Starfleet seems to have a policy of only Captain's having long-term command of starships, regardless of size or function.
Why was a Captain in command of Voyager?
- Thread starter ThatsMrCaptaintoyou
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Thankfully, Sisko's involvement in war affairs after he got kicked out of his station was written using gimmicks. Even with his Hero Badge, he doesn't suddenly become the supreme commander of Starfleet. Instead, Vice Admiral Ross, a legitimate bigwig, gives his aide Sisko "honorary" command to go with the fact that it's his plan, the right to Give The Word: implicit in Operation Return, explicit for the invasion of Chin'toka.
What we get in "Sacrifice of Angels" is pretty atrocious, with Sisko giving tactical commands during the battle while flying a ship unsuited for command (that is, the heroes have their hands full trying to keep the ship intact, leaving little time for fleet command duties). But it is his plan, and perhaps he got a bit carried away with his privileges. In the later fights, Sisko merely dishes out timely advice, while Martok and Ross are clearly in charge.
A jump from young Captain to a flag officer would have been a bit much, especially since the writers would then have to pretty much give up on the character and invent a new one (with the same name and face) to keep him on the station with all the familiar folks and doing Emissary stuff and all. The "he planned it, he gets to give consultation in situ" approach works pretty well much of the time, even if not in "Sacrifice".
Timo Saloniemi
What we get in "Sacrifice of Angels" is pretty atrocious, with Sisko giving tactical commands during the battle while flying a ship unsuited for command (that is, the heroes have their hands full trying to keep the ship intact, leaving little time for fleet command duties). But it is his plan, and perhaps he got a bit carried away with his privileges. In the later fights, Sisko merely dishes out timely advice, while Martok and Ross are clearly in charge.
A jump from young Captain to a flag officer would have been a bit much, especially since the writers would then have to pretty much give up on the character and invent a new one (with the same name and face) to keep him on the station with all the familiar folks and doing Emissary stuff and all. The "he planned it, he gets to give consultation in situ" approach works pretty well much of the time, even if not in "Sacrifice".
Timo Saloniemi
Hmm, yeah, I suppose Chief O'Brien's "old naval tradition" explanation to Nog didn't have to be the authoritative and comprehensive word on the subject; he was just an enlisted guy, after all.
Maybe the naval tradition wasn't formerly common in Starfleet, but started to be used during the Dominion War. After all, there were probably a lot of junior officers taking command when their captains were killed, mustered out due to injury, or reassigned, and Starfleet was probably putting as many ships into service as possible and didn't have enough genuine captains for all of them, so the practice of calling any ship commander "captain" could've been encouraged as an aid to morale and discipline.
Quite simply, Voyager is a medium sized, very modern ship. Since we see captains in command of much smaller (see Ramsom, with his Nova-class midget) and much older (see the various Oberth, Galaxy and Miranda vessels that show up on TNG and DS9) it makes sense to have a captain on Voyager.
The last two posts have it right. Voyager was small, but she was fancy and state if the art, with tech that even the Galaxy class flagship didn't have: bioneural circuits, superfast engines, and an EMH. It was right that a captain command her. It might also explain why her ops officer was so low ranking: Academy might have just begun teaching about the new tech, so a more senior officer wouldn't have been as knowledgeable.
This isn't particularly satisfactory, or necessary - since basically all ships in Starfleet are commanded by a four-pipper, including old and small ones. The Voyager isn't special there, regardless of whether she's special in other ways. (And she probably isn't, because Starfleet is churning out state-of-the-art ships all the time anyway.)
Also, most probably the ship didn't have a low-ranking Ops officer: she had a dead Ops officer. So the junior Assistant to the Assisting Ops Assistant got the job instead, right off the bat.
Timo Saloniemi
Also, most probably the ship didn't have a low-ranking Ops officer: she had a dead Ops officer. So the junior Assistant to the Assisting Ops Assistant got the job instead, right off the bat.
Timo Saloniemi
Is anyone going to listen to my repeated reminders that the Intrepid class is actually larger than the Constitution class, 344 meters long vs. 289 (305 for the refit)? That's also slightly bigger than the largest aircraft carrier in the world (the Gerald R. Ford class at 337 meters). It's not a small ship. It's actually very large. It's just not as gigantic as a Galaxy or Sovereign, or as the self-indulgently oversized designs of the modern movies and shows.
Honestly? No.
This is a very good point!
This would have made a lot of sense, but unfortunately it’s not canon in any way and screen evidence seems to suggest otherwise.
It's a TV show. Unlike books, or real life, TV shows have 45 minutes of run time, and eating that up with convoluted explanations of why the captain is or isn't actually the captain would bog things down unnecessarily.
In Starfleet, the (assigned, not acting) commanding officer of a starship has both the rank and title of "Captain", QED.
(The Defiant was initially assigned to DS9 as a glorified runabout, having only a permanent skeleton staff with its regular crew being filled out from Station Personnel.)
In Starfleet, the (assigned, not acting) commanding officer of a starship has both the rank and title of "Captain", QED.
(The Defiant was initially assigned to DS9 as a glorified runabout, having only a permanent skeleton staff with its regular crew being filled out from Station Personnel.)
Shocking I know but people can go back to school and learn new things. So getting a more experienced officer should be easy enough for Starfleet to arrange. In the case of Kim if I'm remembering the scene right the ships Doctor has a line of something like "new operations officer" not chief operations so perhaps we can infer that he was simply a junior officer who in essence became head of the department after the rest of the department was killed.
Let's not get carried away Commodore would have been sufficient, Just because we never saw the rank on screen during TNG/DSN/VOY era doesn't mean it wasn't in use after all it appeared in PIC.
Rear Admiral lower half is a 1 star rank equal to commodore that it replaces Rear Admiral upper half is a 2 star rank
He never commanded the fleet... at least it didn't feel that way
Very likely, though that was never explained. If it was the case, then Harry's 7-year ensignhood becomes even more of a travesty. He was a kid right out of Academy who had to step up and do a lieutenant's work right off the bat... and he did it quite well. But, this accomplishment was not only not properly rewarded (by putting a little box on his seat), it was never even acknowledged.
My point is we as far as I am aware we never saw a 1 pip in a box on screen during TNG/DSN/VOY which would denote the rank of commodore as seen in PIC if that is the case there is no onscreen evidence to indicate that Starfleet ever stopped using the rank of Commodore and replaced it with the rank of R. Adm (LH). Just because the USN stopped using the rank of Commodore doesn't mean the fictional Starfleet did.
Yes, but even so, the Intrepid was larger than other classes in use contemporaneously, whether older designs like the Constellation, Miranda, and Oberth or more modern ones like the Defiant, Nova, Saber, or Steamrunner. By 24th-century standards, it's a medium-sized ship.
And there's no way it was ever "third-rate." Voyager was intended to be peak Starfleet technology for 2371, faster even than the Enterprise with cutting-edge bio-neural circuitry. It was an elite class of ship, which might be why it was able to hold up so well under the kind of abuses that were more crippling for the Equinox.
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