Anyone have an official source for the Acting Ensign Uniform...?

Aha, so we DO have someone here in favour of this interpretation! But - million dilithium crystal question - do we have any behind-the-scenes evidence that this was the case...? As I say above, I find this interpretation plausible, but without a backstage clue it's essentially speculation, and it's impossible to rule out that Wesley chose to dress this way because he wanted something that could look like a uniform even though it wasn't. (If only Bill Theiss hadn't been so averse to interviews!!)

The WAM for "The Battle" runs two weeks from today, so I'm super keen to get the skinny on this before the newsletter 'goes to print'. Thanks once again for everyone who waded in on this!

 

In one of the early books, a character (Riker?) mentions that the uniforms are so comfortable that he prefers them to civilian clothing.

Ironic, yes. But they sure did look comfortable.

 

That is sure an interesting quote because when I imagine what show could mean by that, the uniforms worn on Voyager come to mind immediately, even though they were designed by another person.

Seriously, though, how many "acting Ensigns" would there ever be?

Enlisted crew would not have gone to the Academy and would not need to go to the Academy. They would have their own enlisted ranks, like we see later with O'Brien.

(On the other hand, O'Brien is called a Lieutenant once, so maybe he is "acting" LT and they just don't say that part aloud? He wears a duty uniform though, so that indicates Wesley is in a different system from O'Brien.)

Cadets would mostly not be Ensigns yet, and whether they could have rank while cadets or not, I could see them wearing something like Wesley wears in Season 2. But in that case they would not "Acting Ensigns," they would be either cadets or Ensigns outright.

The sweater in question could be a "uniform" in the sense that the only person to whom the term "Acting Ensign" applies wears it to work, but, in fact, not be "uniform," as in "the same" as anything worn by anyone, including the other acting Ensigns on other ships, who are likely very few, if any.

 

wow, have you just elegantly solved the decades-old issue of O’Brian’s rank?!

He’s an enlisted man who while on the enterprise served as acting lieutenant. Brilliant!

It must be noted that O’Brian is entitled to a regular uniform due to his being regularly in Starfleet, though.

 

Personally, at least for the first 2 seasons - I think that sweater getup could have worked for the Captain and XO getup. It always felt weird to me that being in control of the ship would just be a normal a department color. As Captain, you are over all - operations/security, science/medical, conn/whateverelseisred

 

So you want to put Picard and Riker in grey sweaters that have those red/yellow/green strips running across the chest?
Really?
Plus, red is also Command, that's why the captain and XO are wearing that colour.

 

Sure, why not?

Let's time travel back to 1987. They were making a new show and everything was up for grabs.

In TOS Kirk had the green wrap around.

In the movies, the Captains uniquely wore white. That was the command division. The 2 guys in charge. Not 1/3rd of the ship. White is the color that all colors come from, even makes sense there. The precedent had already been changed.

Now. Here we are. 1st season TNG. Who is going to seem more charge. The guys in the sweater and pants. Clothes that adults actually wear, or everyone else in their skin tight spandex onesies, or possibly the ladies (and guys, of course) running around in skants?

Yeah, I could easily see the sweater guys as being in charge.

 

That's not actually true.



White is for all command department officers. Not just the actual ship commanders.

Even though some jobs that had been (and would again be) part of Command got shunted off to Operations or Sciences for some strange reason, like helm and navigation, that doesn't mean there weren't any lower-level Command officers.

I'll admit that the Monster Maroon color scheme doesn't actually make a ton of sense, though.

 

There were massive continuity issues with them, I mean, Chekhov as the XO of Reliant didn't wear white.

The point still being, it was supposed to be a much more exclusive color scheme. It meant, Command. Unlike today with Red meaning command, or special operations, or bridge officer or helm or whatever.

 

The Star Trek Fact Files has a depiction of Wesley's sweater costume and claims it is the acting ensigns uniform, but the illustration looks more like a uniform than what Wesley actually wears on the show. Plus the Fact Files didn't always get it right. I don't even know where they got their info from.

 

We don't actually know that. It's never clearly established what the colors mean.

We know that helm and nav were taken out of the Command department for a while (in some cases, at least), but we don't know anything about most of the other officers who wear white. Especially the junior officers.

The Fact Files are closer to fan fiction than anything else. I bet we could scroll through that page and find a dozen errors without really even trying.

 

There's also the sheer force of accumulation to consider. By season 7 they would have built up quite a large wardrobe a bit at a time.

I think I've mentioned this a few times before, but there was supposed to be a departmental colour scheme for the TWOK uniforms, but the costume department were very poor at sticking to it.

I also read it said that the TNG uniforms put black at all the sensitive regions to preserve the actors' dignity... but no word about the one child actor dressed all in light grey!

 

It probably wasn't helped by the studio never releasing an official guide. Publicizing that information would have made it a lot easier for the production crew to follow it.

Maybe had they explained what the colors and symbols meant, later costumers could have avoided some of the more embarrassing mistakes.

 

The downside of knowing what all the uniform colours mean, is that you'd have to properly decide what each random extra did with their lives!

dJE

 

I think it was also a case of those uniforms being difficult to make and later films just recycling whatever would fit the actors irrespective of the rules.

 

The folks in this picture may not all be CMDR's or Captains, but the few whose rank I can see clearly would be in specialized roles that would definitely mean that, even if you did not need a certain rank to wear white, any post outside of a Command Headquarters would likely have very few of them.

-Saavik is only a LT, but unless I'm mistaken, she and the Captain are the only 2 people in a white sweater shown on the Grissom, and she seems to have some kind of lead role.

-The bald alien works at HQ and also is giving important (weather) reports, so that indicates that he might be at least an important NCO in communications or meteorology or some other role like that.

-I cannot tell anything clearly for the two men in the upper small pictures, other than one is a LT at CONN or Ops. That person could be XO at the rank of LT and still do one of those positions, like Number One in "The Cage." What movies or episodes are these from?

-The woman in picture on the upper right is wearing an honor cord, and since Kirk's yeoman wore an honor cord in ST:5, she is probably a Captain's yeoman and is wearing white for that reason, so there would not many others wearing that uniform. Again, I'm not sure what movie this is from.

-The woman in relative close-up in the lower right is on a variant of the movie bridge, but it does not look like a variant used in the actual movies. I'm guessing that she is an officer shown in the background of the Bozeman, am I correct? She seems to have CMDR's or Captain's ranks, which would make her possibly the first officer of the Bozeman, which does not require than many of the Bozeman crew wear white.

It's admittedly hard to tell in these pictures since some details are not clear, and saying that only 3 people on the ship wear white may be a stretch, but it seems plausible that under this system we would generally see a lot fewer officers in white sweaters than we would see officers in red shirts in TNG.

On the special features for one of the movies' DVD's, Robert Fletcher alludes to creating the rank insignia for these uniforms and coming up with a system for departmental colors. Apparently it is either complicated, it was changed by later productions, or they just costumed actors as they could.

This example of Valeris' uniform colors does not bother me much; I just suppose that she is a recent graduate who got her shoulder strap at a ceremony, but who has not gotten her Sciences sweater yet

 

What's wrong with turtle necks....
Fashion, I'm not an expert and I don't need to be but isn't it all about what's cool right now, something might be fashionable today and tomorrow no one wants to wear it.
That turtle neck uniform was apparently very Starfleet in 2364 but was gone pretty soon.
One might say fortunately it went out of fashion....

 

Think Geek did have it for sale as a hoodie in 2014, but now that it's a part of Gamestop doesn't seem to have it up for sale. I did see a few other sites, like Etsy have them. The point is, you can get one if you wanted to!

This is my thinking on it in that Wesley just wore that shirt and considered it his uniform until someone took pity on him and created him an actual uniform.

The odd thing though is that every other time we've seen an "Acting" officer in anything long-term (unlike when a captain is temporarily unable to serve as captain, for example), they wore the uniform and pips (insignia) of the position that they were acting as: Riker as acting captain in "Best of Both Worlds, Part II" got a fourth pip and Kirk donned the yellow command shirt in the Kelvinverse, followed by him making Chekov acting chief engineer and telling him to, "Go put on a red shirt." It makes sense that taking over after the captain's shift, or while they're on shore leave, etc. wouldn't lead to a change in uniform, but anything long-term would.

 

Not sure that "helmsman" would count as all that specialized.

I was principally taking issue with the notion that white was exclusively reserved for the commander and first officer of a starship. Which is plainly not true.

Sure, it wasn't 1/3 of the ship. But that's because there were suddenly more options than just the three colors in TNG. The movies jumped from three colors to at least five (if not more), which means that some of the larger categories got broken down into smaller divisions. Such as medicine being removed from the Sciences department and given their own color. They also took some of the Command functions out of Command and gave them to Operations and Science, for some strange and undetermined reason. So sure, fewer people wore white in the movies than wore gold in TOS or red in TNG. But it wasn't just the top two officers.

We don't even know that it was customary during the movie era for first officers to be in the Command division. That really started with Riker and TNG, when "first officer" became a job in its own right rather than a secondary role taken on by the science officer or helmsman. Chekov says in dialogue that he is the first officer of Reliant, but yet he wears the gray of Science or Operations or whatever it was supposed to be. Spock wears white, true, but he's the Captain of the Enterprise and not its first officer.

And then there's Saavik. There's no reason to indicate that she was the first officer of the Grissom, yet she wears white. She's just a junior officer who's had command training, which makes her part of the Command division. We later see the Excelsior's helmsman wearing white, and the woman on the bridge of the Bozeman wearing white. Those two were both junior grade lieutenants, and therefore not first officer material by anything we've seen. The third unidentified man in the graphic is one of Tuvok's roommates, which speaks for itself.

So we can see that while white is not the most common uniform color on a starship, we can also establish that certainly wasn't limited to just commanders or highly specialized roles.

It was changed in no small part because nobody knew what Fletcher's system was, and subsequent costumers just made up whatever they felt like. That's why I wish they had actually released Fletcher's notes so we could know what he was thinking, because it's pretty hard to determine the logic behind Fletcher's color scheme based solely on what we saw on screen.

And they also got her rank wrong because.... ?