It was the norm that Starbase commanders held the rank of Commander in TNG, different from what we were used to in TOS.
I rather doubt that. Whenever our TNG or DS9 heroes contacted a Starbase, they contacted an Admiral of some sort.
Only the Deep Space Station from the latter show had a lowly Commander in charge, and the few times it was referred to as a starbase were probably just arrogant propaganda to give Sisko a better footing in his negotiations with the Gamma aliens of the week.
Oh, in "11001001", Picard met a Commander Quinteros at SB 74. But this character was not stated to be the high leader of that vast city in space, and indeed was specifically getting his hands dirty with the minor task of refitting the
Enterprise computers. He probably answered to some Captain who answered to some Rear Admiral who answered to the SB 74 commanding officer...
Picard was ambitious, but so is everybody else in the command program. He commanded the Stargazer for twenty years (or so), but this is probably the norm in Starfleet.
We never hear of either Picard doing that, or anybody else doing that. The longest stretch of command seems to be Picard on the E-D, seven or eight years, and that was not expected career development for him - he was supposed to move on to be Academy Commandant at flag rank, but he refused. And then betrayed the Federation. Which surprisingly didn't terminate his career, but may have stopped any hope of future promotion (alternate/fictional futures notwithstanding). In any case, the UFP Flagship probably was the highest possible starship posting, and as such a dead end.
Different people go through their Starfleet careers at different paces, and Starfleet doesn't kick out those who remain Lieutenants at the age of seventy. But getting stuck on a single ship for those putative two decades would look bad on anybody's resume.
He probably had a ship between the Stargazer and Enterprise, or maybe a posting as an Admiral's adjutant somewhere he could influence himself into the list of prospective Starfleet captains.
No doubt. Regardless of whether he was Captain of the
Stargazer for those decades, or just a Lieutenant and then Commander and only briefly the actual CO, he would be disadvantaged by his absence from the halls of Starfleet Command, and would need to catch up after the loss of that old ship.
Although it's possible that he never did spend much time on the
Stargazer after all. It was the first ship he served on, and the first he commanded, but those two feats might have been separated by two decades and seven starships for all we know.
Starfleet doesn't seem to transfer its Captains around much in canon. Janeway is the only possibility that comes to mind of a lateral transfer from another ship that wasn't destroyed or something.
Did she ever command anything before
Voyager? She had "commands", but those weren't necessarily of ships, as the sole reference to such a thing involves the lowly Lieutenant Tuvok chiding her for her performance (unlikely for a Lieutenant to chide a Captain, and unlikely for a starship command to be a single performance subject to critique afterwards).
Oh, and I guess Ben Maxwell of the USSes Rutledge and Phoenix.
It's more an artifact of starship captain characters being one-offs whose career histories are insignificant to the plot: we only meet them at one stage of their career, with them commanding a specific ship. Nothing to say they couldn't have commanded three others previously.
Ransom isn't a captain because he's in command of Equinox, he's in command of Equinox because he's a captain.
Dunno. He got promoted to captain or Captain because he rediscovered the Yridians, sez dialogue. But he was an exobiologist before/at that feat. Which raises questions:
1) Why was
he credited with the discovery, which probably involved a starship sailing to where the Yridians were to be found? Why not the CO of that ship?
2) Was the promotion to rank or position?
3) If the former, why would it be worth remarking on? Surely he would have made Captain rank eventually anyway: did the discovery make him an exceptionally young Captain?
4) Was this promotion in any way connected to him changing careers from research to command? Or did he have command in his sights even back when his title was Exobiologist? (Did Janeway?)
The curious way in which the incident and the promotion is brought up makes it at least possible that the relationship between the
Equinox and Ransom's rank is a complex one, with Starfleet perhaps rewarding him with a command for his feat and then feeling obligated to give him a promotion in rank as well.
Timo Saloniemi
