e2: Eh, maybe not? Did we only have 2 prospectors to start?
EDIT2: IDK, maybe we only had two prospectors to start? I can't find any references to how many we had.
Yup, we only had 2 prospectors - see the fleet snapshots in the
2313 MWCO report.
It was one of the factors behind voting to build the prospector and colony ship instead of a hospital ship and engineering ship. (The other factor was that the hospital ship would've either been the old Ranger-based model, or would be the Renaissance-based prototype and would occupy a member fleet berth for 4.5 years.)
Ships just plain do not level up unless they pass lots of event checks. The RBZ and KBZ have been pretty quiet eventwise for some reason.
Oh, I'm aware - it's just a curious state of affairs. A frigate being stuck in green crew rating for decades, perhaps its whole lifespan, isn't so surprising. An Excelsior though is a different story. Luck of the dice.
As to why the ship didn't have XP prior to game start? Well, none of our other ships do, and some of them are probably older than Excelsior. We might as well argue why the Soyuzes didn't have Veteran/Elite crews after sixty years in service; there's no reason to assume the ships were a dumping ground for unusually poor personnel, but just being physically old is not a guarantee of veterancy, and I suspect that the post-Khitomer drawdown would have done a lot to disrupt veterancy of pre-Khitomer crews in any case.
I'm not so sure about crew ratings being so easily transferable, since narrative and omakes have implied that some of the increased capabilities of "crew rating" are actual physical changes to the ship. USS
Enterprise-B is a special case here, in that its warp core and other systems were supposedly massively tweaked and customized, yet her crew ratings were transferable when she was scuttled. We also have the counterexample of the USS
Miracht, which could not transfer her crew rating upon her destruction.
I'd also like to point out that we did have some Excelsiors start off at blooded or veteran status - see
this quoted snapshot of the front page.
Enterprise started out at veteran (and ka'Sharren's bonus made that elite).
Sarek started out as blooded, or at least was blooded during the Biophage crisis.
Courageous, I think started out as blooded - her crew rating increased to veteran in
2302.Q3.
That all said, the Khitomer crisis is as good as excuse as any to explain away any partial "reset" in crew ratings like this.
(Excalibur, Sarek, Enterprise, Courageous... um, do the dates add up for there to have been five Excelsiors completed prior to 2301?
Assuming there was only the single 3mt berth at San Francisco available and Excelsior production started in 2380s, not really.
It's made worse by the fact that
Kumari was under construction from 2298 to 2302.
Ignoring the canon refit of the
Excelsior to remove its prototype transwarp engine, the best schedule we could hope for is:
2276-2282:
Excelsior prototype construction
2282-2286:
Excalibur construction
2286-2290:
Enterprise construction (ST canon commission date was 2293)
2290-2294:
Courageous construction
2294-2298:
Sarek construction
2298-2302:
Kumari construction
Well,
Excalibur was only mentioned in an omake AFAIK, so if it doesn't actually exist, the dates would line up better and make room for the canon
Excelsior refit. Still won't align directly, unless there was a Khitomer crisis-related small build gap.
edit:
Courageous built before
Sarek, taking into account NCC registry numbers
