Tell me where the number on the exterior came from?

NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It�d been pretty much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with NCC.

The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused. I don�t think anyone�ll confuse a one and a seven, or the zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one, the first bird.