But about that secondary hull getting a knew saucer.. Somehow, i see a scene where an admiral starts making a farce about the age of the enterprise and that its better to decomission her.
Well, it's not exactly a farce when it's true - he just misspoke the age. The
Enterprise was forty years old when she made her last journey, and the tech had taken something of a big step forward - thanks, coincidentally, to the Big E's refit in the interim between TOS and TMP. The TMP refit made the TOS-era ships obsolete, and the big leaps forward with
Excelsior were threatening to do the same to
Enterprise. (On a semi-related note, it's funny that they say Starfleet transwarp wouldn't work because of the
Excelsior, but think about it - how well would it have done if Scotty
hadn't sabotaged the transwarp computers?)