Star Trek: 10 Secrets About The USS Dauntless You Need To Know
1. How Does That Register With You?
At the time of production, it seemed absolutely fine to label the USS Dauntless up as NX-01-A because in the real world no one had yet considered that the follow up to Voyager would be a prequel. Nor did they have to consider that the hero ship would be registered as NX-01.
Oddly onscreen it appears as both NX-01-A (hull) and NX-01A (LCARS) technically making both valid ways of denoting the fake starship even though the precedent for designations had been technically set some 12 years earlier with the introduction of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A in The Voyage Home and then again in The Next Generation with NCC-1701-D.
In the case of the Prodigy Dauntless, the first digits of the registry (80) indicate that it was built after the Protostar (76) while the remaining three numbers, 816 are linked to the birthday of supervising producer Patrick Krebs' birthday. Aaron Waltke has indicated that this would also line up with the indication that this later ship has worked out all the kinks with the quantum slipstream. That's likely backed up with the point that it has an NCC designation rather than the prototype NX tag.