Until Trylla Scott, wasn’t Kirk the youngest Starfleet officer to make captain? Since Trylla was TNG, in TOS, Kirk could’ve been the youngest to have attained that commission by that time. Even Picard was supposed to be one of the youngest ever when first made Captain.
So, having young, hot bodied actors playing the (early) rolls doesn’t violate canon.
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Yes, Chris Pine turned 29 in 2009 when Star Trek came out. As Kirk was supposed to be the youngest starship captain in Starfleet history, that seems perfectly valid. But the original history for Kirk had him completing the Academy, even instructing at some point there, and serving up through the ranks.
ETA: well, that took a long time to type. 
Well, the reset button, I mean reboot, changes some of those earlier conceived details.
I mean that Kirk was supposed to be in his early 30s. In “The Conscience of The King,” the crazy hot blonde daughter notes that’s he’s younger than she expects, and in super-fast-aging episode he says that he’s 32.
Computer science?
Political Science. Gunboat Diplomacy
A Captain as a rank is completely different from a Captain as the commanding officer of a vessel. The rank Captain is an O-6, above a Commander, but below a Rear Admiral. But the captain of a vessel can be one of several ranks, and in the US Navy, is often (usually?) not a Captain in rank:
USS Bremerton commanded by Commander Wes Bringham.
USS Kidd commanded by Commander Gabriel Varela.
USS Avenger commanded by Lieutenant Commander Todd Penrod.
So the captain of a vessel could be outranked by a non-Captain. Whether the person who outranks him has authority to remove him from command is a different question. But there’s nothing that would automatically prevent a Commander from being a Lieutenant Commander’s immediate superior, even if the LCDR is the CO of a vessel.
Given his penchant for quoting it, I always assumed he taught literature.
I don’t have an answer. But one thing I’ve never understood in the Starfleet setting is whether there is a distinction between line officers and not. I remember, for example, a TNG episode when Dr. Crusher takes the “command test” and becomes elgible for command duty. Depending on how that sort of thing works, it would be possible that Nog (apparently an engineer) would be a restricted line officer and not elligble to take command. But I can’t imagine that working between a commissioned officer and a cadet.
It was Troi, not Crusher, who took the command test on-screen. Though implicitly Crusher had taken it OFF-screen.
My feeling at the time was that you couldn’t go from lieutenant commander to commander without taking that test, though apparently there was no time limit on how long you could stay at the former rank. Data & Geordie must each have been lieutenant commanders for 12+ years.
They could have started with a story where Kirk is still in command of his previous ship (the Faragut?) and Pike is in command of the Enterprise and ended the movie with Kirk being given command of the Enterprise. Of course, no time travel, no Nimoy cameo, but so what?
In TOS canon, the Constitution class cruisers had a standard crew of 430.
Of course, since my private theory is that Starfleet is a private organization of self-funded explorers akin to grown-up Boy Scouts who want adventure rather than sitting home on a post-scarcity Earth, anybody can do anything they want, they just have to persuade everyone else to play along.
All those ranks and regulations are just the ground rules that people accept, otherwise no one will allow them to join the club.
It is kind of funny in Abrams!Trek! how they’re constantly quoting regulations for everything under the sun and beyond, yet constantly ignoring those regulations and doing whatever the hell they feel like.
It was definitely Crusher I was thinking of. Although, I don’t recall the test taking place on-screen. I had forgotten that Troi took it.
I don’t know if it was a “rank” thing. Both Troi and Crusher would have been memebrs of specialities outside the typical “line” officer chain of command. Although, wasn’t Crusher a Commander throughout?
Although, promotions did appear hard to come by. I only ever recall Worf and Geordie getting promoted.
You keep saying that, and it remains ridiculous. The simplest refutation is that Starfleet officers have the power to arrest people. If they were simply play-acting, no criminal would play along at that point. Michael Eddington would have simply walked away when Sisko captured him, not gone to prison, for instance. And if it were a private organization rather than a governmental agency, Kirk and his successors would not have to report to the Federation Council, which they clearly do.
Clearly the Fleet is an entirely volunteer force, but it’s not private, and it clearly has authority seen as legitimate by Federation citizens.
And the first time she gets to drive, she totals the damn thing. :rolleyes:
Yeah, this is sort of what I’m getting at. In some DS9 episode that I watched recently, they explain their uniform colors to someone - blue for sciences and medical, yellow for engineering and security, and red for command. Those groupings make very little sense given their actual roles on the show. When Worf shows up and they make him the strategic something officer, they make a deal about getting him a red shirt. I don’t remember them sending him to command school, but I may just be forgetting.
I don’t know if Nog would be eligible to command in the DS9 universe, but he’s certainly got more of a claim to it than the cadet.
In my neck of the military, engineering, security, and sciences would all be eligible to command anyone else. Medical staff and lawyers are in different categories, with medical officers still able to command other medical officers (e.g., a medical group). There’s no “test” involved, although there’s a series of schools/courses that you need to graduate from. Legally though, they can’t take some cadet at the academy and give him command; same with an enlisted person. So I’m wondering how this battlefield commission would hold up to the arrival of someone with a more legitimate rank.
How dare you!
Who says ordinary Federation citizens don’t have the power to arrest people? I mean, in 21st Century America, we have citizen’s arrest. So Sisko can arrest people, or shoot them in the face, or what have you, just the same as any other random Schmoe who isn’t afraid to face the consequences of his actions.
They report to the Federation Council in the same way a troop of Boy Scouts who are helping on a search and rescue mission report to the Police Chief.
Of course this theory is a bit tongue in cheek, since all human organizations and rules are the result of everyone agreeing to act as if the organizations exist and the rules are important. When enough people stop acting as if they exist, they stop existing. Your bowling league only exists because people agree to go bowling together. And the police force and courts and army only exist because people agree that they exist, and those who don’t agree are vastly outnumbered and outgunned.
The main point is that Starfleet isn’t supported by taxpayers or tribute from colonies. In a post-scarcity economy nobody has to work, nobody pays taxes, and if you want to watch holoporn all day nobody cares. Starfleet is composed of people who like to build spaceships and explore the galaxy. And since even in a post-scarcity economy it’s still dangerous to boldly go where no Man has gone before, building a one-man ship and heading out into the black by yourself is likely to be a fancy way to commit suicide.
So open a restaurant, or run a vineyard, or teach physics, or build robots, or colonize the ocean floor, or cruise the galaxy, but the only reason you’d do any of those is for fun and status. Just like today, only minus the whole needing a place to live and food to eat and clothes to wear thing.
Data received a temporary field promotion to captain a vessel after the events of Wolf 359.
Is Starfleet Military? has been discussed over and over, long before this SDMB ever existed. Personally, I go back to 1970s era pre-internet clubs, conventions, and 1980s era Phil Farrand’s Nitpicker’s Guild with discussions of it. Nothing is ever going to set it absolutely straight one way or the other. Even The Great Bird of the Galaxy apparently went back and forth on it, evidenced by what he produced with TOS, movies, and early TNG.
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And declare galactic war against the Dominion. But you know, everyone’s gotta have hobbies.
eta: Also, there were a few episodes where Starfleet enacted and enforced a bunch of draconian rules to deal with the Shapeshifter threat, including randomly blood testing civilians. Certainly they had the authority to do that.
Even Q commented on that.