Captain/Commander and size of command

[Crewman47]

After reading the post on why Sisko was a Commander in early DS9 I started to think about if Starfleet hands out it's ship/station commands to any Captain or Commader based on the size or if it's just random picking?

For example Kirk and Picard are Captains and have commanded top line Starships, Sisko was a Commander in charge of Space Station but then got promoted to Captain and command of the Defiant, but with a crew of of only 50 and then there's Janeway who was a Captain in command of an Intrepid with a crew of 150.

I've read that todays Navy does have some sort of size limits where Lt Commanders will command a ship with a small crew size, above that Commanders command the next size group up and then for the larger ships it's Captains that command them.

Do you suppose this is same setup in Starfleet?

 

[Timo]

We have seen very small ships under the command of a full Captain - say, the Grissom in ST3. So I'd argue against strict crew size limits, and instead for some sort of a "threshold importance" of the mission. That is, any armed starship that ventures into deep space and acts as a spearhead of UFP policies is important enough to warrant a Captain for a skipper... And some lesser vessels may find themselves tasked with similar things, and thus may receive a high-ranking CO.

OTOH, I would like to argue that Commander is a perfectly good rank for commanding a largish frontline vessel, too... It's just that we've not seen such commands so far. Unless we count the Enterprise in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", as Captain Kirk's sleeve clearly stated his Commander rank. That is, unless we assume that the rank braid system was different from the regular TOS one in that pilot episode.

FWIW, Sisko's initial command of DS9 apparently involved 300 underlings, as stated in "Captive Pursuit". That would include both Starfleet and Bajoran personnel, supposedly, and might exclude assorted passersby, stragglers, merchants, spies and whatnot.

Timo Saloniemi