If he’s such a legend, why are there no ships named for Kirk. Or Spock. Instead, they just recycle names of old ships. We’ll see the USS Voyager-Z before the Kirk.
When ships are named for people, it's after they have died. Starfleet is never sure that Kirk and Spock are going to stay dead!
In the novelverse there is indeed a USS James T. Kirk. Linky There is also a (different) USS Kirk from STO. Canonically speaking, there's the USS Chekov, one of the wrecked ships at Wolf 359.
Not necessarily. Ronald Reagan had one while he was alive, and the closest he got to serving was in movies.
I thnk he meant, do doctors and engineers get ships named after them. Which is entirely possible. McCoy and Scotty are decorated Starfleet veterans with decades of service to Starfleet. They've more than earned the right. For example I can totally see a USS McCoy as a medical transport/hospital ship...
Starfleet has eight billion ships, just because we haven’t heard a name doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Spoiler: Discovery Isn’t the a ship named after Kirk in the 32nd century?
Those are just ranks. He could be a surgeon general and not get a ship. Most admirals don’t. I’m not saying that they don’t deserve their own ships, but Kirk definitely does.
We might not have heard of one if Starfleet named it. But it’s actually the production staff that names ships IRL, and if they name one, we hear about it.
The FASA Deckers had TOS names. Cameron did a lot of work on a real surface vessel named the Academic Keldysh IIRC.
That rang a bell, because Nimoy narrated one of the documentaries about the wreck of Titanic. Wikipedia has this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Mstislav_Keldysh