I take it the crew of Discovery will be issued new uniforms rather than the current ones they wear which are many hundreds of years old?
I haven't read through the entire thread, but I'm sure someone has brought up that's it's gotten increasingly established that several uniform styles can exist simultaneously in Starfleet: LDS has Cerritos and First Contact, VOY maintains its style even after reconnecting with Starfleet, DSC has TOS variant along with its own style, Short Treks introduced a Cage variant.
It seems like new uniform roll out happens ship by ship and not simultaneously. In GEN we even saw a ship in flux
I like the uniforms. Would have liked a bit more change in 800/900 years, but I prefer them to the DISCO ones. Really like the com badge. Really classy and timeless.
The com badge could do with being matt just for TV purposes but it is nice ( also much like new C3PO the badge must be a pain for the CGI people )
Yes, it has been mentioned above! Even back to the original series, there was never just one single uniform and nothing else: the standard uniform, the one-piece single colour work suits, Kirk’s wrap-around (and others garments in a similar style), the medical smock worn by McCoy and M’benga, the dress uniforms... The same was also true for the extended TNG-era, including DS9 and Voyager.
Yes, Vance addresses each of them, in turn, as “Captain [name]” before assigning their missions. I agree that the presence of multiple insignia could be confusing but the main features seem to be the single patch on the collar that is the same design as the junior officers but in gold with the four pips added above the two “check marks.” Vance has a pair of mirror-image collar pins, each with five pips. Similarly, Vance’s uniform has epaulettes that run the lengths of his shoulders, rather than front-to-back like the captains. Noticeably, Vance has five check-mark stripes below five pips on his epaulettes, the captains have two check-marks (like the collar patch) below their four pips on each shoulder strap. This is more subtle but I’m fairly convinced that the raised bumps that make up the pips on the left-hand edge of the transporter badge are silver for the captains and below (or black where required for LCDR and LTJG) whereas Vance appears to have five gold pips on his badge, the same as the gold delta on all the badges. We haven’t yet seen any other flag officers (other than the symbiont image of Senna Tal, who appeared to be wearing an older version of the uniform). It seems odd that the C-in-C is taking such a direct hand in co-ordinating day-to-day operations — maybe there just aren’t that many flag officers left...?! (Obviously, from a production point of view, they have cast Oded Fehr and they’re going to make full use of him; no other admirals required...!) If we do see any other admirals, my guess is that their uniforms will be similar to Vance, with gold pips (four or less) on the transporter badge and the same collar pins as Vance, but with the relevant number of pips. Similarly, I would expect them to have longitudinal epaulettes like Vance but with, four pips over four check-mark stripes or three pips over three stripes, and so on.
Yes, that could well be deliberate! The later movies pretty much just used the TMP security uniforms but dyed them maroon! My guess is that these are intended to be operational duty uniforms specific to Security. I guess the question is, when wearing the standard grey jacket uniform, would Security wear the yellow stripes of the Operations division (like the two guys in the background of the briefing room scene) or would they have their own version with black stripes that we just haven’t seen yet...?
Why not consider that the two uniforms exist simultaneously and have different purposes rather than one simply replacing the other? The mandarin collar TNG uniforms actually continued in parallel throughout DS9’s run, where they were generally a more formal uniform than the original DS9 costumes that were clearly intended to be more of a utility or working uniform. Obviously, by the end of DS9 they had almost entirely transitioned into the grey-shoulder version first introduced in First Contact but that made sense as they moved from conflict with the Klingons into full-on war with the Dominion and that uniform was much more appropriate (and visually they needed to go to a darker, less colourful look, as well has having to work with what had been established in the movies).