Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Excelsior
4. My God, That's An Old Ship
In addition to major appearances as both the USS Excelsior and the USS Enterprise-B in the Star Trek motion pictures, the Excelsior-class filming model was one of the most frequently reused miniatures in Paramount's fleet.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation alone the Excelsior model has appeared as the USS Fearless in "Where No One Has Gone Before", the USS Repulse in "The Child", the USS Potemkin in "Ethics, the USS Cairo in "Chain of Command", the USS Crazy Horse in "Descent", and the USS Gorkon in "Preemptive Strike" – almost all as stock footage of the USS Hood originally filmed for the show's pilot episode, "Encounter at Farpoint". All told, the Excelsior-class has appeared in some form or another in 50 episodes of TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, it even cropped up in a graphic in Crewman Daniels' futuristic database in Enterprise's "Shockwave".
In-universe, the Excelsior-class served Starfleet from the 2280s to (at least) the late-2370s, nearly a century in active service. According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, the Excelsior-class served "beyond [its] original design lifetime."
No kidding.