Shirt colours

[Phaser Two]

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.

Interesting! I am not nearly as familiar with S1 as I am with S2 and S3 (on a relative scale, meaning I haven't watched a lot of first season episodes 50-100 times and don't have huge snippets of dialogue I can remember from S1 eps with some exceptions), but I thought there was one episode, probably in S1, where someone, maybe Kirk, makes a comment or issues an order about "phaser gun crews."

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Interesting! I am not nearly as familiar with S1 as I am with S2 and S3 (on a relative scale, meaning I haven't watched a lot of first season episodes 50-100 times and don't have huge snippets of dialogue I can remember from S1 eps with some exceptions), but I thought there was one episode, probably in S1, where someone, maybe Kirk, makes a comment or issues an order about "phaser gun crews."

Yes.

From "The Corbomite Maneuver" [http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/3.htm]:

KIRK: It's time for action, gentlemen. Mister Bailey
BAILEY: Bridge to Phaser Gun Crew
KIRK: Countermand. I'll select what kind of action.​

Also, no less, from "Spectre of the Gun" [http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/56.htm]:

SPOCK: The object is beginning to emit M-rays of a highly unstable nature, Captain.
KIRK: Lieutenant, sound Red Alert. Mister Chekov, deflector shields on full. Phaser gun crews, lock on target.
SPOCK: Energy output increasing beyond measurable levels, Captain.
KIRK: Phaser guns, stand by to fire.​

 

[Timo]

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 the point seems to be that he wasn't one of the aides. The Gorn gunned him down, after all.

That is, it would have been trivial for their sniper to kill all the officers if that was their goal; it would have been even more trivial for them to use a bomb that would eliminate the entire landing party with one shot. So we must deduce they wanted to capture the important people alive for interrogation - which means they were free to kill the unimportant bodyguard first, and then start firing that apparently deliberately ineffective ordnance that'd prompt the rest to surrender (or then commit suicide, like Kirk apparently wanted to do).

And for what it's worth, Memory Alpha says that O'Herlihy was an ordnance officer and apparently so does the episode's script.

What he certainly is is juniormost in rank... Why does Kirk pick a junior to represent a department when his other two underlings at least rank up there with his known department heads?

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.

Going along with the assumption that those are division colors, and seeing that he didn't actually contribute anything to the tactics used in the three eps, we could say he had zip to do with anything tactical, and was accompanying Kirk, Spock and Lang either in some scientific role, or because he knew Travers or some of his people.

I guess the one thing we can rule him out of representing is Astral Anthropology, as he has to rely on external help there in "The Galileo Seven".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Qonundrum]

I prefer the non-fiction version for the uniforms' colors: Color TV was new and TOS really exploited the richness of color with choice of palettes, right down to uniforms. It's dated because of the 1960s yet it holds up because the designers did a smashing job with color. The crew pic of "I, Mudd" with the bridge crew still captivates to this day.

(Indeed, when TNG premiered I disliked their retaining the color scheme, but liked the angular design of the outfits... but the colors ultimately grew on me to where I accepted their iconic nature... but it was because of shiny new color TV. And did you know RCA owned NBC in the 1960s, which also featured full-page color TV ads promoting Star Trek? )

That and "red shirts die" -- said by casual viewers who didn't notice Uhura and Scotty were in different divisions, but let's also face facts: Eight colors, since eight main divisions exist, would have been too much - even back then. Or six, to make it nice and even with the color wheel, also noting the groupings of red/yellow/blue (primary pigment colors, in lighting one would see red/green/blue as being primary colors) and orange/green/purple (secondary pigment colors)... and then there's CMYK subtractive, but that's another issue altogether...

 

[Kor]

I love the bold and bright aesthetic of the sixties. It beats the snot out of the drab, beige and dirty look of later TV and movies.

Kor

 

[Timo]

It might be interesting for Trek to try bold again. I mean, you can still do bold with colors and get a huge impact. District 9 made industrial orange on dirty white immediately cool and copied (it had some help from preceding computer games and anime and whatnot, but that's where the "Doom pallette" finally made it big on the silver screen). The Transformers movies did their own thing with primary colors. Superman made textured colors the thing to have.

If Trek dared try, it would get free boost from something like "coolifying violet-on-green" or whatever. Today, it just rides the old Superman wave.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Phaser Two]

Yes.

From "The Corbomite Maneuver" [http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/3.htm]:

KIRK: It's time for action, gentlemen. Mister Bailey
BAILEY: Bridge to Phaser Gun Crew
KIRK: Countermand. I'll select what kind of action.​

Also, no less, from "Spectre of the Gun" [http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/56.htm]:

SPOCK: The object is beginning to emit M-rays of a highly unstable nature, Captain.
KIRK: Lieutenant, sound Red Alert. Mister Chekov, deflector shields on full. Phaser gun crews, lock on target.
SPOCK: Energy output increasing beyond measurable levels, Captain.
KIRK: Phaser guns, stand by to fire.​

There we go. Thanks. I thought it might be The Corbomite Maneuver given all of the bridge action and that that is one of the S1 eps that I have not watched nearly as many times as the others, which I need to fix. I shouldn't have forgotten about Spectre of the Gun. Heck, given the title and to some extent the theme, maybe the phaser gun crews reference was intentional.

And the point seems to be that he wasn't one of the aides. The Gorn gunned him down, after all.

That is, it would have been trivial for their sniper to kill all the officers if that was their goal; it would have been even more trivial for them to use a bomb that would eliminate the entire landing party with one shot. So we must deduce they wanted to capture the important people alive for interrogation - which means they were free to kill the unimportant bodyguard first, and then start firing that apparently deliberately ineffective ordnance that'd prompt the rest to surrender (or then commit suicide, like Kirk apparently wanted to do).



What he certainly is is juniormost in rank... Why does Kirk pick a junior to represent a department when his other two underlings at least rank up there with his known department heads?



Going along with the assumption that those are division colors, and seeing that he didn't actually contribute anything to the tactics used in the three eps, we could say he had zip to do with anything tactical, and was accompanying Kirk, Spock and Lang either in some scientific role, or because he knew Travers or some of his people.

I guess the one thing we can rule him out of representing is Astral Anthropology, as he has to rely on external help there in "The Galileo Seven".

Timo Saloniemi

LOL about Kelowitz and astral anthropology. He was a good actor and an interesting character; I'm sorry he didn't stick around past S1. I love the azimuth approximation and the "little close for one of these little jewels" bit.

I don't think the Gorn intended to capture the Enterprise landing party. They killed Lang, the highest ranking of the three aides, and their bombardment was pretty indiscriminate. Sure, Kirk ran in that awesome zigzag pattern, but it didn't look like the Gorn cared if he bought it, and they came pretty close to nailing Spock (decidedly non-zigzag movement) too. I thought the Travers ruse was about decapitation of the command structure of the Starfleet vessel assigned to patrol the sector, making it easier to defeat.

 

[Nerys Myk]

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.

I don't think any of the actresses looked good in gold. For some reason those costumes looked horrible.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I don't think any of the actresses looked good in gold. For some reason those costumes looked horrible.

I agree, the color was too bland and blah. And I can think of only a few speaking parts for women in gold uniforms. Angela in "Balance of Terror" looked okay at best, and Lt. Radha in "That Which Survives" wasn't very flattered by the color.

The TNG-era switch to red for Command was surely done for this reason, to make Stewart and Frakes stand out a little better.

 

[drt]

The TNG-era switch to red for Command was surely done for this reason, to make Stewart and Frakes stand out a little better.

Probably right, but I also wonder if it was to tie their look a bit more into the movies, since the shade of red they chose always looked to my eye pretty close to the post-TMP movie uniforms, since the captain "wore red" in those (the different colored collars and shoulder things probably didn't stand out much to the general audience).

 

[JonnyQuest037]

The TNG-era switch to red for Command was surely done for this reason, to make Stewart and Frakes stand out a little better.

I think the gold uniform meshing well with Brent Spiner's Data makeup also had something to do with it.

 

[John Cooley]

Sir Pat Stew® looked horrible in gold.

 

[Timo]

I don't think the Gorn intended to capture the Enterprise landing party. They killed Lang, the highest ranking of the three aides, and their bombardment was pretty indiscriminate.

This is what I meant by the suicide bit. Sniping down O'Hereidie but not the rest would suggest restraint; launching the bombardment would be offering the heroes two options, to surrender or to die; and the heroes would opt to die, which would also suit the Gorn just fine.

I thought the Travers ruse was about decapitation of the command structure of the Starfleet vessel assigned to patrol the sector, making it easier to defeat.

Certainly. But capturing would achieve that, too.

The Gorn really had Starfleet's number with the Travers ruse; I wonder if they couldn't have lured even more of Kirk's Lieutenant Commanders (the subsequent eps show plenty) down on some pretext or another...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Phaser Two]

This is what I meant by the suicide bit. Sniping down O'Hereidie but not the rest would suggest restraint; launching the bombardment would be offering the heroes two options, to surrender or to die; and the heroes would opt to die, which would also suit the Gorn just fine.



Certainly. But capturing would achieve that, too.

The Gorn really had Starfleet's number with the Travers ruse; I wonder if they couldn't have lured even more of Kirk's Lieutenant Commanders (the subsequent eps show plenty) down on some pretext or another...

Timo Saloniemi

As to capture, sure, I suppose that makes sense. But the Gorn didn't seem to be firing warning shots or using munitions that offered a high chance of only wounding the Starfleet officers. Their decision to level the Federation outpost also seems to suggest a lack of interest in anything other than a show of brute force. Leaving Hansen alive is another curiosity. My guess is they just didn't care.

I've always wondered why there isn't a bit more dialogue about the fate of poor Travers and the Gorns' evident seizure of enough classified Starfleet info to fake an interactive voice conversation.

And as to the lieutenant commanders, as a big Scotty fan, I always wished he had been invited and beamed down too. It would have been fun to see Doohan act out a big action scene and perhaps Scotty could have contributed to the solution. It also would have explained why Sulu was in command while Scotty was available, but still preserved the nice "Sulu is an experienced combat officer" dialogue and screentime for Takei.

 

[MacLeod]

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

Perhaps Eddington was referring to Captain of a starship. I'm fairly sure we saw a gold shirt Adm. I believe it was Adm. Toddman (DSN: "The Die is Cast). Now he might have worn red when a Cpt.

 

[Timo]

Amusingly enough, we never do see a goldshirt of Captain rank, never mind position. Even Scotty as "Captain of Engineering" in ST3 wears some sort of a custom teal in place of whatever the heck Engineering was supposed to wear at the time (the Academy had stolen red from them in the previous movie, and Scotty had been wearing the Low Command Yellow ever since).

We know it's possible to go from goldshirt to Captain easily enough - Riker did that, too. But Captain as goldshirt appears to be a no-no.

Which is pretty silly. If gold indeed marks some sort of a restriction, why do redshirts in TNG do those "stints" at that color before going back to red and attaining high rank? Shouldn't they be doing their no doubt mandatory Feel What It Is Like To Be Engineer Or Security Man For A Change period in red, reflecting their hard-earned status?

It's just that three colors denoting departments works even worse, what with all the contradictions.

Timo Saloniemi