I wonder if Picard was a Fleet Captain, then. I mean, he won that marathon at the Academy and everything.
Pike and "Fleet Captain"?
- Thread starter BillJ
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But this would be like you coming up with your own pet theory as to how transporters work without any basis from anything on the show. You are free to engage in fan fiction of course.
But again, Garth probably isn't a Fleet Captain, or at least wasn't written to be one. He's just Captain, and by fluke the word "fleet" happens in front of his rank a couple of times, as part of the expression "starship fleet".
What Garth's title really is may be best summed up here:
We can argue that "Captain Garth" is the proper short form of address for somebody whose full title is "starship fleet Captain". But this is probably Kirk's full title as well, as he is a Captain in the starship fleet specifically, rather than a random skipper.
Why Mendez would not use the short form with Pike if that were appropriate is unknown, so perhaps Pike's rank really differs from Kirk's or Garth's.
In light of this, it's funny that he would write explicit enlisted characters into his Star Trek pilot... We get this guy whose unvoiced title (as per the credits, which also reveal his unvoiced name) is CPO, and then these non-decorated folks toiling under him.
If anything, earliest Trek such as "Man Trap" relies on rowdy and undisciplined not-officers who get into trouble for not being as shiny as the officer heroes. Such characters served Forbidden Planet well; if there ever was an active effort in Trek to get rid of them, it was towards the third season where the money for additional faces was harder to come by.
Timo Saloniemi
It's interesting to speculate why a "new" rank was introduced at all. The rank structure was a little squishy at that point, but it seems safe to assume that it was basically real-word-navy-based from the get-go, with captain and lieutenant in the first pilot and lieutenant commander in the second. Ensign followed in production #14, commodore in #15 and admiral in #25.
My guess is that Pike was supposed to be a little older than Kirk but not over-the-hill ("about your age") and still an active officer, not working behind the dreaded Desk. Commodore and admiral might have been thought to imply an older officer than intended. Fleet captain sounded a little higher up, but still a captain, like Kirk.
ETA:
If anyone wants to read about the duties of a fleet captain in the Civil War period:
1865 U.S. Navy Regulations
My guess is that Pike was supposed to be a little older than Kirk but not over-the-hill ("about your age") and still an active officer, not working behind the dreaded Desk. Commodore and admiral might have been thought to imply an older officer than intended. Fleet captain sounded a little higher up, but still a captain, like Kirk.
ETA:
If anyone wants to read about the duties of a fleet captain in the Civil War period:
1865 U.S. Navy Regulations
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ENT says that Vulcans and Humans cannot produce a natural offspring; it can only be attained with gene splicing. Perhaps Sarek also added some augmentation to the mix to make him super smart, too. So, I guess I'm saying that Spock is a Vulcan augment.
On the face of it, humans and Vulcans shouldn't be able to interbreed. I imagine this has been discussed in another thread, and I won't clutter this one up, but it would be fun to discuss.
No one calls a Lt. Commander "Lieutenant Commander" nor a Lieutenant Colonel "Lieutenant Colonel"...
(when referring to someone using their rank as an honorific -- obviously, when the rank is explicitly referred to, the full rank gets used).
I still go for the Spock is a naturally born person myself as it's never been referenced as a genetic splicing on any of the shows I've watched like TOS-VOY do like all this modern day style of destroying your heroes I'm against it! Plus in TNGs The Chase we learn that all of the major races of the Trek galaxy are linked by an earlier race of beings, possibly The Preservers! 
JB
Plus in TNGs The Chase we learn that all of the major races of the Trek galaxy are linked by an earlier race of beings, possibly The Preservers! JB
Then again, using the full rank there would be "demoting", while using the short form is "promoting". Using the shortened form for Pike would in turn be "demoting"!
I could see Fleet Captains being unhappy with that...
Timo Saloniemi
Out of universe, your second paragraph makes sense as to why. In universe, well, I figure advancement is bottle-necked at the Captain level.
Cool. You can see why it was changed to Chief of Staff later. Also interesting was the list of duties a ship commander must perform before handing off the ship to someone else. No tag-your-the-captain played here.
Context. Look at what is being said about Captain Garth in the post immediately above mine.
I am also amused that someone is instructing me on Navy ranks...
It's interesting, if you scroll back to Article 29, you see "The Fleet Captain to be called the 'Chief of the Staff.'" This was part of Secretary Welles's General Order of 13 March, 1863 which realigned the ranks of staff corps officers. When that order was overturned by opinion of the Attorney General in April 1869, another General Order was issued to change the title to "Chief of Staff".
Yeah, you can really see how administrative and bureaucratic a captain's job was, even 150 years ago. It goes to what I was saying earlier in the thread about the IMO unrealistic treatment of "desk" work in Trek.
I think you solved this thread five posts in, but not many seemed to have noticed.
I always thought that fleet captain could be a billet, which solves all the issues. But based on suggestions in this thread, I'm also partial to the idea that it's an honorific - it doesn't change a captain's rank, it just recognizes outstanding service as a starship captain.
Presumably the reason Kirk never received the honour under this intepretation was all the violations of the Prime Directive in his career...
Alternately, Kirk received the very honor, and indeed several years before TOS, and always was a Fleet Captain by billet or rank or whatever.
The fun thing is, Pike seems to have been Kirk's junior when it came to rank held per position: in "The Cage" he commanded the Enterprise with just one sleeve stripe when Kirk in "Where No Man" began with two. Might be he got promoted to (Fleet) Captain relatively later than Kirk, too, well after the incident depicted in "The Cage", and essentially simultaneously with the otherwise much younger Kirk. That is, Pike gets the |:| rank shortly before handing over the Enterprise, while Kirk gets it shortly after receiving the ship.
Speculation is fine, and has been all we have had until this point. But now we also have the visuals from DSC where Pike is wearing five rank markers on his shoulder, whilst four is the usual number to match Captain rank or the |:| sleeve braid... Perhaps we should start favoring the idea that Fleet Captain is a real rank with five pips or the (still unseen) braid of ||| now?
Timo Saloniemi
The fun thing is, Pike seems to have been Kirk's junior when it came to rank held per position: in "The Cage" he commanded the Enterprise with just one sleeve stripe when Kirk in "Where No Man" began with two. Might be he got promoted to (Fleet) Captain relatively later than Kirk, too, well after the incident depicted in "The Cage", and essentially simultaneously with the otherwise much younger Kirk. That is, Pike gets the |:| rank shortly before handing over the Enterprise, while Kirk gets it shortly after receiving the ship.
Speculation is fine, and has been all we have had until this point. But now we also have the visuals from DSC where Pike is wearing five rank markers on his shoulder, whilst four is the usual number to match Captain rank or the |:| sleeve braid... Perhaps we should start favoring the idea that Fleet Captain is a real rank with five pips or the (still unseen) braid of ||| now?
Timo Saloniemi
Or, they simply changed the rank signifiers between Pike's and Kirk's captaincies. Given the changes happening to the uniforms around that time, it's an easy interpretation.
I've never been entirely fond of the "five pip" arrangement as it magnifies the existing visual problem of the "missing" three and a half pip rank in US and UK/Commonwealth rankings, although several non-Anglophone navies (Albania, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Norway, Turkey and possibly others) do use it for Captain II/Commander/Frigate Captain.
As far as the III braid of TOS, I am in favour, and I believe that Picard at least would have worn this (or the Decker-variant of the Commodore uni) if TOS-style braid had been in use during TNG, as regardless of whether you except the title Fleet Captain specifically, it makes sense to acknowledge seniority among (starship) captains once you get to the point of having captains that have a generation or more seniority than some of their nominal peers, particularly as at least two of the "founder fleets" of Starfleet (Vulcan and Andorian) use two ranks for starship captains -- Commander (single ship, both) and Captain (Emeritus position [Vulcans], task force/squadron commander [Andorians] -- and it's plausible but not certain that Earth Starfleet didn't mostly because of the smaller size of their fleet.
Personally, I've always assumed that Pike should be retcon'd as wearing the Kirk braid, as the II uniform was later worn by a (more junior) Merchant Service captain in Charlie X, which logically supports the idea that a second/third junior captain rank equivalent of a Starship Commander exists at least within inter-divisional/organizational protocol.
We didn't really see him violate the Prime Directive in TOS, though. We saw him restoring planets to their natural course of evolution several times, but Kirk didn't disobey orders nearly as much as his popular myth suggests.
I would suggest instead the reason Kirk never got this title/rank is because they promoted him all the way Admiral instead for his achievements as a Captain.
I suggest the possibility that Pike may well have started as a lower rank when he became Captain, but that he had reached the 2-and-a-half stripe or 3-stripe level by the time Kirk took over...and that Kirk may have only been a Commander in that episode, the wearing only 2 stripes. In the original universe, Kirk could have only met Pike briefly before taking over, with the rest ofthe crew mostly in place (except for McCoy and a few other exceptions). Kirk then becomes a full Captain for the rest of the series.
Yeah. Kirk says in "The Menagerie" that he met Pike when Pike was promoted.
So yeah, it's pretty conclusive that Prime Kirk didn't know Pike nearly as well as he did in the Kelvin Timeline.
And yeah, I can definitely see Scotty serving under Pike for a while towards the end of Pike's command of the Enterprise. Spock, of course. Sulu? Maybe as the ship's physicist, yeah. Uhura? I get the feeling that she was new on Kirk's ship in "The Corbomite Maneuver." She's very restrained in that episode, as if she's still settling into a new assignment she's just recently started.
Lately, I've even come to think that Gary Mitchell served under Pike towards the end of Pike's command. After all Mr. Spock supposedly served next to Gary Mitchell "for years." I personally find it a very intriguing idea that for a certainly period of time, Mitchell knew both Spock and Kirk better than the two of them knew each other.
