Comment on It's Been a Long Road by trekmodeler
I can think of a couple of reasons right off the bat:
(1) With a refit time of only 180 days, anything that didn't have top priority might well have been, as the old saying goes, "put on the back burner." The designers and powers-that-be might well have agreed to let replacing the original nav deflector wait for her next refit.
(2) They might not be altogether sure that the old deflector couldn't prove useful as an auxiliary unit, and/or elements of the improved dish in the secondary hull might not be completely debugged. They may well have a 'wait-and-see' attitude with regard to relying entirely on the main deflector, and will decide after trials with the new unit before replacing the old one with additional cabin space (maybe even a precursor to Ten-Forward
). Naval architects tend to be a rather conservative lot, generally preferring to stick with what they know works, and I don't think a couple of centuries is going to change that.
(1) With a refit time of only 180 days, anything that didn't have top priority might well have been, as the old saying goes, "put on the back burner." The designers and powers-that-be might well have agreed to let replacing the original nav deflector wait for her next refit.
(2) They might not be altogether sure that the old deflector couldn't prove useful as an auxiliary unit, and/or elements of the improved dish in the secondary hull might not be completely debugged. They may well have a 'wait-and-see' attitude with regard to relying entirely on the main deflector, and will decide after trials with the new unit before replacing the old one with additional cabin space (maybe even a precursor to Ten-Forward
). Naval architects tend to be a rather conservative lot, generally preferring to stick with what they know works, and I don't think a couple of centuries is going to change that.