To be fair, most fiction makes things vastly more comlicated than real life. Real countries tend to have very few titles of nobility, and they are not aranged into a distinct heirarchy. However, fiction frequently crosses multiple cultural lines for some ungodly reason.
Not so fast. There is a sub-set of programmers who love the clicky keyboard, and go to some expense to get a click with each keyboard. If you’re pounding code in for 18 hours at a stretch, no amount is too much for a solid, reliable tool - probably like using a Milwaukee drill or Snap-On wrenches.
Officer ranks for Army, Marines, and Air Force, at least in the US, are all the same. Navy ranks have different names, and they have their own alternate set of insignia for some uniforms. Coast Guard follows Navy ranks I think.
Now, enlisted ranks vary wildly from one service to another. 
In the Hornblower books it said that a naval Captain was the equivalent of an army Colonel and as such an army captain was well below in rank to his naval namesake.
Air Force Officer ranks go thusly, lowest to highest:
2nd Lieutenant
1st Lieutenant
Captain
Major
Lieutenant Colonel
Colonel
Brigadier General
Major General
Lieutenant General
General
General of the Air Force
Navy Officer ranks go thusly, lowest to highest:
Ensign
Lieutenant Junior Grade
Lieutenant
Lieutenant Commander
Commander
Captain
Rear Admiral, Lower Half
Rear Admiral, Upper Half
Vice Admiral
Admiral
Fleet Admiral
So is it possible that the fighter pilots use an air force ranking system (being small, “air” units) and the fleet ships use naval ranking (being large, boat like ships) in order to differentiate which “branch” the officer works for? Perhaps the XO for a fleet ship, then, is a ranking fighter jock - after all, the XO should be the captain advisor to other aspects of the ship. And then, when Apollo is given command of a fleet ship, his rank is promoted to one within the fleet ship ranking system, given that he is no longer a fighter jock (primarily)?
It’s a possible suggestion! BTW, I know this is terrible for a Scifi nerd like me to admit, but I haven’t yet seen the new BSG series…I missed the first several episodes (and refuse to watch shows I can’t catch from the beginning), and they just haven’t gotten to me in my Netflix queue yet. So all of the above is simply an outsider with some minor experience with military ranks giving a guess.
I just chalk it up to the Colonial Fleet being not an American military and therefore don’t follow the rank structure. The Commander is a commander because he commands a command.
Although for some reason, I still wonder how the colonies got Hummers and 5 Tons that look just like ours.
Doctor Who went to the end of the universe and the last remaining humans had a nice 5 Ton there as well.
Actually, I’m pretty sure he’s a Commander because there was a Commander Adama in the original series. Ron Moore wanted to make the Colonials as “American” as possible, but he wasn’t willing to deviate far enough from the show’s heritage to name Adama anything else.
With Battlestar Galactica’s screwy rank structure, party I think it’s that they inherited it from the original show: Lorne Greene, the skipper of the Galactica, was Commander Adama; his X.O. was Colonel Tigh; Adam’s son was Captain Apollo and Apollo’s buddy was Lieutenant Starbuck (and “Apollo” and “Starbuck” were evidently their actual names, not just their callsigns). So, I think the new BSG just kept the ranks/names and much of their basic relationships–skipper of the ship, Commander [Bill] Adama; his X.O., Colonel [Saul] Tigh; Adama’s son, Captain [Lee] “Apollo” [Adama]; Apollo’s [female] buddy and sidekick [and on-again off-again romantic interest] Lieutenant [Kara] “Starbuck” [Thrace]–even while at the same time radically changing many things around.
And, given the cheesiness of the original TV show, it may not be worthwhile to try and figure out exactly where the hell this screwy rank structure originally came from–it may have been no more than a case of they Didn’t Do the Research back in the '70’s.
Ever see The Core? Quite possibly one of the most unrealistic movies when it comes to bad movie physics. I mean, they restart the movement in the outer core with a couple of nuclear bombs for cryin’ out loud! Oh, they also have a shit made of unobtainium, which gets stronger as the heat and pressure around it increase. It’s best to completely switch off your brain and look at the pretty colors when watching that one.
Haha!
MEBuckner said:
I’m aware they were copying in the original, which probably pulled it out of their… hat. Okay, but from that try to construct a sensible chain of ranks.
If Colonel is the XO position, that’s one rung below Commander (Ship commander), so at some point when Lee is being promoted, have him go through the rank of Colonel.
Why have the rank Major? The other place Major is used is when the Pegasus shows up. The Major is IIRC the second in command and in charge of the Marines. But Lee never commands the Marines.
Hmm. But Lee is transferred to Pegasus as 2nd in command when promoted to Major. Okay, so why is the XO of Pegasus Major but the XO of Galactica Colonel?
I can forgive them using a made up system. I can forgive them basing it on the previous show. What I get irritated about is inconsistency within their made up system.
**smiling bandit ** said:
So why is the wife of an Earl called a Countess, but also the wife of a Count is a Countess?
Because Earl is the British equivalent of Count. The title of Earl existed before the Norman Conquest. An pre-conquest earl was much more powerful than a count though–more like a sub-king. When the Normans took over, earl was sort of shoe-horned in as an equivalent.
I’m sorry I don’t have enough time to go into more detail. (Though you might not be.)
I always disregarded Earth military conventions for BSG. I took it that one was military rank and the other was more your administrative title on the battle ship.
Like Hawkeye on MAS*H was a Captain and was outranked as a military officer by Major Ferret-Face. But inside the operating room Hawkeye was still Chief of Surgery outranking Ferret-Face as a doctor.
So, on Galactica, you’ve got your military rank (Major) and then your post assignment on the ship (Commander).
So, Janitor Cellphone is outranked by Captain Lee Adama, but if I am suddenly handed the command of the warship Boomyguns, I become Commander Cellphone, a defacto promotion even though my military rank may still be Janitor. That means while I’m in command of Boomyguns, I can boss Captain Apollo around, even though he is a Captain and I’m a lowly Janitor. But once the Cylons destroy Boomyguns and I’ve lost my command, Captain Apollo can order me to go scrub the toilets again.
I just chalk it up to the fact that what they have left is the regrouped remnants of an utterly shattered and all but destroyed military force. Not everyone is going to be at the rank you’d expect them to be for certain responsibilities, for example the scenario sometimes given of the most junior ensign on a warship finding that he is the Captain due to everybody else being dead or incapacitated.
For more fun examples of this, watch Babylon 5. Due to things happening in the show, we see various odd arrangements, such as a Major in command of an EarthForce destroyer (normally a Captain’s billet; Majors on B5 are shown to not even be senior to Lieutenant Commanders), a Captain in command of a large fleet (on B5, shown to be more typical of a General for any sizable forces), in one of the more extreme examples, a Commander being in command of said large fleet (she was the right-hand woman of the aforementioned Captain, he got captured, she took over), and my favorite example, Lieutenant Corwin, barely having been promoted to full-grade Lieutenant a few months previous, finding himself in command of B5 for most of the 4th season of the show (B5 being more typically commanded by a Captain).
Doc Cottle was also a major (but he wasn’t a line officer). Lee skipped Colonel because his dad wanted him to command Pegasus and a battlestar is commanded by a commander or admiral. The officer ranks went; Ensign, Lieutenant (JG), Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Colonel, Commander, and there were several grades of Admirals (Cain was a Rear Admiral, after she died Roslin promoted Adama to Fleet Admiral so he’d outrank any other potential surviving officers). The mixture of ranks was carried over from TOS, and I think the in-universe explanation is that it’s a result of combining 12 Colonies’ militaries into a single Colonial Fleet.
YES. THIS. It drove me absolutely nuts. Would it have been that hard for them to just not have said that she was a fluent speaker? Lucy Liu’s Japanese was better, at least.
Once my friend finishes her JD and passes the Bar, maybe I’ll hook you up.
Is this the same look of recognition that Vader gave 3PO the first time they ran across each other? (You can’t see it because of the mask.)
I am going to make every effort to start referring to “standard timeparts.” If I can find some way to use it in combination with Mongo miles, so much the better.
My contribution: *Dogma *features an airport in Milwaukee. This would be the General Mitchell International Airport. The set looks nothing like any part of Mitchell I’ve ever been through (and I’ve lived here most of my life, so I’ve been through there a lot).
I went to a doc-in-a-box once and the doctor drew blood. That would have been fine except that he talked and looked just like Peter Lorre. Unnerving really.
It didn’t really take me out of the movie*, but it was inaccurate. I just saw The Wild, Wild West while in a hotel in Oklahoma. At the end of the story, President Grant is so grateful for the results obtained by Jim and Artemus, that he creates the secret Service, and makes them Agents One and Two.
'Cept the Secret Service was created by Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.**
*Any more than the eighty foot tarantula and the Davinci-plane did, anyway.
**Better it should have been April 13, eh? 
Correct. I have one of those clicky keyboards. I paid an awful lot for it. And I love it.
Well, I would hardly call myself fluent, but I can generally get my point across, and I speak Japanese every day w/ my friends… That said, when I’m speaking English, even w/ my Japanese friends, I’ll usually use the American English pronunciation of a word. i.e. I’ll pronounce ‘karaoke’ as ‘cary-okey’ instead of ‘karah-okeh’ Sometimes I’ll have to do the correct pronunciation when they don’t catch it, but when I’m speaking w/ Americans, that’s not an issue. It always seemed kinda pretentious to insist on the ‘correct’ pronunciation of a Japanese word while speaking English. It doesn’t fit/flow w/ the rest of the sentence. Same way the Japanese use katakana pronunciation on English words when speaking Japanese, even if they’re completely fluent in English…
Point being, even someone fluent in Japanese might just naturally say ‘Yakuzas’ for the plural, or use English inflection on it while speaking English. Especially someone as no-nonsense and not so much given to pretense as that character.