Star Trek Lower Decks

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102

In TOS, everyone was an officer. I think Roddenberry said in interviews that basically everyone was an astronaut, the best of the best, and therefore an officer.

TNG-era was kind of murky, but they did eventually establish that Chief O’Brien was a Chief Petty Officer, and he (eventually) had a different style of rank insignia from everyone else. If I remember correctly, DS9 also established that Starfleet had ground forces, with enlisted infantry.

Edited to add: Star Trek uses U.S. Navy-inspired ranks; a “Chief Petty Officer” is actually an enlisted person, not an officer.

103

From dialogs in the various shows, “Crewman” apparently, or the title of their rating/staff specialty if we’re to go by Yeoman Colt, Rand, etc. Ocassionally they nod to American naval rates by mentioning “crewman (1st,2nd,3d) class”.

As mentioned Roddenberry had TOS work under the conceit of “everyone’s an officer” (so it would seem in TOS being adddressed as Ensign just meant that particular slicksleeve was on the track to go up the commissioned ranks rather than stay a “[whatever]man”). I suspect that was just his way of signalling his own dissatisfaction with the “class system” he knew from his military days.

Meanwhile O’Brien wore junior officer collar pips while being addressed as “chief” until he was given a chief’s rocker years after he was an established character, after the writers figured out where the character best fit in the stories. For 54 years the franchise’s officialdom has clearly never been as punctillious about canonical continuity as the fandom.

104

The only insight I think we really get into that issue is when Crewman Simon Tarses goes on trial in “The Drumhead,” and he explains to Picard that he enlisted as a crewman because he was too impatient to attend Starfleet Academy and earn a commission.

105

The thing is, that actually makes sense to me. It seems unlikely to me that in 200, 300 years they’d still be using the same rank structure - the officer rank structure is EXACTLY the same as a NATO navy, in fact, down to the words in English-speaking navies (at least up to Captain; I do not recall if Starfleet has four admiral ranks.)

106

More or less. Since we somehow don’t seem to have a Trekker with encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek participating in this thread, here’s my memory/understanding:

In TOS, there were, as someone upthread put it, “smoothsleeve” crewmen, which might seem to indicate the existence of enlisted ranks, but that wasn’t firmly established, and Roddenberry himself said that everyone on the ship was an officer.

Dialogue in the show established the existence of the ranks of Ensign, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, Captain, Commodore, and Admiral. Going by the pattern of rank insignia on the sleeve cuffs, we can interpolate the existence of a Lieutenant, Junior Grade rank, but that’s never mentioned in dialogue, and I don’t know if we actually see characters with that rank insignia. That’s actually a slightly anachronistic version of USN ranks (the contemporary USN no longer had “commodores”).

There’s also a “Yeoman”, but that seems to be a position rather than a rank, and a “Fleet Captain”, but it’s entirely unclear if that’s a rank, a position, an honorific, or what.

In the TNG era, ranks are rather clearer. Between dialogue and the pip rank insignia, there are ranks of Ensign, Lieutenant (Junior Grade), Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, and four grades of Admiral. Everyone with a “pip in a box” is addressed as and referred to as “Admiral”. I don’t know if we actually saw every grade in the show, but we did see “Admirals” with different numbers of pips in the box, up to four I think, which implies four grades of Admiral, as in the USN, but apparently without separate rank titles.

107

The Star Trek wiki says that “O’Brien is one of two enlisted characters in Star Trek to have received any significant character development, the other being Yeoman Janice Rand”, and that the latter was seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture wearing the rank insignia of a chief petty officer.

Anyway, it’s possible that various writers at various times simply ignored Roddenberry’s note. But back to Lower Decks, on one hand, IIRC in the episode where Mariner was on the team scraping carbon filters, the crewmembers she was supervising appeared to be wearing “pips” as well. So that fits in with the “everyone’s an officer” scenario. On the other hand, if not everyone is an officer, it does not seem to make sense that a ship like the Cerritos would have no enlisted men assigned to it. Hence my speculation.

108

Which is odd. Lower Decks is firmly in the TNG era and original timeline, which is the one era/timeline where it’s firmly established in dialogue that Starfleet has enlisted ranks.

Wild Fanspec: Starfleet generally prefers generalist officers to staff its ships over specialist crewmen. However, Starfleet doesn’t have enough to fully staff every ship and starbase. Bigger ships, like the Galaxy-class, are likely to have positions filled out by specialist crewmen. Smaller to mid-size ships, like the California-class, are often crewed entirely by officers. Also, since Cerritos is specifically tasked as a Second Contact specialist vessel, it might be exceptional in being staffed entirely by officers.

More likely, as JRDelirious alludes to upthread, we’re spending way more time and effort in this thread trying to suss out Starfleet’s rank structure than the writers and producers ever have.

109

This ends now Badgy.

110

I don’t consider myself a big trekkie but I really liked it. My wife vacated the room as soon as it came on and refuses to give it a second chance.

The sleeping in the hall thing seemed weird. Is that ‘canon’?

111

So am I the only one watching this?

[Album] imgur.com
112

And apparently Imgur is showing images again instead of a link…

113

This show’s hilarious and a wonderful tribute to Star Trek. I like it more every week. My only complaint about this week was I could have seen The Dog twice as much.

I watched this week’s episode would a lady who’s a huge, huge Star Trek episode and she loves it just as much as I do.

114

Cool. Which one is she? She isn’t The Best of Both Worlds Part II, is she?

115

This was a fantastic episode. Yet again, the show does two things that other Trek shows can’t or won’t.

  1. Awesome action scenes that are only feasible in an animated space.

  2. Poking at holes in Star Trek canon. Of course Starfleet would be stuffed with people who have been affected by weird anomalies and not suddenly cured at the end of an episode. Except for Boimler, who is of course suddenly cured at the end of the episode and really wishes he hadn’t been.

The only weak part of this episode was the creepy transport shuttle. It would have been more effective if the ship had been clean and white, but subtlety creepy in a “everything is super sterile and all the staff smiles too much” kind of way. The punchline then could have been something like, “you know, maybe we should print some pamphlets for our guests. Or show a video!”

116

I think this probably counts as a Halloween episode.

On a different note, notice that The Dog the dog (and Boimler) got sent to a farm?

117

Ha :slight_smile:

No, she’s “Darmok.”

118

It’s so remarkably easy to tell when watching these things what shows are actually written by people who understand Star Trek, and which ones are not.

The creative team who made “Star Trek Picard” clearly had very little familiarity with the franchise (or just knew the movies.) The creative team who made this show love Star Trek .

Incidentally, I think it’s pretty much 99% likely Cerritos is named after the city in L.A. county. It’s just another random municipality. USS Cerritos is a “California-class” ship, and we have seen two other ships of its type, both named after small California towns, Rubidoux and Merced.

If so they shouldn’t be called “California class” - that’s not how ship naming convention works, you’re supposed to call the class after the first ship of the type - but that’s what they say it’s called.

119

That’s not necessarily a contradiction. In real world, contemporary ship naming conventions, if the first ship in it’s class was named after a U.S. state, the following ships would follow that pattern and also be named after U.S. states. And that’s consistent with the little bit of in-universe evidence we have with Starfleet naming conventions. But it’s entirely possible that the first ship in the class was the USS California, and subsequent ships in the class followed a different naming pattern.

Starfleet does share a lot of conventions with the 20th Century U.S. Navy, but it also breaks a lot of them. I think there was a recent thread about how not just their uniforms but their branch livery frequently changes. In the TOS era, Starfleet personnel apparently wore their ship’s distinctive insignia as a badge, but had no service insignia. By the TNG era, apparently the Enterprise’s distinctive ship insignia had become the service insignia, Starfleet personnel wore the service insignia as a badge, and ships no longer had distinctive ship insignia.

120

I’d give them a lot of leeway about TOS, in which it isn’t even initially clear that Starfleet is called Starfleet - they uses at least 3-4 other, often very different names - or that the United Federation of Planets is called that. It’s since been officially retconned that it was always Starfleet, even before the Federation existed, and that the Federation was called the Federation from before the events of TOS.

121

Yes, they do at times seem to be inconsistent as to what they borrow from 20th century fleets – and not necessarily exclusively from the USN or even from the USN at a specific time.

As to ship classes even in our times we have diferring patterns, for example at one point the Coast Guard had “Treasury-class” cutters, as opposed to after whoever was honored with the lead ship, and more recently Island class as opposed to Farallon class; at various times the Royal Navy has had County, Colony, Town, etc. class, of vessels named after the relevant type of polity. Or classes where all the ships would start with the same letter.

But yes, the usual practice is for all the ships in a class to be named about things that are like in kind – in the modern USN this is in practice excepted for carriers where you can find a mix of different kinds of things in a same class (e.g. current Ford class includes the new Enterprise).