Spock wore gold and had the Command star insignia while Mitchell wore sandy brown and had a globe insignia, so I'd go with Spock as XO.
Crew Rank Insignia?
- Thread starter Chaos Descending
- Start date
Spock wore gold and had the Command star insignia while Mitchell wore sandy brown and had a globe insignia, so I'd go with Spock as XO.
Although, with shows or movies about the military, some of the uniform errors are intentional, otherwise the actors could be facing criminal charges for impersonating military personnel.
Not in the US; the Supreme Court has ruled that the use of military uniforms in dramatic portrayals is protected by the First Amendment.
Some military and police agencies have lawyered up to protect their uniform insignia as intellectual property, as we saw with depiction of Peruvian troops in a first-season episode of Agents of SHIELD, the RCMP in Due South (at least until Leslie Nielsen intervened in support of that series), and so on...
I just came across this video this morning, which has a segment about the decorations starting around the 5:30 mark.
They amount of detail they put in to things for brief appearances on screen is amazing.
Love it, thank you for posting this.
I love how they’re keeping the visual vibe of TOS while upgrading the hell out of the production quality.
My pleasure!
I’d been looking for info on that topic and finally stumbled across it after I stopped trying.
Rank devices and military decorations has always been a bit of a hobby for me. I did a whole work up on NuBSG uniform designs back in the day.
I have come to the conclusion that, apart from Captain Pike, the rank insignia of the Enterprise crew has no relationship to the rank of the person wearing it. It's kind of sad that the production team has paid so little attention to detail in this regard.
Uhura is correct, no stripe ensign. But all the Lieutenants have Lt. Commander stripes, and Una has full commander stripes. However, because they aren't using broken stripes the distiction between lt jg and full lt is difficult to see in practice. Therefore perhaps Lt. jG is one wide stripe. Unfortunately that leaves us without an existing option for full commander. we could invent one, thin thick thin?
From the trailer he's still rocking one stripe in "Subspace Rhapsody". Though easy enough to hand-wave that it hasn't been that long since episode 6 and he's still transitioning into the position/awaiting formal promotion. Guess we'll see if he's still addressed as Lt. or Lt. Cmdr. when he boards the Enterprise but my guess is he's still a Lt in episode 9.Kirk oddly enough has the single stripe of a TOS lieutenant, yet I assume will be promoted to Lt. Commander when he officially takes on the Farragut XO position.
Be curious as to what stripes he sports in "Sub-space Rhapsody"
Tried to freezeframe on him in the trailer, but failed.
A prop in tonight's episode seems to confirm that M'Benga's rank is full commander. I believe this is the first time that his rank has been definitively established. So now we can say that we've seen the two wide stripes worn by a lieutenant, a lieutenant commander, and a commander.
Is one of those Chapel? She's supposed to be a civilian at this point.
I'm not entirely sure that tonight's episode didn't just retcon that line from the premiere out of existence.
But that aside, the characters I was referring to were Hemmer (lieutenant), Una (lieutenant commander), and M'Benga (commander). As far as I recall, Chapel's rank, if any, hasn't been established yet.
I also spotted the two wide stripes on a redshirted extra in one of the episodes from this week, but I don't recall if it was tonight's or Saturday's.
I could be very wrong on this, but tonight's episode might have been the first time that we've seen an unnamed member of the medical staff wear a blue uniform, like M'Benga, rather than a white uniform, like Chapel.
I'm starting to wish all the branches showed the gold braid. While initially an interesting idea, matching the braid color to the shirt color, I'm finding it difficult to read their rank braids, which are supposed to be easily readable from a distance IRL. In fact, I've always found the TOS braids to be most practical. Even if SNW's braids were gold, it may also be difficult to see the difference between the thick and thin stripes (closest to multiple nations' modern Navy designs, ironically), whereas the stripe/broken dashes design from TOS was imminently readable. I suppose it doesn't matter, though, if they're using all these different grades interchangeably in-dialogue - kind of defeating the purpose, really. 
