A lot of people read The Making of Star Trek back in the day, and most of them saw this bit from the original Series Proposal, found at the beginning of the book. There are a lot of things here that had people scratching their heads for years.



"Gross, 190,000 tons.": Everybody had read this, but of course it's never mentioned onscreen. It doesn't really matter, it's only there because Gene was trying to make the show more accessible by relating it to the modern Navy, and all naval vessels have weights like this.



"Crew Complement - 203 persons.": This number was mentioned in The Cage, but was quickly changed to 400+. What happened is that they did some measurements on the Matt Jefferies model and realized that the ship was bigger than they had thought, and therefore should have a larger crew. But this led to come confusion about women in the crew. In the second pilot Mitchell makes the flat out statement that there are almost a hundred women onboard, or, in other words, about a quarter of 430. Why so low? This led to stories about NBC must have objected to "all the fooling around that would be going on up there" if it were 50/50. No, no. When Mitchell said that there were a hundred women, the crew size was still 203. It didn't become 400+ until Charlie X. Even that seems a tad small, considering that CV-6, the USS Enterprise that everybody knew, had a crew of over 2,200.



"Drive - space-warp.": Very early on, the ship was powered by something loosely called a "space warp", which is kind of vague. They considered and rejected several propulsion methods, like atomic power, ion power, and so forth. It was only after talking to scientists about it that they decided that antimatter was the only thing currently known that might possibly be powerful enough.



"Range - 18 years at light year velocity.": What the heck does that mean? That the ship can travel 18 years at Warp 1 without stopping at a filling station? Everybody laughed at this because nobody knew what it meant.



Registry-Earth, United Spaceship: The Enterprise was an Earth ship in the early going, of course. In Charlie X, Kirk even mentions contacting UESPA Headquarters forgetting that the viewer didn't have the slightest idea what UESPA stood for. It wasn't until Tomorrow is Yesterday that you learned it stood for "United Earth Space Probe Agency", and by then you'd probably forgotten the Charlie X reference.



"Galaxy exploration and investigation; 5 years.": This was, of course a wish for how long they hoped the show would run. As David Gerrold explained in "The World of Star Trek", 5 years was the magic sweet spot for a series at which point the bookkeeper can throw away his bottle of red ink because the show just can't lose money. At that point they have an optimal number of episodes for a really nice syndication package.



"You will patrol the Ninth Quadrant, beginning with Alpha Centauri and extending to the outer Pinial Galaxy limit.": More candy flavoring that never made it into the actual series. What's a pineal galaxy? No idea. I know what a pineal gland is. It never made sense to limit the ship's patrol area, so that "Ninth Quadrant" business never made the cut. Specifying that Alpha Centauri was within the ship's patrol area didn't make sense either. They wanted to imply something much more remote than a place that everyone knew was the closest star to Earth.



"You will confine your landings and contacts to Class "M" planets approximating Earth-Mars conditions.": This is maybe the most interesting comment here. The idea of the Class M planet was established immediately, to explain why there were no space suits, and every place they landed looked sort of like Earth. But one thing about it that never made it onscreen was that "Class M" meant "Earth/Mars" conditions. Mars is not really that much like Earth at all. Yeah, it's maybe the closest thing in the solar system to Earth conditions, but that's not saying much. It's really only habitable in the same way that the Moon is habitable (that is, with space suits and things that they were trying to avoid).



But where did the name "Class M" come from? Nobody ever asks that. Does M stand for "Mars"? Or is it a phonetic way of pronouncing "EM" (Earth/Mars)? Or does it not stand for anything?



April's orders go on to talk about how the ship's mission is Earth security, scientific investigation, providing needed assistance to Earth colonies, and enforcing appropriate statutes pertaining to commerce vessels (so that's where Mudd's Women came from). All of this is fine, and virtually unchanged when the show went on the air. Except, of course, that the phrase "Earth" was gradually phased out in favor of "Federation". Presumably Earth Colony 9 eventually changed its name.


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