Is anyone able to explain what the ranks are in starfleet? The uniforms all have diffrent colors and stripes. Do these mean anything. What does USS stand for? I seartched utube for a first star trek clip and found spock and a guy named chris? Can anyone tell me what that is about? Sorry to be a pain. New to trek and starting to get hooked fast.
For a quick primer on the ranks, think US navy, although the rank insignia is different. Welcome to the world of Star Trek. It's a wierd place, you'll love it.
Officer ranks, from lowest to highest: Ensign Lieutenant Junior Grade Lieutenant Lieutenant Commander Commander Captain Commodore (later replaced with Rear Admiral, Lower Half) Rear Admiral Vice Admiral Admiral In the 22nd and 23rd centuries Gold was for command officers, red for security officers and engineers, blue for science and medical officers. In the 24th century, red and gold switched meanings. United Starship Captain Christopher Pike, Captain Kirk's predecessor as captain of the Enterprise, featured in the The Cage, the very first episode of Star Trek.
That's never demonstrated on screen. Neither "Commodore" or "Lower Half" were used to describe any admiral in TNG or later. That's aside from the fact they only showed 2 "1-star" (both were in TNG S1, so they didn't even have pips) admirals in all of TNG+.
They were both referred to as "Admiral" and only having one star, they are likely Rear Admiral, Lower Half. What else would their rank be?
^^Rear Admiral, Lower Half is the actual title for a one-star Admiral in the US Navy, and Starfleet seems to mimic the US Navy with its ranks. So therefore I assume a one-star Admiral in Starfleet is Rear Admiral, Lower Half until I have reason to think otherwise.
It could be "Branch Admiral" perhaps--maybe a flag rank given to non-command division officers like McCoy in "Encounter At Farpoint" or someone from the sciences and engineering divisions. Or maybe it's even the often discussed "Fleet Captain"...
Which, in all honesty, is very silly. Federation starships really ought to have the prefix F.S.S. ("Federation Starship") rather than U.S.S.. Putting U.S.S. there is just a wink and a nod to the idea of American-centrism in a show supposedly about a Federation of many different worlds.
That has never been canonically established, and it's faintly ridiculous.. It's never standard practice to put the full name of a state in a ship prefix -- you don't hear about the United States of America Ship Abraham Lincoln, you hear about the United States Ship Abraham Lincoln.
I've always thought so. It makes it sound as if various independent parts of the starship had to be unified for some reason. --Justin