#but i've looked through what little we see of sirena in the show (all four episodes that she appeared in) several times

[mappinglasirena]

La Sirena's Registry

Before season 3 aired, I promised I would make a post about La Sirena's registry if and when it was canonized during the final season of Star Trek: Picard. Now that the finale has aired and we are unlikely to ever see this little speed freighter on our tv screens again, I think it's high time I elaborate on this issue.

Mild spoilers for early season 3 of Star Trek: Picard below!

What are we talking about here?

Back in May 2022, after season 2 wrapped up, the official Star Trek twitter account made a post about some of the ships shown in the season finale.

As you can see, they added additional information about the ships, including names, classes, and registry numbers. For La Sirena, they listed her as "S.S. La Sirena NAR-93131".

The "S.S."-prefix and registry number were repeated by, among others, production designer Dave Blass, who said he was asked to come up with a registry number for season 3 and/or promo purposes, and they have since been listed on Sirena's Memory Alpha page and also showed up in the season 3 Instagram promos run by Paramount+ (which I briefly talked about here).

However, I have been holding off on changing any of my posts on this blog or the way I talk about La Sirena to reflect this new information, because I was waiting to see if it would actually get confirmed in canon. (In Star Trek, generally only things shown on screen during the aired shows and movies are considered canon. The many books and technical manuals, any deleted scenes, official promo-materials, tweets, Q&As, interviews, or other messages from the showrunners, writers, or production staff are usually relegated to beta canon).

Now that the show has officially ended, I can say with some confidence: we never got confirmation that La Sirena has a registry number, let alone what that number might be.

(Follow me below the cut for a (very long) exploration of registry numbers in Star Trek and why I think La Sirena remains without one.)

What is a registry number?

Most Trekkies are probably very familiar with the typical starship registry numbers we find throughought the shows and movies. They're blazoned across the hull and are often seen in official information or even used as identification in dialogue.

Here the classic example: the U.S.S. Enterprise which has the registry "NCC-1701", with various letters added for all later reincarnations of the famous flagship.

While it is never discussed in detail anywhere in canon (unless I have missed something crucial), these registries are unique identifiers given to the ships. They are created and kept on file by the organization that has registered the ship in question (e.g. Starfleet for the Enterprises, the Klingon Empire for Imperial ships, the UFP for civilian vessels, etc.).

The prefixes before the ship name are an indication of this affiliation. Where in the real world, a ship operated by the UK's royal navy might be called "HMS Shipname" for "His/Her Majesty's Ship", in Trek world, we have Starfleet using "USS" for "United [Federation] Star Ship"/"United Space Ship", or the Klingon "IKS" prefix for "Imperial Klingon Ship."

(Like this beauty. Though I don't think we ever see official registry markings on the hulls of Klingon ships.)

Similarly, the registry number has a specific format depending on the institution issuing it. For Starfleet, the most common in the 24th century was "NCC" followed by a number, though others were possible (e.g. "NA" for the fully-automated Starships like the U.S.S. Aledo from Lower Decks.

With the few civilian ships we have seen over the course of the 24th-century Trek series, the most common prefix/registry combination has been "S.S. Shipname" (presumably for "Star Ship"), and a registry number beginning with "NAR".

(See for example the "S.S. Mariposa, NAR-7678" from TNG's "Up the Long Ladder".)

At first glance, it would make sense for La Sirena to follow this pattern. However there is a snag.

To Register or not To Register?

We learn in season 1 that La Sirena is an unregistered vessel. Rios is an "off the books" pilot and the fact that his ship is not registered is mentioned more than once.

However, at no point in any of the series (as far as I'm aware, and please, correct me if I'm wrong) do we get a clear explanation of what this entails in the Star Trek universe.

On its face, I would think "unregistered" means that La Sirena is not listed in any of the official registries that exist throughout the spaces where Rios operates his vessel. She's not registered with the UFP, the Romulan Free State, any merchant association, or any other organziation that might keep such a database. In order to be truly independent (and capable of doing a lot of shady dealings), Rios has kept Sirena out of any and all official records.

But if that is the case, that would mean there is no institution who could have conferred an official registry onto the ship. If "NAR-93131" were the ships registry, by definition, that would have to be listed in some kind of official register. Which would defeat the purpose of being off-the-books in the first place.

"But wouldn't the ship need a registry any time it docked at a port or came into contact with other ships?"

Presumably, yes. The point of registries is to make ships trackable and accountable. So, if you rocked up to a Starfleet-run spacestation and didn't have an official-sounding registry to broadcast, you would probably be in a lot of trouble. But there are many ways around this.

A determined off-the-books pilot (especially one with an extremely capable hacker-friend like Raffi Musiker) could have any number of fake registries (think: fake licence plates), official papers that are just out of date (e.g. stolen from a recently decommissioned ship) and a good story about currently being in the process of renewing them, funds set aside to bribe port officials in places farther from the centre of the Federation, where money still runs the economy... There are many ways around the obstacles presented by not having an official registry, and it seems very likely Rios would have chosen one of those.

Now, as I see it, there are three in-universe ways to bring in the "NAR-93131" registry.

The first possibility is that it's the designation the ship used to have, before Rios (or a previous owner) took her over and let the registration lapse. We don't know anything about the age of the ship in canon (in beta canon, she is fairly old), so it's possible she was fully integrated into a registered organization before she went rogue. In that case, Rios might even keep the registry around to have handy in case of interstellar bureaucracy mishaps.

Alternatively, this might be one of the fake registries Rios uses commonly when he encounters any kind of authority who will be likely to ask for his ship's identification.

In both of those cases, however, it likely wouldn't be a permanent feature of La Sirena. If you consistently use a fake registry, even if there is no record of it in any official database, it will eventually become associated with your ship and trackable across jurisdictions and time, which is the opposite of what you want to achieve by remaining unregistered.

The third possibility is that some time after Season 1, someone registered La Sirena with the UFP and "NAR-93131" is the number that was assigned to her then. I can't speculate about whether that was the production team's intended explanation (not least because from some of the comments I've read from them, it seemed to me like the connection between "this ship is unregistered" and "this ship does not have a fixed registry" might have gotten a bit muddled on their end), but it's definitely a possibility.

However, I am also not convinced by this explanation. While Sirena does rise to more prominence in the immediate aftermath of the Coppelius incident (she is ferrying around the Newly Great Jean-Luc Picard, after all), I'm not sure Rios would have agreed to register her before he joined Starfleet. Then Seven of Nine takes over the ship for work with the Fenris Rangers, and while I disagree with season 3's characterization of the Rangers as "pirates" ("vigilantes" or "non-state actors" seems more apt imo), I still think they would either not bother too much with having their ships properly registered or might even prefer the more stealthy approach of unregistered ships.

Finally, Sirena ends up with Raffi Musiker, who is using her for undercover work in Starfleet Intelligence. Once again, it could go either way. Raffi's cover story is that she's out of Starfleet, and while it would probably not raise any eyebrows for her to have a properly registered ship, I also think leaving the ship unregistered might have been useful to add to her outlaw persona.

As it stands, I think you can make good arguments for both, La Sirena being registered at some point during the run of Star Trek: Picard and her being kept unregistered and off the books for use in various semi-legal and/or covert activities.

One thing is clear, however: We never got any on-screen confirmation of her being registered, let alone the "official" name "S.S. La Sirena NAR-93131".

(NB: There is a minute chance a reference to the registry number might be somewhere in all of this information:

but since effectively none of it is legible and the two or three docs talking about Raffi's assignment (Operation Daybreak) seem to be highly redacted, I will go with: It's never actually confirmed.)

Why does any of this matter?

Honestly? It doesn't. If it brings you joy to have a registry number to associate with this ship, I'd say go ahead and live your bliss.

This is really just a petty and very personal gripe of mine. I liked that La Sirena wasn't a Starfleet ship with the usual bells and whistles (registry number, dedication plaque, etc.). She was an oddball, run by a captain who, while emotionally still deeply connected to Starfleet, was also on the outside and preferred it that way. Season 1 offered a look at parts of the Star Trek universe we never really got to see before, and that felt fresh and exciting.

To me, personally, giving Sirena a registry number (without any character-driven explanation for how she got it or who decided to register her and why) felt like it erased a part of her identity. It changed her from a scrappy underdog operating in the grey areas and along the edges of the Federation to just another quasi-Starfleet ship of the line.

Is that a highly personal pet peeve and completely blowing things out of proportion? Yes. Yes, it very much is. Which is why I won't ever fault anyone for choosing to adopt the headcanon/fanon/beta canon of this registry and running with it.

But if anyone ever wonders why I continue to call her simply "La Sirena" and talk about her as an unregistered vessel, now you know ;)