I think you are right, in at least one episode she is fixing the subspace radio with spock.
I deleted my quote of your previous post!
Definitely, Uhura's is a technical role, managing internal and external comns and maintaining the communications systems.
She's also proficient in other bridge duties such as navigation, and joins landing parties for more general roles - e.g. leading a search team looking for Bones in COTEOF.
Definitely, Uhura's is a technical role, managing internal and external comns and maintaining the communications systems.
She's also proficient in other bridge duties such as navigation, and joins landing parties for more general roles - e.g. leading a search team looking for Bones in COTEOF.
Comms officer is typically a command position in the navy, and Uhura was initially in a command uniform in TOS, and also in TMP. Trek has been so inconsistent. She's a technician rather than a broadly trained engineer. She's a mathematician rather than a broad scientist. But when Nichelle was given the opportunity to control junior officers, she owned it. She's certainly more in control of the investigation in TUC than former security chief Chekov. Yet she's in engineering red in TOS and grey science. I get why in the sixties they were not going to put her in charge but they failed to capitalise on her talents time and again. It winds me up in TMP that Uhura is not asked to help Spock work on V'Ger's signal. THAT'S LITERALLY HER JOB SPOCK.
I think there were better ways to be funny without making the characters look stupid with very basic roadblocks that wouldn't outfox 20th century methods.
She really didn't get that chance until TAS, but she was a hell of a lot more effective as an actress in TOS then she was given the chance to be. She absolutely could have handled more than she was given without upsetting the sensibilities of the late 60's.
Sadly, as much as fans like to say Shatner made the supporting cast look bad in TFF, Meyer made Chekov and Uhura look worse (at least Uhura singing and doing a fan dance was part of her skillset). The investigation in TUC was a joke in every way. Uhura needed a dozen books tossed around by a bunch of nobodies to talk to Klingons. And when the Klingons are laughing Chekov mouths laughing as if to figure out what they're doing. And then some other nobody has coach them to laugh in response.
I've already gone on at length here about how much the forced jokes and cheesiness rubs me the wrong way. Nick Meyer in 1991 was not the same Nick Meyer in 1982.
This kind of feels like the "what does the receptionist actually do?" effect. Most people in an office ignore the front desk staff... and yet, the entire office collapses when the front desk can't or isn't doing their job.
People in charge of communications in a organization spend a lot of time keeping track of who knows what, recording information, and filtering information. A big part of Uhura's job was surely deciding what Kirk needed to know now, what he needed to know during the routine meeting at the end of the shift, what should really go to Spock, and what can just get put in the end-of-week report because it doesn't matter. And then remembering what went in that end-of-week report when suddenly it does matter. This is not unskilled work. And while modern computing systems help a lot, that kind of filtering and prioritisation still needs a human in the loop. Certainly there wasn't a way to automate it in the 1960s!
Plus, there's presumably at least four people doing that job - three watch-standers and a spare - so someone needs to be in charge of them. TOS doesn't have a lot of rank levels, so Lt. seems reasonable. (Arguably, the Yeomen are also under Communications, though that's fan speculation on my part.)
We also shouldn't assume a 21st Century Earth level of coms reliability. In the 1940s-1960s, just being able to get your radio sending a message to the other radio was skilled labour. Who knows what getting two subspace radios to work requires? Especially in the TOS era; by TNG we can assume a network similar to a cellular network covers most of the Federation, but in TOS, we're dealing with future-short-wave radio.
In short: the person in the Communications chair needs a range of technical, interpersonal, analytical, and organizational skills at a fairly high degree, and at least one of them needs to be an officer in command of the rest. TOS may not have been great at showing this, but I'd not be surprised if Roddenberry and Meyer didn't really appreciate how much work their admin assistants did, too, so I'm not surprised that kind of work (which is, admittedly, not dramatically interesting) didn't make it onto the screen.
Well to be fair, that depends on the size of office and how the workflow is set up. Uhura is portrayed as a switchboard operator and not the front desk. That's not always the same thing. I've worked in a number of offices. Smaller outfits rely on their receptionists to handle phones as well as front deck client greeting, meeting room set up and so on. My current much lager firm limits the position to routing calls to assistants and greeting visitors. The rest of the duties are parceled out to others.
Having said that:
This is a very reasonable and unfortunately almost totally unspoken - and logical - part of what should be her job. She's on the bridge, so she's in charge of that. Probably filters other less time sensitive issues to others. That's good insight.
I'm not surprised at all. There's no room for it in the stories, although she could have been shown to be smarter than they have her looking in TUC.
But their main focus was making sure Kirk, Spock and McCoy were well serviced and everyone else had enough dialog to keep them from bitching to Starlog.
Sounds like a good firm!
TMP plans had a Communications Bay at the bottom of the saucer. This would be where the non-coms monitor and receive all the signals. Presumably the computer, supervised by crew on duty, prioritise messages and Uhura gets the most important or most relevant to pass on to the Captain.
It's silly to expect Uhura do triage every comms signal out there. In STIV, when she had no help, Spock says, "Uhura is busy. I am monitoring."
This also gives a bit of a patch over one of my post-TOS pet-peeves, that "Operations" is a nonsense station/job. Ostensibly, their role is to ensure ship's resources are correctly allocated, but that seems like both too much and not enough; allocating crew is the First Officer's job, allocating computer time is the Science Officer's job, and allocating power is the Engineer's job. Just having a full station dedicated to micromanaging ship's priorities and stepping on everyone else's toes seems strange.
On the other hand, if we take this aspect that the nuts-and-bolts of external (and internal) communications is perfectly automated in the 24th century, Ops could be the human (or android) in the loop, synthesizing all the information about and surrounding the ship and summing it up for the captain and department heads as it happens.
And there was a massive Communications Lab that Uhura was assigned to initially in ST09 before getting a bridge shift thanks to being able to tell the difference between Romulan and Vulcan.
Yep IRL there would be a whole workflow with Uhura at the top and a staff to assist. For TV, it's the one person they pay to be in the episode. But you did hear her toss off some instructions to other places like "analysis sector" in The Changeling.
They just rebranded “science officer” for TNG. Ops does whatever the plot requires, it’s a bridge node for all the scientific and analysis departments on the ship.
Data never allocates anything, he mainly receives information, analyses it and suggests options to the captain.
Ops is more of a rebranded engineering station, which is why it tends to be manned by an engineer. In TOS, it was very much kept in the background unless Scotty was working it, but monitoring ship's systems and re-allocation of power resources during emergencies is very much applicable to both stations.
That's not the principle function Ops carries out on the shows. Data and Kim are the bridge science officers - their main job is scanning things.
But it's also like the deflector dish - it's a swiss army knife station. Data can reroute power, he can adjust the structural integrity field, operate tractor beams, even communications, weapons and helm control.
There's an engineering station at the back that fulfills the same narrative need it did it TOS - give the engineer somewhere to stand when they're needed on the bridge for the story.
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Funnily enough I've just been reminded there's a scene in Unification where Data is off the ship, but the plot needs someone to scan an alien ship and speak some [Tech] lines.
So Geordi just happens to be standing at the back of the bridge, and performs a scan and analysis from the engineering station.
So Geordi just happens to be standing at the back of the bridge, and performs a scan and analysis from the engineering station.
Plus the security station doing scans, comms, weapons, shields etc.
I think I preferred it when the stations dictated the function rather than the characters. That said, stations that can be reconfigured to suit the mission make perfect sense, I suppose.
A bit late, but...
I'd give these the same in-universe explanation as to the Romulan Bird-of-Prey racing the Enterprise in Balance of Terror: they were using fusion reactors to produce the plasma to reach low warp speeds, instead of the matter/antimatter core. In both cases the spoken lines are about using "impulse power", not "impulse engines." The Romulans didn't have M/AM power generation yet in TOS but the BoP has obvious warp nacelles. For the Excelsior... perhaps it saved antimatter and was good enough for their current need.
That's enough lampshade for me.
Or perhaps Nick Meyer just didn't give a rat's patoot about getting the technical details of the Star Trek universe correct...
Or he felt that it communicated what was happening better to a wider audience who REALLY didn't give a patoot.Or perhaps Nick Meyer just didn't give a rat's patoot about getting the technical details of the Star Trek universe correct...
In the modern navy, they report to the executive officer, which also seems to have been the case for Rand on TOS. I'm not sure about today, but in World War II, some yeomen did have communications duties as phone circuit talkers at their battle stations.
That would make sense, but in TOS we don't really see an executive officer. Spock is 2IC, yes - but do we ever see him doing actual XO duties? He's described as the science officer more than the executive officer. And whilst there is certainly a tradition of the 2IC and the XO being the same person that dates back to the late 17th Century Royal Navy, where the First Lieutenant's duties included what we'd now call the Executive Officer's duties, which is to say managing the crew in the same way the Chief Engineer manages the engineering department and the Surgeon manages sickbay.
Contrast with Riker in TNG, or even Una in SNW, where these officers are doing XO duties.
Obviously someone has to be doing that work, but there's no requirement that it be the second in command of the ship, and I think it helps make Star Fleet get some distance from the US Navy that it isn't Spock. And if it isn't Spock, and assuming Kirk is too busy to be doing it himself, maybe it's actually Uhura? Wild fan speculation, of course, there's nothing I can think of in the show to support that, I just enjoy the idea.
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