I know the brand/studio reasons, but all I can come up with for in-setting lore reason is that Mirandas require less resources/crew/maintenance, but it still seems like a sharp contrast between the service lives of both ships where, as far as I can tell, the Excelsior-class may have required more resources/crew/maintenance and that judging by size and a history of jankiness alone (I love the ship, I really do, but it's still an in-setting thing) and even the Constellation seemed to be kept around at least a little longer than the Constitution.
Anyone got any sources about this that make it feel justified besides the studio/suits deciding "we don't want audiences to confuse anything on screen for the TMP refit" ?
Could be due to crew numbers? I mean compare pikes Enterprise to TOS era, and double the crew gets you a lot less quarter space (pike's quarters in particular clearly get subdivided to hell by TOS). Maybe they were too cramped with increasing crew numbers.
Looking through MA it mentions they were meant to have an operational lifespan of 18-odd years, given their battle positions and exploration use (both high attrition) it mught be that they were seen as the sweet spot between endurance and disposable
Maybe it's just that there were fewer of them and their captains kept destroying them
and their captains kept destroying them
If that was the reason, Deep Space 9's lost ship count alone would have ended the Miranda-class.
There's a couple things here. The most obvious explanation is that there just weren't very many Constitution class ships in service, and their attrition rate was brutal.
As for why there were so few in the first place, and why more were not built to replace the losses, the conventional wisdom prior to Discovery coming out (and perhaps it still holds) was that the Connie was actually substantially less automated, and less well designed to facilitate automation, than it's rough contemporaries and immediate successors. The Connie refit gives some support to this assertion in that an extremely extensive rebuild was apparently necessary to get the ship to modern standards only 20ish years after their original commissioning. Such an extensive refit process could very well have still fallen short of what a brand new ship designed from the ground up to use the latest tech was capable of, meaning that it was more cost effective to crank out Excelsiors where frontline ships were needed, and far more cost effective to build Mirandas and Oberths to do lightweight tasks in safe areas.
In other words, the Constitution class was an awkward, inflexible, and inefficient design which happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and just good enough to have a staring role in a key period of Federation history. It carved it's niche and made it's mark, but was rightly supplanted by better ships as Federation technological and industrial capacity progressed into the late 23rd century.
