It sometimes surprising just how little exploration they do.
Money?
Going by that, engineering falls under the authority of the Chief of Security.
Because they're admirals.
And who's going to tell them they can't?
R.H.I.P.
The three divisions have no sense to them
- Thread starter Watersluis
- Start date
And who's going to tell them they can't?
R.H.I.P.
Exactly so. Though, one of the other appeals is the simple fact this system could easily be expanded if needed.
Perhaps a tradition from another Federation member.
The divisions are fine, but I can see the confusion when Spock started stepping all over Scotty's expertise during the 3rd season, obviously because on stage script re-writes but it spawned the all knowing super Spock which was very annoying. We have seen on occasions Operations officers took the helm of the Enterprise and some instances science officers; crews on a space vessel has to have some training in many of the functions on board just in case an emergency occurs where a particular position requires temporary replacement. No need for multiple colors, these people on board are Starfleet's finest and the best representing the organization and there are many episodes which shows their abilities.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...Star Trek really did sell the final frontier, that of color television.
Me neither. Did they think viewers wouldn't be able to tell who was an admiral? If the actors act like someone is their boss, the viewers will get it.
For sure, and that was part of the deal that got rid of the officer Engineer Corps in 1899. Since the engineers would be line officers now, they would not spend their whole careers working with the machinery and most of the practical knowledge would be in the enlisted force, so TPTB opened a lot more slots for warrant machinists to replace the former engineer officers. I think ever since then machinists have been the most numerous type of warrant officer, with the possible exception of Seabee WO carpenters in WW2.
One, the regulations which come from a higher level of authority, and two a more senior admiral. There can only be only one officer at a time who isn't outranked by someone. A good example of this was top USN Admiral Ernest King in WW2. He replaced the popular officer/CPO khakis with an unpopular gray uniform. It was still permitted to wear khaki until it wore out, but officers assigned to the Navy Department were quickly advised to get a set of grays before they attracted King's attention, and many if not most photographs of admirals in the DC area in the last two years of the war show them wearing gray, not khaki.
The three divisions is more of a historical quirk if anything, pointing to a time when three divisions was helpful. The medical division and the security division may have been add-ons. Enterprise, for example, doesn't have a medical staff (Phlox being their lone doctor and alien observer) and this might imply that medical operations were done by civilians outside the rank structure. Enterprise had security (already tied in with the armory/tactical), but later introduced the MACOs. Perhaps earlier vessels of the era utilized the MACO agency as a separate security force, allowing Starfleet to continue operations under the legal fiction as a pure exploratory arm and successor to NASA/UESPA.
So, the three divisions of early Starfleet were the guys who maintained the ship (Red-Striped Engineers), the guys who fulfilled all the exploration and study mantra of Starfleet (Blue-Striped Scientists), and the guys who oversaw everything (Gold-Striped Commanders).
Perhaps on the earliest ships, the pilots were the COs, and eventually it was a fast-track to command (note: Archer was a pilot). When Security was folded in, they were placed in operations instead of creating a fourth branch, perhaps because it was a small force and they were usually dual officers overseeing the weapons equipment (i.e. also maintenance on the ship). Medicine is a science, so placing them into Blue-Stripes makes sense if they don't want to create a new scheme. ...But we never see a Medical officer in Enterprise, and the first ones we see chronologically are the Kelvin officers (in all white). By the Disco era, medical is generally still wearing white, but feature silver piping, indicative of scientists (and they are in Sciences Blue during The Cage and TOS era, and probably Pike's Disco-era variation).
The Enterprise era featured colored piping, the Franklin era had large shoulder epaulets, and the Disco era returned to the piping of Enterprise. It was the Kelvin era that first experimented with colored shirts, allowing much easier visibility of the divisions (they also changed division colors for the first time, a decision apparently reversed in subsequent eras for a time), which breaks a little of the uniformity of earlier eras and Disco. The Pike variation of the Disco era returns to colored shirts, while returning to the three division colors from the very beginnings of Starfleet.
The TOS era is a clear evolution of the Pike variation, dropping the unnecessary piping and streamlining alot of the structure, probably out of necessity when they adopted organic uniforms as opposed to the fabricated ones of Discovery.
The TMP era dropped the three divisions for the first time, adopting six: White (Command, indicative of the admiralty of the Enterprise era which I will get to), Orange (Sciences, an odd change), Green (Medical, accepted as its own division, and only slightly changed from the Blue before), Red (Engineering, carryover from TOS era), Gold (Flight control, carryover from before, even though command has "branched" out), Grey (Security, accepted as its own division and possibly alluding to its MACO origins or the greyish color from the Kelvin era). Further evolutions and switches were made in the Movie era/Lost Era, and the three divisions only return in the 2350s for the TNG era, adopting red for command (likely indicative of the red worn by all officers from at least 2278 to at least 2348), and maintaining gold for engineering (as it had been adopted for the Movie era), while folding security back in, and restoring blue for an overarching sciences division consisting of the formerly green medical and formerly grey sciences division.
That heirarchy of divisions has been retained through five or six uniform eras, from at least 2353 ("Suddenly Human") until at least 2399 ("The Impossible Box", I won't spoil any episodes released less than six months ago), a span of 46 years.
Admiralty in the Enterprise era wore their own division, red-and-white, which likely eschewed any specialties they had in their lower ranks and makes sense, if we assume division colors were mainly to denote shipboard assignments at a glance. The Admirals would be differentiated by their shoulder patches, most likely. In the Kelvin Timeline, the admirals seemed to retain the White color variation (this may have been the same as the Kelvin era in the regular timeline, even if it clashes with medical attire). In the Disco era, we see that admirals seem to wear gold piping indicative of the command division, with no indication of what non-command admirals wear. But the admirals and commodores of the TOS era wore different divisions (red and gold were seen), and this may have continued or been restored in the TNG era (with Vice Admiral Toddman) and Picard era (with Commodore Oh), both figures wearing operations gold and identified as Starfleet Security chiefs (although this flies in the face of command-red Vice Admiral Henry in The Drumhead). All admirals in the movie eras and early TNG (before Toddman) wore command colors (white or red).
So, the three divisions of early Starfleet were the guys who maintained the ship (Red-Striped Engineers), the guys who fulfilled all the exploration and study mantra of Starfleet (Blue-Striped Scientists), and the guys who oversaw everything (Gold-Striped Commanders).
Perhaps on the earliest ships, the pilots were the COs, and eventually it was a fast-track to command (note: Archer was a pilot). When Security was folded in, they were placed in operations instead of creating a fourth branch, perhaps because it was a small force and they were usually dual officers overseeing the weapons equipment (i.e. also maintenance on the ship). Medicine is a science, so placing them into Blue-Stripes makes sense if they don't want to create a new scheme. ...But we never see a Medical officer in Enterprise, and the first ones we see chronologically are the Kelvin officers (in all white). By the Disco era, medical is generally still wearing white, but feature silver piping, indicative of scientists (and they are in Sciences Blue during The Cage and TOS era, and probably Pike's Disco-era variation).
The Enterprise era featured colored piping, the Franklin era had large shoulder epaulets, and the Disco era returned to the piping of Enterprise. It was the Kelvin era that first experimented with colored shirts, allowing much easier visibility of the divisions (they also changed division colors for the first time, a decision apparently reversed in subsequent eras for a time), which breaks a little of the uniformity of earlier eras and Disco. The Pike variation of the Disco era returns to colored shirts, while returning to the three division colors from the very beginnings of Starfleet.
The TOS era is a clear evolution of the Pike variation, dropping the unnecessary piping and streamlining alot of the structure, probably out of necessity when they adopted organic uniforms as opposed to the fabricated ones of Discovery.
The TMP era dropped the three divisions for the first time, adopting six: White (Command, indicative of the admiralty of the Enterprise era which I will get to), Orange (Sciences, an odd change), Green (Medical, accepted as its own division, and only slightly changed from the Blue before), Red (Engineering, carryover from TOS era), Gold (Flight control, carryover from before, even though command has "branched" out), Grey (Security, accepted as its own division and possibly alluding to its MACO origins or the greyish color from the Kelvin era). Further evolutions and switches were made in the Movie era/Lost Era, and the three divisions only return in the 2350s for the TNG era, adopting red for command (likely indicative of the red worn by all officers from at least 2278 to at least 2348), and maintaining gold for engineering (as it had been adopted for the Movie era), while folding security back in, and restoring blue for an overarching sciences division consisting of the formerly green medical and formerly grey sciences division.
That heirarchy of divisions has been retained through five or six uniform eras, from at least 2353 ("Suddenly Human") until at least 2399 ("The Impossible Box", I won't spoil any episodes released less than six months ago), a span of 46 years.
Admiralty in the Enterprise era wore their own division, red-and-white, which likely eschewed any specialties they had in their lower ranks and makes sense, if we assume division colors were mainly to denote shipboard assignments at a glance. The Admirals would be differentiated by their shoulder patches, most likely. In the Kelvin Timeline, the admirals seemed to retain the White color variation (this may have been the same as the Kelvin era in the regular timeline, even if it clashes with medical attire). In the Disco era, we see that admirals seem to wear gold piping indicative of the command division, with no indication of what non-command admirals wear. But the admirals and commodores of the TOS era wore different divisions (red and gold were seen), and this may have continued or been restored in the TNG era (with Vice Admiral Toddman) and Picard era (with Commodore Oh), both figures wearing operations gold and identified as Starfleet Security chiefs (although this flies in the face of command-red Vice Admiral Henry in The Drumhead). All admirals in the movie eras and early TNG (before Toddman) wore command colors (white or red).
You could have put Admiral Necheyevin in a summer dress and it would have been clear that Picard was her underling.
Indeed. Especially when you consider how much money TNG must have wasted constantly changing the Admiral's uniform as often as they did.
I always thought Admiral Uniforms should be closer to regular uniforms.
There are so many examples of Admiral Uniforms being too different from regular designs that they look like they're from a parallel universe.
You add an Admiral’s pips and gold piping to an existing uniform and instant Admiral’s uniform. Would have been so hard? Instead we get some sort of 24th Century Generalissimo BS
I put Admiral's pips on my bathrobe...........never out of uniform!You add an Admiral’s pips and gold piping to an existing uniform and instant Admiral’s uniform. Would have been so hard? Instead we get some sort of 24th Century Generalissimo BS
It seems like every admiral who appeared in the 90s shows had their own special uniform design. Did they ever settle on a unified one?
Not until DS9/First Contact if I remember correctly.
They were unified, the problem was they were always changing. First there was the Admiral's uniform Q wore in Hide and Q. Then later in TNG's first season a new Admiral's uniform was introduced in Too Short a Season and kept for the remainder of the first season. Then a new one introduced in The Measure of a Man and kept throughout the rest of the second season. Then yet another new uniform in The Defector which this time stayed throughout the third, fourth and fifth seasons. In Realm of Fear we get another new design which was kept for the remainder of TNG, the first five seasons of DS9, and the first five seasons of Voyager. This was also kept briefly in DS9's sixth season before they switched to the new design in Behind the Lines which was used for the remainder of the Berman era 24th century, being last seen in Nemesis.
That's certainly possible if the ChSECO was the ranking redshirt.
Scotty was the Head of Department (and Second Officer) during his ChEng career because he has the "time in service" and potentially rank over the Chief Communications Officer (Uhura) and various ChSECOs (inc but not limited to Giotto and various Lieutenants), similarly Commander Tucker was Head of Department/Second Officer because he outranked LT Reed, and LTCDR was Head of Department/Second Officer over Yar/Worf, the Acting ChEngs in s1 and LaForge for similar reasons.
Conversly, LT (later LTCDR) Tuvok, despite being ChSECO, was Second Officer bexcause he outranked the ChEng and ChOpsO.
Makes sense to me, I suspect that Duty Officers at least on smaller and auxiliary vessels still fly.
Yup.
Fair enough.
Which never made any sense to me, they should either have had a variety or follow the TNG scheme of them wearing the "Command" colour.
They had some uniformity before that, but it certainly headed towards the peak with the FC/DS9 unis, the interim unis of the 2380s were similar, and the 2390s-era ones were fully unified as everyone bar the C-in-C (and maybe some top-level deputies) wore the same style (no gild trim).
There's some first class Generalissimo action.
I'm sure Admiral Sisqó agreesIf they aren’t on your thong, then GTFO.
You add an Admiral’s pips and gold piping to an existing uniform and instant Admiral’s uniform. Would have been so hard? Instead we get some sort of 24th Century Generalissimo BS
Speaking of the generalissimo look, that reminds me of the US Air Force general/high school drum major uniform that was used once at a ceremony in 2012, and then never seen or spoken of again.
#neveragain
Everyone was sworn to secrecy. They went full DISCO on that.
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