Regarding the scene in "Court Martial", note that the other officers were situated so that you never got a straight-on view of their insignia (I know, it was the same as Kirk's, but play along for a bit), whereas Kirk was right there, squared up with the camera, with that arrowhead insignia as plain as day. Likewise, in "The Tholian Web", in cases where an insignia would otherwise be visible, a strategically placed arm was covering it up, they were strapped down in the beds with the straps conveniently across the badges, or folks were just placed on their stomachs. In other instances, like Captain Tracy (and the other Exeter uniforms) or Commodore Decker, their insignia were shown quite clearly, and were most definitely not the standard arrowhead insignia. I think it's clear that the intent was that every ship would have its own insignia, like every unit and ship in today's military has their own unit symbol, and when the budget was there, they followed up on that intent, while in cases where the budget wasn't there, they at least made an effort to obscure what otherwise would've been a distinctively non-Enterprise insignia.
Not correct: http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x20/Court_Martial_041.JPG http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x20/Court_Martial_042.JPG
In The Cage, during Pike's "Veena as Orion Girl" illusion, the Starfleet officer who was there with him had the traditional Delta, yet you didn't get the impression he was from the Enterprise. I suppose he could have been, but it wasn't even the same type of uniform the Enterprise crew wore. Only the delta was the same.
I don't know your opinion of Enterprise (and frankly I don't care), but "In a Mirror, Darkly" created a different insignia for the Defiant crewmembers.
These are absolutely beautiful, Reverend... my favorite is the Nova Squadron patch... just awesome stuff, all around.
It's true that every Constitution class we've seen has a different insignia and the intention seams to be every ship has it's own logo, though for all we know each of those ships was head of a different fleet, so there's enough wiggle room for all the theories preposed. However, my problem with the one-ship-one-insignia-each rule is that from a purely design POV, when you have a fleet in the thousands it gets harder and harder to come up with simple, distinctive and recognisable shapes before you start recycling and adding minute variations. With the NX-01/NASA style patches it's much easier, you can play with colours, shape have the ship's likeness and name actually written on the thing, not so with an abstract shape. Even so, after a while the shapes loose all meaning and you may as well wear a patch that just says "USS Enterprise" or better yet the registry number. This may be the real reason Starfleet switched to a unified insignia, maybe not. I'm quite proud of that one too, it's the first time I've been able to get vector to really look like rasta.
First of all I want to say great work on all of these. Mad props to you both technically and aesthetically. Back in TOS days I don't think this was an issue. I'm at work (shhhh!) so I can't look up hard canon on this but the impression we got was that intially there were only 12 "starships" at the beginning of TOS. Even if every other ship in every other class at the time had their own insignia, it'd be a good bet that the whole of starfleet wasn't much more than two or three hundred ships...and that's if we include all the ships listed in Franz Joseph's unofficial tech manual. It's a solid point, though, that after a while there's only so much you can work with in making such simple symbols unique. One could theorize that the reason for the adoption of a standard starfleet insignia around the time of TMP was the fact that the fleet was ballooning in size and the fleet's graphic design interns had better things to do.
I always love threads like this. While we're on the subject, here are some logos and symbols I've collected over the years:
Blame my Swiss cheese memory, but the point remains. The intent was for each ship to have its own insignia (and crying about how they'd run out of viable designs is kind of a slap in the face of the designers, doncha think?). And I happen to have liked what they came up with for the Defiant for "In A Mirror, Darkly...".
These are truly superb. Excellent work! My one nitpick is that Nova Squadron had 5 ships instead of 4.
Where can we get these logos in vector (Adobe Illustrator - .ai) format? Can some one post a link or make them available? Thanks, Raider
Yes I know...originally. I wondered when someone would spot the sick joke. Same place I did. www.drawityourself.com
Not after Nick Locarno got done with 'em. I think he changed his name and joined the Maquis afterward in disgrace...