Starship Insignia
- Thread starter Tallguy
- Start date
Re "The Tholian Web". Those arrowheads are in plain sight in a few shots. Like (link).
It's clear that TPTB made a great effort to hide them (see all the odd poses), and still failed. I guess the ENT reinterpretation is a decent compromise between expectations, but going with the standard arrowhead would have been more consistent even if contradicting intent.
Or then Commodore Mendez is just visiting, and in no way employed by Starbase 11.
His role in the episode does not involve commanding the resources of Starbase 11; it's limited to being the person who knows both Kirk and Pike personally. That he signs of with "Mendez, SB11" can very well be him just giving his current address (assuming this highly dubious message had anything to do with Mendez in the first place).
Similarly, Wesley could be visiting the starbase of Commodore Enwright who wore red (and looked a bit like Scotty, especially around the vocal cords). We could keep our redshirts and goldshirts sorted out that way: the latter always command out in the field.
Timo Saloniemi
Or then Commodore Mendez is just visiting, and in no way employed by Starbase 11.
His role in the episode does not involve commanding the resources of Starbase 11; it's limited to being the person who knows both Kirk and Pike personally. That he signs of with "Mendez, SB11" can very well be him just giving his current address (assuming this highly dubious message had anything to do with Mendez in the first place).
Similarly, Wesley could be visiting the starbase of Commodore Enwright who wore red (and looked a bit like Scotty, especially around the vocal cords). We could keep our redshirts and goldshirts sorted out that way: the latter always command out in the field.
Timo Saloniemi
Which is why TAS shouldn't be considered canon; it's a friggin' cartoon. It should be considered a close approximation to what the "actual" events would be if they had been live episodes.
The Enterprise production team was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I would guess that more fans think all TOS ships had unique insignia, than not. Therefore if they had given the Defiant the delta, they would have been raked over the coals for retcons and not knowing TOS. Considering the hoops we jump through to explain away the other insignia, I think giving the Defiant her own emblem was the right choice.
You, too, eh? 
Nah. Just rake 'em right back. Like what Star Wars did about the whole AT-AT debacle.
Not quite. Kirk was wearing the arrowhead on his admiral's uniform prior to taking command.
Vacation or in-between commanding officers would seem the most logical guesses.
Also, the people working in the orbital station.
Also good point.
It's hard to explain, really. It's like the people serving near the Klingon border with the "radio telescope" icon are in a different organization from that of the Starfleet personnel seen serving near Earth. If anything, it would tend to support the idea that the arrowhead is for the Earth fleet. Or, maybe Epsilon IX is Federation, but not Starfleet.
There was somewhere online where I read UESPA had the arrowhead, meaning the ship was for general exploration, the IDIC symbol for research ships, the hoof symbol for cargo, the long rectangle for a different command, and the loop thing for a different command; each was a branch of Starfleet to which the ship was then assigned. That sounded like a good alternative explanation to that of each ship having its own emblem.
Chris Bennett in his novels attempts another compromise between expectations, establishing that in the early days, the UFP Starfleet was divided into task-specific branches as above, but with different UFP member species handling different tasks. There's plenty of room in the timeline for the organization to both diversify and adopt a less speciesist policy, eventually leading to what we see in TOS - and then to either get more flexible and therefore abandon the last signs (literally) of task-specificity, or perhaps get even more diverse and have the insignia system collapse of sheer complexity and crumble back to one nice unifying symbol.
In any case, what we see in TOS is "transitional" in that nothing of it survives past the next few decades of pseudohistory. First the alternate insignia disappear, then the broader range of "department colors" (if they ever were that) briefly seen in the TOS movies and lingering till "Yesterday's Enterprise". But those movie department colors also "came" in addition to "going" - they weren't there in TOS yet - so a comeback of ship-specific, task-specific or fleet-specific insignia shouldn't be unexpected. Perhaps DSC will experiment with something else altogether and be excused for it because Starfleet is entitled to changing its mind before the 2260s...
Timo Saloniemi
In any case, what we see in TOS is "transitional" in that nothing of it survives past the next few decades of pseudohistory. First the alternate insignia disappear, then the broader range of "department colors" (if they ever were that) briefly seen in the TOS movies and lingering till "Yesterday's Enterprise". But those movie department colors also "came" in addition to "going" - they weren't there in TOS yet - so a comeback of ship-specific, task-specific or fleet-specific insignia shouldn't be unexpected. Perhaps DSC will experiment with something else altogether and be excused for it because Starfleet is entitled to changing its mind before the 2260s...
Timo Saloniemi
I can't figure out how or why Justman acted all self-righteous about this when Starbase personnel from commodores to Miss Piper to Areel Shaw wore the flower and Decker had the pretzel. Seems like he should have cottoned on to the realization that everyone else in production thought the delta shield was Enterprise only.
Parroting a Roddenberry edict, perhaps, and playing the hatchet-man about it? Best explanation as any that I can think of.
Roddenberry was the boss. If Gene made the decision, it was up to Justman as the producer to carry it out.
Right, and why didn't Roddenberry notice either? Not like it should have been hard to detect for a pretty hands-on production team. Really weird.
I suspect he was spending most of his time fending off the suits from NBC/DesiLu/Paramount and all the stupid shit that came out of their mouths, rather than bothering with the minutia of costume design. Guys like Coon or Justman came around, told him something was going on between phone calls with the Head Office, he would either give them a verbal response or write a quick memo and go back to the phone calls or writing the next script.
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