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Following a YouTube discussion it set me thinking- has every iteration of the Enterprise served as the "Federation flagship" whether on a temp or permanent basis?
Wikipedia:

A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the first, largest, fastest, most heavily armed, or best known.

Memory Alpha:

A flagship was a term referring to the status conferred upon a starship. Typically, a flagship was a vessel commanded by a flag officer (an admiral or similar rank). The term was also properly applied to the ship of whichever commanding officer was in charge of a grouping of ships. A third, more colloquial usage of the term could mean that the ship in question was considered an "exemplar" of the best capabilities and virtues of the force it represented.

As far as I can tell, only the nil and the D have been specifically referred to as such. However, other iterations have carried out flagship actions:
The A acted as host to a diplomatic dinner with chancellor Gorkon and his staff while escorting his ship through Federation space, despite being superseded technologically by Excelsior at this point.
The E did the same thing with the Evora delegation, fortunately that went far smoother, as well as earlier taking command of the Federation fleet after the Borg destroyed the admiral's ship during the Battle of Sector 001.
The F was commanded by fleet admiral Elizabeth Shelby during Frontier Day, which as strong a case as any for "flagship".

The two ships that are the hardest to make an onscreen case for due to the very limited information about their time in service are the B and C, though in theory they do qualify by virtue of being "typically the first (no), largest (yes), fastest (yes), most heavily armed (yes), or best known (HELL YES)".

Because it predates the Federation, the NX-01 by definition does not qualify, and the G... the less said about that, the better.

I suspect "Federation flagship" was more of the "exemplar" role then the "command ship of the flag officer" role, Enterprise seems to carry a certain status with just the name so I think it's more the prestige coming with the name Enterprise then the stats that makes that line the "federation flagship"

Pretty sure the E-Nil under Pike has been referred to as the flagship in Strange New Worlds at least.

It's definitely meant in a colloquial sense not a literal sense. The closest you'd get to it being a literal flag ship is the first two TOS movies but even then Kirk was an Admiral but he wasn't formally flying his flag from the Enterprise as the flagship of a fleet, just commanding the one ship on an ad-hoc basis. Otherwise the E-D and EE has commanded fleets but Picard wasn't an admiral at the time. (Redemption II and Star Trek: First Contact respectively)

The writer's aren't great miltary and they could be using it the sense of just 'showing the flag' duties rather than flag officers.

Definitely colloqial. The times he had an admiral on board were far and few between, and an admiral's staff even rarer (unless you count Cdr Shelby from BoBW1).

In think in this case, they mean "Pride/Best of the Federation". The ship they'll send to 'show the flag' so to speak.

There can be a degree of symbolism too - for instance HMS Victory is the flagship of the First Sea Lord in the UK, despite being over 200 years old and never leaving port.

That being said, in the TNG era it feels more like a “we’re sending the best ship we have to show off and/or demonstrate we’re taking this seriously” kind of deal.

Given that we’ve seen Picard and Sisko take command of fleets on more than one occasion, perhaps captains are also considered defacto flag officers? I found it interesting that the admiral told Picard to assemble a fleet during the Klingon Civil War rather than command one themselves, especially seeing as they are right there on the enterprise.

Perhaps the role of admiral has evolved into more of an administrative function than the actual directing of starships?

Of course, due to the ratio of bad/evil/incompetent Admirals we see, perhaps the Dilbert Priciple is in full effect and Federation top brass deliberately kick the worst ones upstairs where they can do the least damage? Maybe there’s an unwritten rule that Admirals aren’t to be trusted with the actual important stuff and it’s better to leave things to the Captains. So, Picard is basically is the defacto flag officer for the fleet, even though he doesn’t have the formal rank. Top brass send him out there when they really need something done right safe in the knowledge that can keep his immediate crazy/incompetent/evil superiors in line.

Or maybe the E-D is the testing ground that the top brass send the suspected crazy admirals too whenever they want to root them out, which would explain why we see so many:

“Hi Admiral whatever, we’re sending you on an “important mission” with the “flagship,” and it’s totally not because we know you’ll inevitably screw up somehow and Picard will slap you down and give us an excuse to finally fire you.”

To be fair I don't recall Picard ever being formally in charge of a fleet, he was charge of task force trying to stop the Romulans but that seemed more like he was part of a larger whole and just in charge of that section as for Battle of Sector 001 in First Contact that was more a case of "the most senior officer takes over when the admiral is dead" then a formal command

I'm guessing it is mostly a diplomatic function, serving the function of waving the flag. It's why Picard, who in many respects seems more like a diplomat than a soldier, has the command. The traditional job of a flagship isn't needed given the level of communications they have, as well as the level of trust put into captains.

Some of the naval terminology in Star Trek is also just plain off, either by accident or by referencing older naval traditions that predate the current standard. They have a similar problem with the concept of the "acting captain." Boimler is given that title when he is merely serving as officer of the deck in the most recent finale of Lower Decks, while a cadet turned acting captain outranks a proper ensign in DS9-Valiant.

Adam Reynolds wrote: ↑2024-01-17 08:08am I'm guessing it is mostly a diplomatic function, serving the function of waving the flag. It's why Picard, who in many respects seems more like a diplomat than a soldier, has the command. The traditional job of a flagship isn't needed given the level of communications they have, as well as the level of trust put into captains.

Some of the naval terminology in Star Trek is also just plain off, either by accident or by referencing older naval traditions that predate the current standard. They have a similar problem with the concept of the "acting captain." Boimler is given that title when he is merely serving as officer of the deck in the most recent finale of Lower Decks, while a cadet turned acting captain outranks a proper ensign in DS9-Valiant.

It's been a while since I've seen the Valiant episode, but if memory serves the cadet had actually been given a field/brevet commission and was the seniormost person left, so it wasn't "just" an "acting Captain" bit. Still a weird situation, and while I suspect Starfleet regs say Nog would technically have been senior, it's a moot point since the other cadets would not have listened to him.

I suspect that the role of "Federation flagship" is a figurative one, like how the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is referred to as "the nation's flagship" even if she normally only has a Commodore or Rear-Admiral aboard.

Also worth noting that's it is IIRC always "the Federation Flagship" instead of "Starfleet's flagship."

I know this is just a side effect of the sprawling canon, the need to keep things apart, different cooks in the kitchen and so on but it has always seriously bothered me how we've had two or three on-screen wars now where the Enterprise was absent from the front lines for one bullshit reason or another. In SNW, Enterprise was kept out of the war to 'preserve the best of us' if the Federation lost and we find out after the fact that the Enterprise-E apparently sat on its glorious, over-hyped ass waiting for evil Picard clones or space vampires to invade Earth during the Dominion War.

The Sisko wrote: ↑2024-02-16 04:19am I know this is just a side effect of the sprawling canon, the need to keep things apart, different cooks in the kitchen and so on but it has always seriously bothered me how we've had two or three on-screen wars now where the Enterprise was absent from the front lines for one bullshit reason or another. In SNW, Enterprise was kept out of the war to 'preserve the best of us' if the Federation lost and we find out after the fact that the Enterprise-E apparently sat on its glorious, over-hyped ass waiting for evil Picard clones or space vampires to invade Earth during the Dominion War.

From what I've gathered ENT-E did fight in the Dominion war just not on the fronts we saw.

As for the Klingon-UFP war in DSC season one, you got remember that Enterprise could be months away from the frontlines due to it's primary mission being "To Boldly go where no one has gone before" and with the way war was going Starfleet command figured that by the time Enterprise would be able to join the fight it would just giving the Klingons another trophy. Not really a BS reason when you think about it.

The simple answer for why we didn't see the Enterprise in the Dominion War is that the audience would immediately want to see how all their TNG favourites were doing.

That's an out-of-universe answer though, and don't we try to avoid those here? Though I can't think of an in-universe answer for why the E-E should've NEEDED to show up in the handful of battles we SAW as opposed to one of those merely MENTIONED. Maybe she was part of the defense of Betazed, maybe she was in one of the offenses that got eaten up, who's to say she wasn't involved just because we didn't SEE her?

We traditionally take a documentary approach when discussing the technological capabilities, but when we are discussing why we see certain things in the fiction, the doylist answer is fine.

Certainly if we're taking the Star Trek Beta Canon for its answers the Enterprise-E was involved in a mission to recruit the Gorn to enter the Dominion War (failed) and flagship of the mission to liberate Betazed (successful), which is reasonable enough wartime service.

The pocket verse novels had her damaged and out of commission in a shipyard (in fact held there by a grief stricken repair officer) during Operation Return. (Well Picard and Ro Laren went on a covert mission to destroy an artificial wormhole the Dominion were building. Go figure)

But yeah fighting elsewhere is a perfectly fine explanation as far as I'm concerned.

IIRC wasn't there something about the rights for the Sovereign class cgi model meaning it couldn't show up in the series? Then again they had plenty of Akira class that were also created for First Contact. And they planned to give all the TNG crew pan over cameo at Worf's wedding but couldn't get them all.

No fewer than four classes of Federation starship were created for the Battle of Sector 001, as well as the Akira there was the Norway, Steamrunner and Saber. Apparently the CGI files for the Norway were lost/corrupted so it never showed up on DS9 but the other three did. No such explanation was given for the Sovereign.

It wouldn't be until Picard and Prodigy that unnamed Sovereign class starships would appear, by this point it had been superceded technologically by the Odyssey class.

It would have made a lot more sense if the Enterprise-G was an Inquiry-class (which is actually an awful name for a class of starship), because according to Riker the Inquiry is "the toughest, fastest, most powerful ship Starfleet ever put into service" and therefore a logical choice to be the flagship of the Federation instead of a instead of another Connie, and the Titan instead be renamed into either the USS Picard/USS Jean-Luc Picard.

It struck me as odd that with the possible exception of the Galaxy-class, most Federation ships actually look a lot better from above than they do from below, something I didn't really notice until I rewatched the battle in First Contact.

If you want a Watsonian reason then there's a simple enough one, the Sovereign appears to be a prestige ship, not suited for serialized production compared to the others, while the likes of the Akira and Steamrunner are.

We know that the Galaxy Class initial run was between six and twelve ships after all, these are big ships, why would there be more than a dozen Sovereigns in the initial run?

As to the G - every Inquiry probably needs yard work to patch the borg vulnerabilities shown in each season of Picard right now, while launching an Enterprise is a propaganda thing, so the Titan-A becoming the Enterprise is probably Starfleet trying to patch over the vast casualties their ineptitude has recently caused.

NecronLord wrote: ↑2024-02-25 12:37pm If you want a Watsonian reason then there's a simple enough one, the Sovereign appears to be a prestige ship, not suited for serialized production compared to the others, while the likes of the Akira and Steamrunner are.

We know that the Galaxy Class initial run was between six and twelve ships after all, these are big ships, why would there be more than a dozen Sovereigns in the initial run?

Also was it ever stated in canon when the production run for the Akiras started, for all we know the Akira design was started before ENT-D met the Borg for the first time and was just modified for the job instead of being purpose built for the task.

To my knowledge no there's nothing beyond trying to extrapolate NCC numbers in alpha canon.

The only canon info is that starships of this class were constructed at Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards by 2371. (VOY: "Relativity")