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The three divisions have no sense to them

Watersluis

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
There are seemingly three divisions: command, operations, and science — this concept and division in no way makes sense, and, if anything, there should be two divisions: military, and science.

Command in particular is senseless; it seems as if any officer that is either a commanding officer, an executive officer, a conn officer, or a flag officer is in this division. There were some minor exceptions of operations flag officers but for the most part this is the definition, and with the exception of conn it seems to be a rank, more than a division. One is in command division starting from a certain position in the hierarchy, which makes a great deal of sense for something called “command”, but not if it be a division.

Operations is also senseless and seems to include both engineering and security, the both of which rarely interact with each other, and as expected engineering officers seem to very often be teamed up with science division officers — it is almost as if it be applied physics and Tucker even made contributions to quantum physics to solve problems the NX-01 was facing.

Thus was the paradoxical situation that Data was in operations division, despite being the Enterprise D's chief science officer, and Kathryn Janeway was in sciences division until he obtained the rank of captain, and then had to transfer to command, as it seems to be more of a rank than a division.
 
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To us it's senseless but to them it makes sense.

They probably didn't want to use all six colors, so they lumped in loosely related fields in a game of multilevel coin toss.

That, and in 1966 the goal of selling more shiny new color TVs sponsored by RCA and all made using color for even uniforms a better selling point... :D Star Trek really did sell the final frontier, that of color television.
 
I think it being a TV show plays a huge part in it. Don't want to overburden your audience. Heck, I still don't know the division colors from the movies.
 
The only thing I didn't quite understand is why the people piloting the ships were red/the same colour as command.

As for Data he was put in yellow because TPTB thought that his skintone clashed with the teal TNG science uniform.
 
The only thing I didn't quite understand is why the people piloting the ships were red/the same colour as command.

Command track. Sulu eventually got a captaincy after shifting from blue to gold. LaForge eventually made captain in an alternate timeline after going from red to gold, and back to command.
 
:confused:
To me, command, operations, & sciences didn't seem that hard to understand.
Agree. There is overlap (think Venn diagrams here) but, generally, there are 1) those that operate the ship, 2) those that keep the ship operational, and 3) those that perform the ship's mission. To me, it only seems nonsensical if you expect hard boundaries between the divisions.
 
For TOS:-
Command - steer the ship and fire the weapons, And ACTUAL command (Captain and First Officer).

Operations - supporting the shipboard and mission operations/actions.

Science - nuff said.

What's there to query?????
 
There are seemingly three divisions
There seems to be three shirt colors. Briefly there was (iirc) people in green coveralls, and in the second pilot Kirk, Spock, a yeoman, and a woman in a corridor were wearing a different color than the gold/olive. More of a tan color.

I doubt that engineering and security are in the same division, even though they wear the same color shirts. Similarly the medical department is separate from the science division.

McCoy doesn't report to Spock because he is the senior science officer, it's because Spock is the first officer.
there should be two divisions: military, and science.
Because there are no military scientists?

Huh?
 
The ones who lead.
The problem with this that leading has nothing to do with any divisions, but with ranks, and that is why “command division” is senseless.

It also makes little sense for the helmsman to be in command division.
 
The problem with extra divisions would also be what colours to select. I guess Science Blue could be split into Science Blue and Medicine Green. But beyond that? Orange? Purple? Nah. And Cyan is still seen (and employed) as a shade of blue by most anglophone people (indeed in 90s Trek science was Cyan rather than blue) For today it would get a little bit to colourful and for the 60s I think most colour televisions might have struggled to keep similar shades apart (see the gold/avocado "controversy")
 
The problem with this that leading has nothing to do with any divisions, but with ranks, and that is why “command division” is senseless.

It also makes little sense for the helmsman to be in command division.
That quote's out of context. I wasn't making a serious post. It was a third of the joke I was making.
 
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