Shirt colours

[Spock_the_Vulcan]

So, I'm new to star trek, and I was wondering what the shirt colors represent in the series. I initially thought that different colours mean different ranking, but Kirk who is wearing a yellow shirt is the captain, while Spock, who is second in command is wearing a blue shirt.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Starfleet_division

Look under uniform divisions for command, operations, and sciences.

Hope that helps! Welcome!

 

[Spock_the_Vulcan]

Ok, thanks, that cleared up the comfusion.

 

[Phaser Two]

Rank in TOS is denoted by braid on the shirt cuffs. You can find the specific rank designations listed in a number of places and it's a pretty easy system to learn.

 

[John Cooley]

Gold: Unrestricted Line Officers

Red: Restricted Line Officers

Blue: Specialist Officers

 

[J.T.B.]

Gold: Unrestricted Line Officers

Red: Restricted Line Officers

Blue: Specialist Officers

Not really. Red and blue shirts take command of the ship quite regularly. Scotty is an "officer of the line" according to "A Taste of Armageddon."

 

[Timo]

Yet red (in TNG, yellow) is restricted quite factually - it restricts what Eddington can do in his career. "You don't get to be a Captain wearing a gold uniform" is Eddington's specific lamentation on the fact that he cannot make Captain due to wearing gold, not on any esoteric desire to wear gold when making Captain.

Whatever the Trek names for the three levels, the colors would appear to mostly bear those out. It's just that Spock wears blue after already having had a stint in gold, and Uhura wears red after a similar stint - why accept "demotions" like that, even if Kirk after the "Where No Man" casualties is forced to fill certain lower slots with onboard personnel?

An alternate interpretation for the three colors is simply three shifts - it then becomes natural for the three top officers to all wear different colors. Its just that Kirk's Gold Shift sometimes summons specialist help from other Shifts (which all are of course active during the adventures which typically involve alert status and in general must represent a big departure from the passive boredom of the intervening weeks).

Alas, to try and relate the three colors to "departments" or "job descriptions" in a functional way just causes irreversible brain damage.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Yet red (in TNG, yellow) is restricted quite factually - it restricts what Eddington can do in his career. "You don't get to be a Captain wearing a gold uniform" is Eddington's specific lamentation on the fact that he cannot make Captain due to wearing gold, not on any esoteric desire to wear gold when making Captain.

Whatever the Trek names for the three levels, the colors would appear to mostly bear those out. It's just that Spock wears blue after already having had a stint in gold, and Uhura wears red after a similar stint - why accept "demotions" like that, even if Kirk after the "Where No Man" casualties is forced to fill certain lower slots with onboard personnel?

An alternate interpretation for the three colors is simply three shifts - it then becomes natural for the three top officers to all wear different colors. Its just that Kirk's Gold Shift sometimes summons specialist help from other Shifts (which all are of course active during the adventures which typically involve alert status and in general must represent a big departure from the passive boredom of the intervening weeks).

Alas, to try and relate the three colors to "departments" or "job descriptions" in a functional way just causes irreversible brain damage.

Timo Saloniemi

Yeah, no.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Alas, to try and relate the three colors to "departments" or "job descriptions" in a functional way just causes irreversible brain damage.

Gold = Command, Flight Control, Ordnance
Red = Engineering, Security, Operations
Blue = Medical, Science

Seems pretty straight forward to me.

 

[Phaser Two]

If Eddington said that - I don't remember the quote - he was wrong, as LaForge eventually commanded a Galaxy-class as a captain (granted, in a reality where only Chakotay and Kim made it home from the Delta Quadrant) and of course Scotty attained the rank of Captain too and probably could have gotten a command pretty easily if he wanted to. That was a silly line of dialogue by the DS9 writers.

Gold = Command, Flight Control, Ordnance
Red = Engineering, Security, Operations
Blue = Medical, Science

Seems pretty straight forward to me.

Exactly. Did we ever see an ordnance officer? Perhaps one of the two Enterprise casualties on Cestus III? Lang and O'Herlihy? (Not checking transcripts right now.) Kirk tells Scotty to "check with ordnance about manufacturing phaser replacements" in Day of the Dove, which was one of those extraneous, world-building lines of dialogue that I love in TOS, but we never saw the guy or gal with whom Scotty had that presumably brief conversation.

 

[Timo]

Gold = Command, Flight Control, Ordnance
Red = Engineering, Security, Operations
Blue = Medical, Science

Seems pretty straight forward to me.

But TOS has prominent exceptions to all of those. Science is red more often than not (all the guest chicks); Command is blue on occasion ("Court Martial", and Spock); Engineering, likewise (Masterson).

If Eddington said that - I don't remember the quote - he was wrong, as LaForge eventually commanded a Galaxy-class as a captain

But only after ditching the damning gold shirt. Anybody can re-educate him- or herself, take a Command Course, whatnot. It's the path of becoming Captain without taking off the gold shirt that is blocked (the quote is from Eddington's introductory episode, "Adversary").

Gold could well denote somebody who isn't allowed to command beyond a certain level, then. And indeed we never see a four-pipper wear gold.

But we do see a flag officer wear gold in DS9, and many wear red in TOS...

Exactly. Did we ever see an ordnance officer? Perhaps one of the two Enterprise casualties on Cestus III? Lang and O'Herlihy? (Not checking transcripts right now.)

Ordnance? That'd be the couple from "Balance of Terror", surely?

The Cestus III landing party is instead remarkable for featuring Kirk's "tactical aides", apparently split between gold and blue.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ChasFink]

Gold = Command, Flight Control, Ordnance
Red = Engineering, Security, Operations
Blue = Medical, Science
Seems pretty straight forward to me.

Agreed. That's the way I always saw it. Or to put a finer point on it, gold (and its variant, green) was what you'd consider Starfleet military (with an obvious path to ship command, blue was sciences in all senses, red was routine operations.

Yet red (in TNG, yellow) is restricted quite factually - it restricts what Eddington can do in his career. "You don't get to be a Captain wearing a gold uniform" is Eddington's specific lamentation on the fact that he cannot make Captain due to wearing gold, not on any esoteric desire to wear gold when making Captain.

I believe Eddington was speaking of relative difficulty, not in absolutes.

Spock and Scotty seem to be exceptions, but not incredibly unusual ones. Spock had the peculiar dual duty of First Officer and Science Officer, and Scotty - aside from his obvious primary love of engineering - clearly had good command skills. They may have been encouraged to train for goldshirt duties in addition to their primary interests because their talents were recognized early in their careers. Whether there is a default to the non-gold color in these circumstances or the individuals get to choose is probably open to debate.

Of course from a practical Roddenberryesque production perspective, you want the folks taking command in Kirk's absence to be familiar faces, and you want the color variety to be as big as possible among your major players.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

But TOS has prominent exceptions to all of those. Science is red more often than not (all the guest chicks); Command is blue on occasion ("Court Martial", and Spock); Engineering, likewise (Masterson).

Most of those exceptions are due to real life constraints of making television and should be taken with a grain of salt, with the guest "chicks" utilising uniforms that would already be in wardrobe.

The other have more in-universe explanations. Spock was the Chief Science Officer first and foremost, hence his uniform reflected that. As for Masterson she was an expert in dilithium crystals so maybe she was a geochemist or mineralogist who was attached to engineering for her expertise.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

TOS had two red shirt commodores, Scotty was captain of engineering on the Excelsior in TSFS, and we saw the gold shirted Admiral Toddman of Starfleet security on DS9. So while it may have been unlikely for Eddington to rise to captain as a gold shirt, by his own admission and by what we can reasonably infer from what we saw, it wasn't impossible.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I'm sure most background actors were given whatever available uniform fit, regardless of its color, but prominent guest women were dressed according to what they looked good in.

Look at historians Marla McGivers (red) vs. Carolyn Palamas (blue). And psychiatrist Helen Noel (blue) vs. astrobiologist Ann Mulhall (red).

All four should have been in blue, but women with reddish-brown hair and rosy cheeks looked like hell in blue, and they looked great in red. The beauty angle was just more important than fictional continuity. And I actually agree with that, because I want the show to look good.

Communications would have been in the greenish gold division, series-long, if Nichelle Nichols had not looked vastly better in red. And she knew it.

 

[J.T.B.]

Did we ever see an ordnance officer?

The phaser crews in "Balance of Terror" would seem likely candidates.

Spock and Scotty seem to be exceptions, but not incredibly unusual ones. Spock had the peculiar dual duty of First Officer and Science Officer, and Scotty - aside from his obvious primary love of engineering - clearly had good command skills. They may have been encouraged to train for goldshirt duties in addition to their primary interests because their talents were recognized early in their careers. Whether there is a default to the non-gold color in these circumstances or the individuals get to choose is probably open to debate.

I think a better fit is that the uniform colors just reflect the division or department of current assignment, not anything about qualifications or career possibilities. Line officers could work in any of the divisions: Kirk worked in engineering early in his career, Scotty regularly took command, Assistant Chief Engineer DeSalle took command, Sulu moved from blue to gold. Uhura changing from gold to red could just be the result of a tweak to the ship's internal organization.

Look at historians Marla McGivers (red) vs. Carolyn Palamas (blue). And psychiatrist Helen Noel (blue) vs. astrobiologist Ann Mulhall (red).

All four should have been in blue, but women with reddish-brown hair and rosy cheeks looked like hell in blue, and they looked great in red. The beauty angle was just more important than fictional continuity. And I actually agree with that, because I want the show to look good.

It's hard to deny it. It seems like Janet McLachlan would have looked nice in red, though.

 

[plynch]

Someone here, or a whole thread, pointed out Uhura is a techie/engineer operating a comm board, not a linguist like Hoshi Sato.

 

[Phaser Two]

Ordnance? That'd be the couple from "Balance of Terror", surely?

The phaser crews in "Balance of Terror" would seem likely candidates.

I think they'd be gunnery rather than ordnance, which is the logistics of weaponry and other materiel including storage, manufacture, handling, etc. As to whether gunnery crewmembers should be in gold/green versus red, I'm not sure.

The Cestus III landing party is instead remarkable for featuring Kirk's "tactical aides", apparently split between gold and blue.

Right; I've always liked the inclusion of the tactical people and the Gorns' ruse to get them down to the planet. But there was a redshirt as well - and now that I'm off of mobile I can more easily check to be sure. That redshirt was O'Herlihy, played by Jerry Ayres, who later had some pretty good dialogue and a nice performance as Rizzo in "Obsession," although his later character was ultimately as doomed as the former. And for what it's worth, Memory Alpha says that O'Herlihy was an ordnance officer and apparently so does the episode's script. Lang, the goldshirt, is listed by MA as a gunnery officer, which fits with "Balance of Terror." The third aide was Kelowitz, the blue shirt who was also in "Galileo Seven" and "This Side of Paradise." I never understood why he was part of the sciences division, but maybe it had something to do with applied sciences in the area of tactics.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

It's hard to deny it. It seems like Janet McLachlan would have looked nice in red, though.

Two theories: they wanted to clearly distinguish her from Uhura for less-observant viewers, or the blue one fit. I just wish they'd put stripes on her sleeves to go with the scripted dialogue.

 

[J.T.B.]

I think they'd be gunnery rather than ordnance, which is the logistics of weaponry and other materiel including storage, manufacture, handling, etc. As to whether gunnery crewmembers should be in gold/green versus red, I'm not sure.

Yeah, ordnance people generally work on the guns and ammunition rather than shoot them, but that was my best guess. The phaser crews are kind of an anomaly anyway, because other times it seems like pushing a button on the helm console does everything.

I don't think the term "gunnery" was ever used in TOS, but "weapons department" was. Of course in the '50s and '60s the US Navy was moving from ships having gunnery departments with guns to weapons departments with guns and missiles, but I don't know if that would have made its way in to Star Trek.