Not sure if I already started a logo thread way back when, but since I can't find it, here's a bunch of new stuff I've been tinkering with lately. This lot are of my own design. While these are reproductions of stuff used on the shows.
I don't know if anyone else will go along with this, but I have my own interpretation of the different badges worn by officers of different units in TOS. Some people interpreted the different shapes of the badges as indicative of different ships, but the officers in the O-Club on Starbase 11 in "Court Martial" who confronted Kirk were obviously not from the Enterprise, yet seemed to know him, and wore the same badge/insignia. I interpeted this arrowhead badge as being a unit larger than just the NCC-1701 Enterprise. Maybe it represents the First Fleet, or some other conglomerated unit or mission-task-force within Starfleet. My first thought back in the 1970's is that Kirk's Enterprise was attached to a specific organization of ships that all serve the same function: a consolidated mission of combined exploration, peacekeeping, and certain kinds of research. Other ships and wings of ships might serve other functions, or combinations of functions. Commodore Decker may have been commanding the Constellation on a completely different mission, one very different than the Enterprise. Or perhaps his ship was part of the Third Fleet. And Captain Tracey's Exeter may have been on yet another mission, or perhaps part of the Second Fleet. And so on. Could those badges be interpeted as logos for projects/missions/wings/fleets, like the shoulder patches for Archer's NX-01 Enterprise and the earlier NX Project? If so, what do you think the pennant logos would look like, as derived from the badges?
I tend to think the same way, though I have no consistent idea as to how that would work. I just know that having thousands of distinctive insignia is being a little silly. One thought I had is that the Enterprise delta could represent UESPA, which was the operating agency of the Enterprise and would be consistent with it's appearance on the Friendship One probe. The Constellation's I suppose looks somewhat Vulcan so it could have been under the Vulcan Science Academy, or whatever replaced the High Command. It might be a nice way to show that at this point in history Starfleet is still in an embryonic state, in that it may have absorbed the old institutions like The Andorian Imperial Guard and the Tellarite Exploration commission (yes, I made that up) but it still have all the infrastructure and some of the trappings of those older organisations.
Does anyone have a canon-based visual collection of all the Starfleet uniform badges seen in TOS and TAS, somewhere on the web?
These look awesome but I don't recognize so many of them, can you say which assorted episode(s) the various real emblems are from?
I found a page all about TOS-era uniforms and insignia: http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/gallery/starfleet-uniforms1.htm The only thing is, they don't provide any coverage of TAS, which came up with at least one more variant: "The Pirates of Orion" http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x01/thepiratesoforion_028.JPG