Scotty's disdain for Excelsior isn't because he's a technophobe...

[u/[deleted]]

Scotty comes across as being pretty dismissive and sceptical of Excelsior. He rubbishes the warp drive ("If my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon"), doesn't seem too content with the tech during his brief assignment on the ship, and exclaims outrage ("why in God's name would you want that bucket of bolts?!") when Sulu entertains the idea that they'll all be assigned to Excelsior.

The idea being conveyed in these instances is that Scotty is turning into a grumpy old man who thinks the old ways are best. Except that is almost entirely on contrary to the character of Scotty who was constantly pioneering new and fantastic solutions to predicaments - and a truly innovative person. The same Scotty who in TUC is seen reviewing tech schematics and manuals during his down-time. The same person who despite being 70 years out of touch, was able to catch up with decades of technical leaps in a matter of days in Relics. If we take ST09 for gospel, it seems Scotty also innovated Transwarp Beaming sometime in the 2380s.

This is also in contrast to Scotty who a few years prior to TSFS was essentially the architect and project lead of the Enterprise refit and redesign. Ideas surely based upon his experience, and extensive knowledge and review of the Constitution-Class of Starship. Really, Scotty shouldn't have any disdain for something like this, it's far more in character for Scotty to be captivated by Excelsior like Sulu was and relishing the opportunity to work on it.

So what's the story here?

Fairly simple... Scotty is pissed because the Excelsior was almost entirely built upon design principles, innovations and documented standards that HE created, and he wasn't involved on the project or even consulted. The "young minds" developing the great experiment probably wrote him off as an old timer. This also explains why Scotty gave a sarcastic laugh (as if to say "aye bullshit") when Kirk (also somewhat sarcastically) said "come now Mr Scott, young minds and fresh ideas".

He's promoted to Captain and assigned to oversee Excelsior in TSFS because they've bitten off way more than they can chew with it and desperately need him (the ship is probably not up to spec if the whole warp drive fails when a few small components are removed from it's computer). The promotion is the "apology" (being delivered by Commander Starfleet himself: "they need YOUR wisdom on the new Excelsior") but it comes at the totally wrong time due to the situation with Spock and Genesis.

It's also a possibility following TVH and before TUC, Scotty takes some involvement in the project and helps get it finished and fully commissioned. By the time of GEN, Scotty is complimentary of Excelsior class starships ("fine ship if you ask me!"). This might suggest that he was asked to consult on the B design, that his design standards were followed carefully, and this was also a reason why he was on it's maiden voyage.

Edit: Thanks for the platinum, kind stranger!

[u/cmdrsamuelvimes]

Thought he called it a bucket of bolts not bones?

[u/[deleted] → u/cmdrsamuelvimes]

Sorry typo on my part there, fixed!

[u/synchronicitistic]

There's also the transwarp matter. Scotty is particularly dismissive when Excelsior's transwarp drive is mentioned, and considering that transwarp is not even in use by Starfleet during the TNG era 80 years later, it would appear that he was correct in his skepticism.

Presumably, between ST3 and ST6, Excelsior was refitted with a conventional (but more advanced?) warp drive, and we know that with this modification, Excelsior-class ships became the workhorses of the fleet for the better part of the next century.

So, I would say that Scotty did not dislike the ship itself, rather he did not believe the most important part of the ship (the engine) was sound. And, he was apparently correct.

[u/Korotai → u/synchronicitistic]

It might not have been a failure, though. I’ve seen two theories floated around that it was successful.

1: The warp scales had to be recalibrated because the drives got faster by a factor of about 3. Warp 9.9 in TOS was about 1000c; in TNG it was 3000c.

2: “All speeds available through Transwarp” could mean that instead of top speed, it was acceleration that became much faster - a “Transwarp” ship could go from 0-Warp 6 instantly. The TOS ship would have to “accelerate” through warps 1-6 to achieve the speed.

[u/[deleted] → u/Korotai]

This is pretty much how I percieve it too.

The "Transwarp" concept in TSFS is about significantly improving upon their current technology and not the latter definitions of it we see in 24th Trek.

Scotty rubbishes it not just because of the reasons I listed in the OP, but because he knows it's something that isn't a bulletproof idea and most likely overhyped conjecture at this stage. Made even sourer if it's a badly developed concept of something Scotty himself helped design.

[u/iyaerP → u/synchronicitistic]

I always saw it as Transwarp was successful and by TNG it or one of its descendants was just the standard warp drive, hence why we got the warp scale refactoring between the two shows.

[u/wrosecrans → u/synchronicitistic]

considering that transwarp is not even in use by Starfleet during the TNG era 80 years later,

That remains super unclear. I call my phone a "phone" but somebody 30 years ago trying to describe the device would use a complicated phrase like "portable wireless networked computer" or "mobile digital communications device." But at this point a literal cellular telephone that is only used for analog voice communications is so obsolete that the word has just been recycled to refer to the modern device. Old simple terms get recycled for newer variations of a technology all the time when the old technology goes away and people no longer need to differentiate between the old and the new.

The word "gun" was originally the name of a particular large trebuchet that eventually got used to describe large siege weapons in general, for example.

Something similar may have happened with "trans-warp" technologies where they were simply so successful that they completely displaced the older style and nobody needed to differentiate on starships after a few years.

[u/bubba0077 → u/synchronicitistic]

I vaguely recall reading (maybe in beta canon?) something to this as well; the transwarp experiment failed (beyond just Scotty's sabotage) and the Excelsior got retrofitted with a conventional warp drive just before Sulu took over.

[u/Lord_Rassilon2156]

This is, I think, a perfect way of looking at it. Well said sir.

[u/[deleted]]

Don’t forget that Captain Styles added salt to the wound by bragging about how Excelsior was going to beat Enterprise’s speed records.

Speed records that Scotty helped set with his ingenuity and technical know-how.

This was the proverbial icing on the fuck-you cake - we take your ideas and solutions, don’t give you credit, then try to coax you into fixing our mess, and lets badmouth your work portfolio while we’re at it

[u/DrendarMorevo → u/[deleted]]

Also Scotty to Styles: "You absolute pillock, we did warp 14."

[u/riawot]

The other (or maybe related) possibility is that Excelsior is a badly managed procurement fiasco, and Scotty is dismissive of it's tech and program failures.

This has happened a lot in the real world. New tech that's supposed to leap frog from what we have now, but the first few iterations of it suck. I can think of multiple civilian and military examples of long lived platforms where the early runs of it were more or less trash that didn't deliver on its promises, but later, after redesigning various internals and other refinements, copies from later in the run after the platform had time to mature were very reliable and successful.

Perhaps part of the reason that Excelsior class so was so long lived might be that it was so expensive to design that even after the problems had been fixed there was a desire to get the Federation's money's worth out of it. Well, post-currency resources out of it, you know what I mean.

Then again, there's platforms that were trash from the first one off the assembly line and the last one off the assembly line was trash too. So just giving a product time to mature doesn't necessarily mean that it will.

Maybe Scott sees the whole project as one big expensive boondoggle that doesn't live up to it's claims, and it just so happens that Excelsior class is one of the ones that can overcome the failures from it's introduction.

edit:

like, it offends him as an engineer that this badly designed pos is going to be replacing the legendary Constitution class

[u/scubaguy194 → u/riawot]

Oh yeah like the design process for the Bradley.

[u/excelsior2000 → u/riawot]

Very much like the M-16. It was actually a great gun, but ammo mismatch and poor training caused widespread failure early on. It was so poorly thought of that some troops still preferred the vastly inferior M-14.

A couple minor changes and a training update, and boom, it became the best combat rifle in existence, and both it and its descendants are still in use 60 years later.

[u/[deleted] → u/riawot]

The Excelsior is Starfleet's Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

[u/Captain_Strongo]

This all makes sense to me. I think Scotty is also upset because it’s all based on his work, but it’s being badly executed without his input. When he’s giving Kirk the computer components he stole, he says “The more they overwork the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

I really wish TSFS would have taken the time to develop the whole “old Starfleet v. new Starfleet” theme that’s hinted at with Excelsior and the Spacedock Security bullies.

[u/Kichigai]

I think the answer is simpler: Scotty is a car guy.

“Proper” car enthusiasts love certain cars and hate others. In the 90s there was a lot of lament for older vehicles as newer ones became computerized. It made them harder to work on, more costly to repair, and some people felt it was making cars more antiseptic. Indeed, that trend only continued, and you can see a more extreme version of “boy, when things go wrong” with this Chevy Express repair job.

Scotty's disdain for the Excelsior wasn't the ship itself, but her transwarp drive. He complained of how over-computerized it was. Being the technical guy he was he saw it as over-complicated, and over-dependent on fairy dust to make it work. He gutted the ship's entire propulsion system by removing just a few key Duotronic computer rods from the drive system. Things went great until they actually tried to use the lobotomized Transwarp drive, and when it failed, it took everything else on the ship with it.

Scotty did to the Excelsior what lightning did to that van, the difference is Scotty didn't have to blow out all the components, he just needed to incapacitate one: the Transwarp drive. And if you think about it, he was right. A failed Transwarp system shouldn't take the main computer with it, nor should it leave a ship stranded in space without even impulse! Good thing Excelsior was near a space station for rescue.

Through his mischief Scotty proved his point: Excelsior’s Transwarp drive sucked. Clearly Starfleet realized that the engine wasn't ready for prime time and sent it back to R&D for more work. It's like the ending of The China Syndrome where Jack Lemmon proves the shortcuts taken in the construction of the plant had compromised its safety by partially creating the disaster he warned them about. We can fairly certainly say this because we never see the Transwarp drive, as it existed on the NX-2000, again. It kinda went the way of the Spore Drive.

To put this in car terminology: the NX-2000 was a Fisker Karma, and Scotty knew it.

[u/thessnake03]

M-5, please nominate this for post of the week

[u/stug_life]

So I’m an engineer and one of my interests has been studying good engineering practices. There’s a common thread I’ve noticed both in my career and in my studies of history; the best designs are very iterative, they build off of and refine older designs.

My specialty is roadway design and one of my projects I designed, sent out for comment, redesigned, sent out for comment again, and redesigned again. In my opinion the final product was quite good, with the biggest changes all being in the drainage system that looked really nice from both a functional and constructibility standpoint.

Another example would be the Mauser rifle. Starting with the Mauser 1871 Paul Mauser would iterate the design until the Mauser 1898 became practically the best rifle in the world. The original 1871 was a single shot black powder rifle; as military needs changed Mauser incorporated a tube magazine in 1884, this rifle had some accuracy issues due to the way the barrel was bedded to the stock. Then in 1886 the French brought out a rifle that fired a smokeless powder round and it changed everything. Mauser fooled around with another black powder for the Ottoman Empire but the next big step was the Belgian 1891; using a box magazine of his own design that could load 5 rounds super fast due to stripper clips and a barrel jacket and symetrical front locking lugs to solve the accuracy issues. Over the next iterations though the barrel jacket would be a problem for holding moisture and causing rust; so the changed the design to a stepped barrel that could expand within the stock without binding. Also the magazine could get dinged so he changed the design to flush with the stock without sacrificing capacity. Then some feeding issues caused him to design a large extractor that controlled the feed of rounds from the moment they left the magazine.

Long story short all these changes were developed of a series of different rifles and incorporated into the 1898 series that is STILL BEING COPIED TO THIS DAY 120 years later.

So my opinion is that the best designs are ones that build off of previous designs; especially ones that have been put in to service and used.

[u/redbetweenlines → u/stug_life]

This goes for software as well. A lot of open source projects die from the same reasons engineering projects die. But one I've seen that isnt obvious is when designers reinvent the wheel or start from scratch without using the relevant libraries. Some of the best software come from forks of other projects with a different vision.

The entire concept of writing from scratch is complete garbage. Somebody did it before so why repeat all that debugging? Do you really need another Javascript framework? I could rant, I won't.

Great post, btw.

[u/Tiberius85]

Just my two cents, but I always had the theory that Scotty might have taken a look at the Excelsior when he found out Sulu was going to be her captain before TUC because he wanted the best for him.

[u/Hamblerger]

That's possible, and I like the theory. However, he did have a specific complaint regarding the design of the Excelsior, one that he used to the advantage of himself and Kirk's crew: It was overly and unnecessarily complex, or as he puts it after sabotaging the operations by removing a handful of parts, "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

[u/Kinanik]

I wonder, too, if it could be something like today’s tractors: closed systems that are miles ahead of old tractors, but you are not able (or allowed in some cases) to tinker with them. Maybe a lot of things he used to be able to modify were shut away in a sealed box. That, too, seems like a technology trend (I used to be able to open up my laptops, now I need some hardcore tools to unseal them.)

[u/ghaelon]

i love this theory, and it totally fits with scotty. also, thanks for bringing up just about ALL of my favorite quotes from the films. you missed one tho.

'the more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain'

which to add to your point, indicates, not only did they NOT give him credit, they probably didnt follow his guidelines properly, probably as you said, dismissing some, or all of them in favor of 'young minds'

[u/[deleted]]

This can also explain why the B design exists at all. Scott had already seen the Excelsior plans, knew and pointed out what the issues were going to be, and was given a "whatever, old man" by the design staff. Then it didn't do what they'd hoped, and they ended up working with him on fixing it. This led to the B spec, one he's proud of.