Starship Insignia

That would mean that Spock can't be the XO of Kirk's ship, because what are the odds of that?

I guess we can only tell there isn't a high number of Vulcans aboard those other doomed ships, or Spock would get plot-significant vibes...

I'm all for "different symbols for different Fleets" in the DS9 sense of Fleets within Starfleet - nothing to do with species or even areas of responsibility, just arbitrary organizational subdividing. That's the best insurance against getting contradicted, after all.

Whether Kirk's arrowhead would then denote the famed 1st (?) Fleet that gets all the interesting assignments and eventually accumulates so much glory that its symbol gets universally adopted, or somehow be a generic "wild card, not of any Fleet" indicator that Starfleet naturally defaults to, is another debate where convenience of noncontradiction might carry weight.

It's just that the jury is still out on whether the arrowhead was a prominent symbol in the earliest days of UFP Starfleet already, or merely something associated with certain random parts of Starfleet the camera arbitrarily follows. ENT shows the UESF using an arrowhead of a significantly different design, quite possibly unrelated to later Starfleet usage. The rest of our pre-TOS, "pre-simplifying" evidence rests on a single random ship (the Kelvin) and then on a parallel timeline where the "simplifying" could merely have happened a decade early.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This is one of those areas where I don't care what Justman's memos say. Having different insignia for the different postings was cool.

What did Bob Wesley wear? Hm, looks like it might have been the Starbase insignia. Maybe he was only temporarily commanding the Lexington.

 

Isn't the ENT version of USS Defiant's insignia basically the same as what was on the secondary hull on the USS Enterprise back then? Before it was replaced with the arrowhead in TMP.

 

The Starfleet Banana, yeah. I don't think anything onscreen ever suggested that the mid-23rd century starship flanks could be decorated with other shapes - all the TAS ships and craft had the same Banana or then just the plain red cheat lines.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Only vaguely. The one on ENT is more angular, less symmetrical above and below the angle, and has straight "clipped" ends. The one on the original model is more curved with rounded ends, the one that hangs on the wall has straight lines and angles but the ends are also rounded.

 

Just pointing out that entities of a particular species would tend to serve together. We know that the Enterprise was cold for Spock because he's from a planet that is much warmer than earth. Imagine species that have even different environmental needs. It make more sense to have more species specific ships than to have crew members don spacesuits every time they leave their quarters.

That's not to say there can't or wont be crossover, just that it would be less likely. It would be more likely that all crew on a spaceship would be a single species. So statistically we could assume that any given sample of a crew would probably be the same species as the rest of the crew.

Even Spock is half human.

 

I'm in your head, man!

 

What a fantastic band name!

 

I got the impression that all flag officers, from Commodore on up to Fleet Admiral, wore that same starburst design as an insignia, irrespective of posting on either a ship or a base. Their crews, however, would continue to wear their unique insignia of assignment.

 

Except for Commodore Decker. It seems like there's always an exception!

 

Assuming they are biologically incompatible, yes. But we have not heard of a species that would actually be incompatible with humans yet. Even the Horta can coexist and no doubt also enlist.

That's way different from saying "we saw the Captain, so the rest must be like him". The Captain or other such top officer alone gives poor statistics, as we learn from the case of Spock.

There's basically two cases of us seeing crews other than Kirk's: the Defiant (assorted departments) and the Lexington (the bridge). We saw next to nothing of the crew of the Exeter, and nothing of Decker's crew; it just won't do to claim that a sample of one or two out of 400+ would hold any statistical significance.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Oh yeah - forgot about that one. Quite right.

 

Other than Needed By Plot, why was Decker a commodore? Where was his fleet? Am I misunderstanding the rank?

 

I'm not saying it's impossible for a human captain to command a crew of Andorians. I'm just saying that it's probably less likely as species would tend to be grouped together. Meaning that I don't think Commodore Decker commanded the Constellation under the auspices of the Andorian Guard. Is the Andorian Guard even a thing?

All I'm saying is that I think the badge division is more along fleet lines rather than member world lines.

 

I get the impression that that was a contrivance to allow Decker to technically "outrank" Kirk's command authority on the Enterprise, much like in NuBSG where Cain appeared as an Admiral to outrank Adama who was only a Commander - hence, artificial drama and conflict when a potentially lethal difference of opinion invariably emerges between the two officers' command styles.

So, yes, Commodores are generally seen to be in charge of fleets or space stations. There is also the honorary rank of Fleet Captain (Garth of Izar) which, in nautical tradition, is a temporary grade bestowed on a ship's captain during a military engagement with a larger fleet, when one (generally more senior) voice is needed to overrule all others, but without giving a full grade hike up to Commodore or into the Admiralty. Decker was an odd man out, not only because he was the only Commodore seen on-screen without a starburst, using his own ship's logo (which I always laughingly referred to as the "golden pretzel" - a goofy-ass design, IMO) but also the only Commodore to command a single ship without a fleet.

I suspect, though, that ship commanders generally have some latitude on how they want their uniform to look and, and in this case, may be at Commodore Decker's discretion, whether or not to use the starburst or ship's logo, just as others like Kirk (and MU Archer) may want to use the green wrap-around tunic. So I wouldn't consider this too much of a problem.

Decker was probably past his prime and was less-than-wonderful as a ship commander, so Starfleet took pity on him (or perhaps was afraid of backlash from his connections), gave him an older Connie (NCC-1017) and sent him off in some random direction to map new star systems. The poor judgment he showed and near-psychotic behavior indicates he was never that tightly-wrapped to begin with. Starfleet should have retired his ass a long time ago. Maybe he was a member of a powerful family in Starfleet or Fed Diplomatic Corps. Would explain how his son, Will, an "untried" captain, got command of the refit Enterprise - ostensibly, quite a plum assignment.

As a matter of history, the grade of "Commodore" was removed from the US Navy in 1985 and replaced with the rather clunky nomenclature "Rear Admiral, Lower Half", for some odd reason. Probably why we never saw a Commodore in TNG Trek and beyond.

 

It's hard to say. One possibility I've though of: Maybe the 12 starships are organized on paper in three or four divisions, and one of the three or four starship commanders is a commodore and has a second hat as division commander. In practice, though, the starships mostly operate individually where needed, so for most of the time, except for maybe some divisional paperwork, the commodore is just running his own ship like a regular captain.

What this wouldn't account for, though, is Commodore Wesley wearing the "base" badge.

Yeah, that's not really naval tradition. Wikipedia had some misleading stuff about that for a long time but it seems to have been mostly cleared up. Naval tradition is that if two ships meet up and operate together, without any commodore or flag officer aboard, whichever captain is senior is in charge, and that ship runs up the "senior officer present afloat" pennant. It's just as if they were officers meeting up anywhere else, no need for a separate rank. In fact, when the rank of commodore in the British navy was a temporary rank for captains, if a commodore met up with a captain who was senior to him as a captain, the senior captain would be in charge and the commodore would strike his broad pennant.

 

A mystery - and unfortunately I couldn't find any clear images of the front of his crew's uniforms to indicate what insignia they were wearing. At least Trek Core didn't have anything. There may be a frame or two in the episode that may answer the question.

 

Scattered on individual assignment, but when they come together for a fleet operation Decker would command that fleet.

 

Where you have an ad-hoc fleet thrown together under the command of one captain who is not the most senior; you need to have some authority for that captain to command the fleet - as in the case of Redemption, when Picard runs a blockade to stop romulans smuggling supplies to the Duras sisters.
IIRC, in real life navies, the officer in question would be given a brevet rank corresponding to the requirements of the deployment; i.e. the captain would become a brevet rear admiral for the duration. That would be a very unusual situation however.