[kevin]

I tend to side with Horatio's remark that on a basic level there is no requirement to always have a USS Enterprise in the fleet (nor always be the flagship either) and so I don't see any real issue with an apparent twenty year gap.

In the real world, for instance, if you take a cursory look at the history of ships named Enterprise in the US Navy they do not exist in complete succession. There have been years (even decade plus) between serving ships and I don't really see how a fictional fleet needs to be different.

In universe one could trot out a variety of reasons - the ship vanished in the original timeline and no one knew what happened to it if I recall and so if we applied the Voyager scenario where the ship wasnt declared lost until 14 months after it vanished then maybe the same applied to the C. Also per the TNG tech manual the Galaxy Class development project was a twenty year program and the Enterprise heself took years to build.

So even if the second Galaxy spaceframe had been assigned as a future Enterprise in the wake of the loss of the C, you still have to wait for her to be built and tested.

[Ensign James T. Kirk]

I'm not sure if this is off topic or not, but here goes.

The term "Flagship" in the RCN means a vessel that not only has a bridge/ops room setup (where the real action happens, as opposed to the bridge) but has auxiliary space available for an Admiral (hence the term "Flag") and and his staff...for planning mainly.

Flagship HMCS Athabaskan, on the East Coast:



Flagship on the West Coast, HMCS Algonquin.



Would it not stand to reason that an organization as large as Starfleet Command would have more than one Flagship at a time?

PS: It always bothered me that Kirk's NCC-1701 was referred to at times as a "Flagship", yet that particular Constitution Class vessel had no such facilities for carrying the Flag...and just guest quarters for a visiting Admiral? Or would the Briefing Room become the Admiral's Flag area?

*dons flame retardant suit* Yes, I know it's science fiction as opposed to real life Navy.

PPS: I guess most of you now know where I live.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

A flagship is the command ship in any fleet or naval grouping, so a modern navy would indeed have more than one. In modern navies they tend to be the faster ships and the ones with the most state of the art communications.

[omegaman]

I think Flagship in the Trek Universe is like as stated in the dictionary:

"the best or most important thing owned or produced by a particular organization"

[omegaman]

And in TNG it was mentioned in several episodes that the Enterprise was the Federations premier vessel; the one that everyone aspired to serve on.

[horatio]

My impression has been that flagship is merely a decorative, representative title. On the other hand in a fleet operation, e.g. Redemption (FC), the D (E) acted as command ship ... but then again even without the flagship title the only Galaxy-class (Sovereign-class) ship in a fleet is the natural command ship.

[kevin]

I'll split the difference and conjecture that in some ways Omegaman's definition of flagship 'might' have been the initially intended one around TNG (I don't think TOS got down to that sort of stuff) - and is the kind of thing that would be seized on by some quarters in fandom as being 'cool' that EVERY Enterprise was by virtue of lineage always the natural flagship........

.......but practically it would probably work more like the real world versions above where the term is a little different in how it works operationally.

[Commodore]

I think there's "flagship" and then there's "the Federation's flagship." The former is the term in the traditional historical sense, and the latter is a Starfleet invention.

I would take it that even in Starfleet, there are quite a few traditional flagships, but only one can be the Federation's flagship, and it's just an honorific for the vessel chosen to be Starfleet's top starship and the one frequently assigned to a wide variety of high profile missions.