I Like Commodores!
- Thread starter Red Ranger
- Start date
The United States did actually have "Commodore Admiral" for a little while, believe it or not.
The British grade was "brigadier general" for many years before the US adopted it, but the British Army changed it after WW1.
--Justin
Orcus: As I found out more about sleeve ranks in the real world, I always found the TOS system odd. Sure, it makes sense: ensigns have no sleeve rank, then lieutenant, j.g. has a broken braid., and so on.
I would have preferred if Starfleet's sleeve braids more closely resembled real-world navies, while maintaining the broken braid for certain ranks. So, our main characters' sleeve braids would've looked like this: Captain Kirk, four gold braids; Commander Spock, three; McCoy and Scotty, both Lieutenant Commanders, their sleeve braids would've resembled the one Kirk actually wore, two full braids with a broken braid in the middle; Sulu and Uhura, full Lieutenants, two full sleeve braids; and Chekov, ensign, one full sleeve braid.
Kinda nitpicky, I know. At least the Commodore sleeve rank quite closely corresponded to most real-world navies' sleeve braid.
I agree with Red Ranger on this.
I have read somewhere that William Theiss wanted a simplified, streamlined futuristic look for the uniforms and so, with that in mind, wanted fewer sleeve braids per rank.
The only problem I have with using the standard USN system is that it doesn't seem like something one would design from a clean slate as a system that would, presumably, encompass varying rank systems from various component forces. The real world system goes by "half steps" mostly, but ensign starts out at 1 instead of zero or 0.5, and there is no half step between three stripes and four. This is of course because the system evolved -- from a simple one through three stripes for lieutenant, commander and captain -- to encompass more and newer grades. But if one were designing a new system from the ground up, the TOS system makes sense as a logical numeric progression.
--Justin
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One of the problems I had with the uniforms in Enterprise were the using of the rank pips from the TNG era. I really feel they should have used the sleeve braids like TOS. It would have been much more in keeping with pointing to that era.
And also to Chaos Descending: Yep I'm with you both on this idea - it makes the most sense to me (although I like the pattern of braid used on TOS).
As an aside, here in NZ Ensigns start in our navy with a "half-width" stripe (with 'executive whorl' - ala RN). Next is Sub-lieutenant (one full-width stripe with whorl) - then Lieutenant with two full-width stripes (with whorl). All other ranks above this point follow exactly the pattern set by the Royal Navy.
The RN doesn't have Ensigns, starting instead with Sub-lieutenant - RNZN introduced Ensigns to save confusion and make our ranking system appear compatible with the USN when posted with US personnel (otherwise our most junior officers would have appeared to be senior to Ensigns and the same grade as Lt jg).
You'd think they would, but I kind of liked the ENT "pips." The difference between them and the ENT ranks was in TNG, they were small round pips, whild in ENT they were rectangular pipsl.
Personally, I wished that commodore had continued in the TNG era (I always felt it should have been a one-pip admiral). Under those circumstances, Picard probably should have been a commodore and Sisko sometime later. It even would have made more sense for Janeway to have been promoted to commodore rather than bumped all the way to vice admiral, IMO...
Yeah SOPA would have made sense...I think they just wanted to bring back "Captain Kirk" and Admiral Kirk maybe didn't sound right for the future trek come back. because then what do you have after the mission. another officer or maybe spock would assume command and kirk would go back to being chief of ops and maybe get drunk, call his orion booty call then cry about the enterprise and take a phaser to the head...
WTF?!
I think it's time to stop drinking the bong water.
L
Lord Garth
Guest
Same here. They were a good band.
Same here. They were a good band.
And not too bad a car, either...
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