Spoilers New season 3 badges

[IMC Headquarters]

I already miss the old badges. I love them so much I got some of the Qmx varieties for my everyday jackets. Great icebreakers in a masked public.

 

[fireproof78]

Trek has never been high-brow predictive futurist science fiction. It's mostly just an adventure story (+/- exploration of the human condition; occasionally a morality tale or an expression of some ideals), set in a futuristic environment.

Sometimes the productions teams have paid much attention to internal consistency / continuity, and sometimes they made a lot of effort to develop plausible future tech for their universe -- and sometimes they don't, or are completely willing to ignore what has gone before in favour of the needs of a particular story.

That's not going to change. The staff will always go for story over tech and they're also kinda constrained by keeping the tech to a level that their characters and their stories can interact with -- and which is acceptable to the majority of (non-fan) casual viewers. At the end of the day, it's a TV show that has to make money and they have ratings and viewer numbers to maintain.

Precisely so. And, the TOS writer's bible recognized that-we have to gain and maintain our audience or we don't stay on the air, period. Slight paraphrase but the idea is very clear as to what their priorities will be in terms of what is produced. And that audience is going to include people like myself who read up on new technologies being developed and people like someone I know who is a retired pipe welder who just enjoys having "new Star Trek" without much more impacting him than that.

I would love Trek to delve in to the futurism that many seem to expect it to do, but it has been left behind, and that was clear from the beginning.

 

[pdyl]

While we're doing Apple jokes, here's one more thing...

I guess this really should be the final version of my drawings:

I haven't included the rather odd design for Fleet Captain as I'm presenting it here with a couple of the more obvious alternatives:

I just don't get the "official" version with the gold base and two black pips between two gold pips. It just makes no sense to me.

I tried drawing a few potential alternatives that would fit more obviously between Captain (silver base / four gold pips) and Commodore (gold base / one gold pip):

- The first was the flag officer style with the gold base but no pips -- that works but it's a bit bland.

- The second was gold base with a single pip, like Commodore, but making the pip either black or silver to differentiate the role -- that also works but somehow wasn't quite right and it occurred to me that if you were changing the colour of the pips then, actually, a Fleet Captain should keep the four pips of a Captain but simply reverse the colours have the pips in silver (to differentiate from flag officers) and the base in gold (to indicate seniority to other captains). I also guess that a fleet captain would wear standard uniform rather than flag officer uniform so confusion with a full four-pip admiral shouldn't be a problem.

- The final version, and perhaps the most obvious, was to just keep the normal silver base of all non-flag officers but use five pips instead of the usual four pips for Captain. Again, this would be on a standard uniform so confusion with the five-pip Fleet Admiral should not be a problem.

I was kinda surprised that they actually created a badge for Fleet Captain but in some ways it's kinda nice to see too. I can't imagine it ever actually appearing in the show (unless someone really wants to write an episode that deliberately includes a Fleet Captain...!). Let's hope they consider amending the design before that happens!



** EDIT **
Images updated to correct the positions of the pips on the flag officer badges (see posts below).

Sorry if this was mentioned already, I am new to this board. It seems that there is a difference between the concept bade chart and what is actually shown on screen. So far to date, all Officer pips from Ensign thru Captain have the pips starting in the lower Delta like you see with the Flag Officers. Can you show that in your chart?

 

[Eric1701]

Curious, new here.... and I'm as huge anerd as anyone I guess...

Does anyone have like a chart with pictures and information on ALL the comm badges used throughout Trek thus far?