its decommissioning was mainly done to boot Kirk off it, let one of the new "queens of the fleet" take the prestigious name, and recommission the former E-A back with its old designation, allowing it several more decades of service. It's entirely possible that (one of) the Constitution-refit ship(s) that were part of the wreckage of the Wolf 359 fleet destroyed by the Borg had, at one time, been the Enterprise -A.

I actually seem to remember that Starfleet would use some of these ships for training new personnel

Even in the 2270's, I would gladly serve on an Excelsior class starship. There is a reason this design was the backbone of Starfleet for close to a century...

Don't forget museum ships. Starfleet does have a museum that houses the NX-01 and a Constitution that apparently didn't undergo refit in the 2270's

Starfleet never truly de-commissions their old ships. They sit in storage, or just receive refits. Starfleet even had an old Consititution Refit at the Battle of Wolf 359 against the Borg.

Our modern military ships have a life span on average of 50 years. With the way ships are being built now with a modular design and the concept of being upgraded baked in, that is likely to be extended to an even longer life span. So this is very believable. I find this subject very interesting and wish we had more canon info.

Great video! It truly amazes me what both the fans and the folks over at paramount came up with over the years. So much lore and back story to explain away the old ships used on TNG/DS9 when the actual reason was they were the only ship models they had access to due to budget and the limited CGI available at the time.

"Jim, the Enterprise is 20 years old, we feel her day is done."

In the novelisation of Star Trek 6, the Enterprise A was slated to be decommissioned and transferred to a Federation member's PDF for defence and policing purposes.

"It's heartening to know that, even after a ship has passed its prime and slowly been relegated to increasingly lighter duty, its eventual fate will be to have all its parts re-used and recycled, becoming part of a thousand other, new ships that will continue to serve and promote the causes Starfleet stands for. So long as Starfleet itself exists, their vessels never truly 'die' completely." FTFY

Just found this channel and excellent videos....love me some Trek!

The Excelsior Class reminds me of the 737, 737 Max 8, 747, 747-8, 777, 777-8 and 777-9 aircrafts they’ve been around for a long time because people love the designs and keep on tweaking the designs to keep them in service like changing the interior and basically modernizing them with new technologies, like winglet at the ends of the wings, chevrons at the back of the engines, composite materials for the hull, touch screens for the cockpits and passenger seating.

Starships still are ships and sooner or later they must be allowed to retire and die peacefully letting their legacy to go forward were no human has gone before.

So....basically, the time would come where the Enterprise would be hauled away as....garbage! I can imagine the Klingons making that date a national Holiday for them. 😪

You got a wicked sense of humor. Thank you!

Thank-you for covering the most little known topic in Star Fleet. I have waited forever for anyone to discuss Star Fleets eventual stance on Decommissioning Star Ships due to the Federations Policies non-proliferation of Warp Technology.

At the time of “Picard” all ships are mothballed except for one class.

This is one of the things I found annoying in the final episode of Star Trek: Picard, other than how lazy and cut-and-paste the fleet looked in the final episode but also where the heck were the older ships and when did they make a hundred of these new ships all the sudden?

I so very much appreciate the optimism, Ric!

You do good work, C.I. and I appreciate that. Thank you for all you do! =D

Goodjob in pointing out that the admirality has some weird policy of using old ships aa their flagship, while the intrepid captains use the most advanced ships.

After thinking about it, the Defiant is the only ship I can think of that, when destroyed, was replaced by the same class of ship. It also was renamed after having been given a different title, so that's also unique. Both of these things could contribute to it being an exception to the alphabet rule.

I always get a kick out of the future described as the past in Star Trek documentaries.

Very good video. Interesting tidbits. Thank you... 😌

Personally i always had the idea that some of the older star ships are used as dumping grounds for some of the less useful people, like the lazy guy at work who doesn't do anything but smoke weed out back, those people have to pull their weight and be given some job that won't get people killed so i suspect that some of the old ships that haven't been refitted or updated as much are given non essential duties that still need doing, nothing like partoling or delivering medicine, but say bring standard shipments of food to say a colony as reserves or raw materials to a colony for eventual expansion in about a year or so, things that are not urgent or needed badly are given to the screw ups to do because if they do screw up then there is time to fix it and it won't cause a major incident, i actually though it would make a good comedy series if it was a crew of say an older ship like an old constellation class that still ran on the 23rd century lcars and was held together with string and good intentions. It could be funny

Its... Starfleet "Wessels!!" :D

Great video! Love your sense of humor!

That was funny at the end. Thanks I needed the laugh.

that ending.

I don’t think you can really use the DIS version of the Constitution as some sort of intermediate step in the evolution of the class between TOS and the movies. The DIS version is almost 100 meters longer for a start. 7:21 Id love to know the story of how that K’tinga got to be in a Federation surplus yard!

This one gave me a nice laugh at the end. Well done.

LOVE IT RICK "Eventually it will die"

So it's not sold to some Ferengi with cloaking systems still intact and just needing to be refitted with disruptors bought on the open market? BTW those Birds of Prey would've been a massive boon to a less advanced species, reverse engineer the ships and then build your own copies (perhaps with enough differences so that the Klingons don't get annoyed and those annoyed with the Klingons don't open fire on sight). And also go shopping at the various weapons markets that do exist in the Alpha Quadrant, not only for weapons but any other useful tech. Imagine a species in the TNG era that had the tech of NX- Enterprise Starfleet, they could leapfrog centuries and be only slightly behind the state of the art with ship equivalents that could still take on a Galaxy class in a ambush.

One thing not mentioned: decades of exposure to the hostile environment of outer space, along with the radiation and energies associated with warp technology, will eventually result in a starship’s spaceframe becoming too unstable for sustained warp flight. This is akin to 20th-century nuclear-powered warships, whose superstructure becomes too brittle due to years of exposure to the radiation continually generated by its power plant.

As your ending (and last video) was emblematic of... I hope we all start feeling better soon. Even under our new normal.

WoW. Very detailed video. Nice work.

How about some being used as target dummies, test beds for new technology, or being used to test survivability after damage, as has been done with U.S. Navy vessels?

Rick, no matter how you try, there's no real 'good way' to explain when old ships just fade away.

Might need to update this for legacy ships. Thank you, Terry M, for season 3 of picard and showing us that ships that made a huge impact are preserved at the fleet museum ready to be called back into active service in case of emergency.

One of the last refit Constitution class was delivered to Bajor as a gift. Used for the building on Bajor but still have the starship plate on the building.

Why am I watching this like it's a real thing 😂😂😂😂😂.

Would have loved to see an episode, heck even a new sub series just showing the clean up and salvage operation after the battle of Wolf 359. Whopping 39 ships.

I grew up on Star Trek TOS. And when you start watching TNG and see all the ammentities and bells and whistles the new starships have, its pretty overwhelming

I LIKE HOW YOU ENDED THE VIDEO . IT MADE SMILE , AND LAUGH .

Instead of "dump into space" how about "set free to drift among the stars"

I can’t remember if it was a novel or something else, it was implied that the USS Lakota was actually the Enterprise-B

Love this channel!!

Real world warships have another fairly common "retirement" path where they're partially stripped and sold to another nation where they get refitted and continue to serve under a new name, usually until they fall apart from old age and shoddy upkeep or get wrecked in some petty conflict. Selling old ships is less common these days than, say, the 1900s but it still goes on.

Weren't some ships, I seem to recall the Oberth class specifically, given to civilian scientific organizations after their service lives were up? I cant help but think that even a disarmed Constitution class might be VERY useful to colonists or other such groups.

I don't know if this is Canon, but in some of the novels, old Starships are sold as Freighters and for other private craft use once they are stripped of their military electronics and weapons.

Thank you for the great video. You forgot to mention some ships who made great contributions to Starfleet were kept as Museum Ships.

I love your ship information videos, such fun and very interesting too. If you are doing more ship videos, would you perhaps do one on the Olympic-class, such as the USS Pasteur that appeared in the TNG final episode All Good Things. Its always been one of my all time favourite ships, even if I might be alone in that view.

@certifiably ingame i think i have a answer to the Defiant question, the A B C D monikers are not for ships reusing a name but ships reusing the Registry # so for the first defiant seen in DS9 its registry wasnt the registry of the Constitution class Defiant seen in TOS so no need for a Letter designation on its registry , there are alot of reused starship names with different Registry numbers , i really never knew sisko's defiants registry to know if it changed from Defiant to the San Palo Defiant when they renamed her when given to sisko , does anyone know for certain??

I imagine that a number Starfleet spacecraft after being decommissioned are preserved at museums which I imagine is what happened to the Enterprise-A.

Also one note... Riker is a really, REALLY good bluffer. He just showed up with a bunch of fresh ships of a single class probably scrounged up from some backwater shipyard and led this fleet at max warp to Picard's location, and hoped full well the Romulans wouldn't notice the ships didn't even have their registry numbers yet. And these ships are SMOL. We're talking Constitution Refit size. And Riker managed to make it work.

A real life reference to the HERO Ships being unceremoniously decommissioned is the USS Enterprise CV-6 from WW2. She and her crew were heroes in the Pacific. Roddenberry name The Enterprise after her.

I always felt i was cheated out of seeing Wesley in an old constitution class starship during his training.

Silly me. I would have thought that a lot of them would be recycled by way of replicators which, since they can construct matter, I assumed they could also deconstruct, for replication in any chosen future item, at a later date.

Hahahaha, great ending! You're the best!

There's a TNG book where an old Constitution class ship was decommissioned,all sensitive equipment,weapons and warp drive removed. It was then sold to highest bidder. It was bought and refitted by a group of do good pirates close to the Romulan border. They refitted the weapons,warp drive and even got their hands on a Romulan cloaking device.