^On the show, Earth Starfleet didn't have a lieutenant commander rank. Apparently that changed by the time of the novels.
Coming July 2013: STAR TREK ENTERPRISE — RISE OF THE FEDERATION
- Thread starter Christopher
- Start date
I just saw the cover and blurb on trek collective. While the blurb sounds interesting, the cover just looks so bland, so blah... It looks like some one grabbed a frame from TATV (just before he gives his speech)and just photo shopped Archer onto that uninteresting background.
Really? Just because one was never shown on the series doesn't mean it didn't exist.
It's a TV show. Nothing exists until someone writes it into an episode.
Besides -- ensigns had one rank pip, lieutenants had two, commanders had three, captains had four. How do you fit a lieutenant commander into that?
Yeah, like bathrooms. You going to argue that the ship never had any until we saw one?
Just like on TNG: Pips of a different color.
The point is, there is no "real" Trek universe where something exists without us knowing about it. It's just a bunch of stuff people make up. The people who made up the show decided that there would not be a lieutenant commander's rank. The people who wrote the earlier ENT novels either didn't notice that quirk of the period or chose to disregard it. So now, in the novel continuity, there is a lieutenant commander's rank. And whether it existed during the series is irrelevant to me because that's not the period I'm writing about.
Oh come on Christopher - you KNOW no-one on here believes that !
That would appear to be why they gave it to Christopher !
Last edited:
To be honest, I don't actually remember the reference either. I was going to write that Lieutenant to Captain in less than five years seemed quite a jump, but then I was thinking "but where have I heared him referred to as 'Commander Reed'?" I then checked Memory Beta which said he was a Lt. Commander in To Brave the Storm.
Although, I seem to recall that Reed was going to be a Lt. Commander in the show but was changed to Lieutenant when Dominic Keating was cast because he was "to young to be a Lt. Commander." Yeah, I know, not really relevant, I just point it out as a fun fact.
Yeah, like bathrooms. You going to argue that the ship never had any until we saw one?
Toilets have been seen twice, in the Enterprise's brig in Trek V and in the NX-01's decon chamber in the episode Observer Effect. Bathrooms themselves were mentioned in a Voyager episode (several of them on the ship were "offline" which was especially problematic for the ship's Bolian crew). Not to mention all the various references to "waste extraction" on DS9. Bathrooms might never have been seen, but they do canonically exist due to having been mentioned in dialogue.
Enterprise was on the air four years and in that time we never saw anyone ranked Lt. Commander nor was anyone of that rank mentioned. It's perfectly reasonable to assume such rank does not exist in the United Earth Starfleet.
^We saw showers several times in ENT, and we saw a bathtub in TNG: "Genesis."
And whatever the case with the UE Starfleet, there are lieutenant commanders in the UFP Starfleet as of RotF.
And whatever the case with the UE Starfleet, there are lieutenant commanders in the UFP Starfleet as of RotF.
It's also perfectly reasonable to assume it DOES exist. To wit:
- Earth Starfleet is a navy. It may not be THE navy, but it is *a* navy.
- We never saw anybody promoted straight from Lieutenant to Commander, did we?
- Like I said, just because we never happened to see anyone of LCDR rank doesn't mean it didn't exist. The very fact that Reed was considered to be given that rank, counts for something, doesn't it?
^See post #379.
Also, from what we've been given to understand, Archer is Freaking Awesome™. It honestly would not surprise me if he were promoted directly from Captain to Admiral. (I feel like there is precedent in canon for this kind of jump, but I can't think of it specifically at the moment.)
^Kirk was promoted from captain to admiral prior to TMP and again prior to TWOK. But it's generally accepted that he was a rear admiral, which in the US Navy was the equivalent of the commodore rank once that rank was phased out -- i.e. just one step up from captain rather than two.
And if the lieutenant commander rank did exist in UE Starfleet, it would have made way more sense for the writers to give that rank to Tucker, thereby giving T'Pol's assertion in Broken Bow that she outranked Tucker at least *some* defensibility.
Enterprise is the only Star Trek show where, when the characters claim Starfleet is not military, I can actually believe them. I can easily see UES using some naval ranks as "job grades" without adopting the whole structure. (Of course, the show writers didn't really stick to this, because they ended up using UES ships in a military role all the time, just like in the 23rd & 24th century shows.)
Did we ever see anyone get promoted to anything? Even the finale, supposedly five years after the previous episode, still had everyone at the same rank!
OK, to be fair... in the First Flight flashbacks, Tucker was a lieutenant, and in the series he was a commander. And in the alt-future from Twilight Lieutenant Reed had been promoted to commander. But since there were significant time gaps between both of these examples, and we never saw either promoted directly, I guess this is inconclusive.
As it should be.
EDIT follows:
To be fair, I believe Rear Admiral Lower Half is the USN equivalent of commodore, and based on Kirk's stripes in TMP, he would have been equivalent to USN's Rear Admiral Upper Half, still two steps up from captain.
Personally, I find the whole upper/lower half thing clunky. The Canadian Navy still proudly uses the rank of Commodore.
Last edited:
Personally, I find the whole upper/lower half thing clunky. The Canadian Navy still proudly uses the rank of Commodore.
Plenty of navies still do. I think the US Navy is one of the few (possibly only one) to have gotten rid of it.
But mainly in situations where NX-01 was the only ship that could get there fast enough, so it was more a matter of lacking alternatives.
True, but it still would have been nice to see Earth military ships in an outer-system defense role instead of Starfleet in The Expanse, or in an Earth-orbit defense role instead of... nothing, in Zero Hour.
As did the UE Starfleet. Forrest was a commodore in "First Flight."To be fair, I believe Rear Admiral Lower Half is the USN equivalent of commodore, and based on Kirk's stripes in TMP, he would have been equivalent to USN's Rear Admiral Upper Half, still two steps up from captain.
Personally, I find the whole upper/lower half thing clunky. The Canadian Navy still proudly uses the rank of Commodore.
I'm not a fan of phasing out the rank of commodore either. But mostly just because I think it sounds cool.
Similar threads
- Poll
