STO mixes canon colours with a MMO trinity. There is no "tactical" branch in canon but a "command" track which includes "tactical" positions. But STO uses a very simplified model so people not familiar with trek recognize the classic "damage guy/healer guy/tanking guy" scheme.
To be fair on STO, it may not be explicitly canonical but it still feels appropriate to have tactical=command. In 'Tapestry' Picard became a Lieutenant J.G. science guy on the Enterprise. When he talked to Riker and Troi about him feeling he has command potential he mentioned transferring to engineering or security. That kind of implies that being in the science division isn't enough for command track careers*[/b] but being in security (and engineering, so operations division) was a stepping stone. [/b]
In addition tactical training is implied to be part of officer career training and promotion. Ensign Ro left the show in early S6 and returned in late S7 a FULL lieutenant (i.e. she got promoted twice from ensign during her absence), after having done an advanced tactical training course.
*Then again, Troi took the bridge officer's exam and she's a staff officer.
I would suspect, that the logic would be that those departments involve directly taking charge of groups of people, with serious implicatons for the outcomes
Spock was a captain in rank in Wrath of Khan, but he was also an academy lecturer, not a ship's commander... It's been suggested that Mad Kathy's career background was science, but look how well that turned out...
well, maybe they took a page from the US Navy. Rank and Command are not equal. as you gain rank you earn qualification to command a ship, but you won't necessarily complete that qualification or you may do it early.
when i was in, officers generally earned that qualification when they were doing their executive officer tour. I served with one who earned that qualification as an O-3 lieutenant, because he XOed a PHM.
Well just a side note, I have seen people in game with the normal odyssey uniform use green to denote they are a command officer, which I've done once or twice.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
well, maybe they took a page from the US Navy. Rank and Command are not equal. as you gain rank you earn qualification to command a ship, but you won't necessarily complete that qualification or you may do it early.
when i was in, officers generally earned that qualification when they were doing their executive officer tour. I served with one who earned that qualification as an O-3 lieutenant, because he XOed a PHM.
Absolutely so... Scotty was a captain in rank, but he wasn't a Commanding Officer
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Well just a side note, I have seen people in game with the normal odyssey uniform use green to denote they are a command officer, which I've done once or twice.
Going by the notion of Kirk's green wraparound, it makes sense Equally, I think the white shoulder panels do a good job in making that distinction
In the Original Series, Captains could and did continue to wear their native branch colour. We saw this in Court Martial, where there were other Captains sitting on the trial board wearing blue and red. Also note that two of the Commodores we saw in the original series also wore red, while one wore gold... indicating the trend carried on into the Admiralty.
I have to admit, I don't remember Court Martial well enough to remember that, but that's pretty interesting
In the Original Series, Captains could and did continue to wear their native branch colour. We saw this in Court Martial, where there were other Captains sitting on the trial board wearing blue and red. Also note that two of the Commodores we saw in the original series also wore red, while one wore gold... indicating the trend carried on into the Admiralty.
I try to follow what's been done with NPC Captains in-game. All of them are red with white shoulders, even the though the 2410 guide said the white shoulders was optional for fashion-minded Captains. Nog's done it, and he's engineering. I had this dilemma too a while ago.
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Absolutely so, especially the boldened text...
Two such examples, are Riker and Worf.
Riker declined so many oportunities to advance to captain, even accepting demotion after a valid promition, that in the US Navy, he would he been either desk-jobbed, or outright discharged... Sander once mantioned the way it was phrased, I can't remember his exact words, but it was something along the lines of 'up or out'...
Worf, was simply temperementally unsuited to command. When the Klingons framed him with the 'ghost ship', although plot let him off the consequences of the action, it couldn't hid that, both in battle and in the safety of a courtroom setting, he lost control and lashed out. His order to 'prepare for ramming speed' (which the helmsman wisely chose to ignore) showed again his 'blaze of glory' mentality, and his decision to save Dax's life over the outcome of a mission, was the nail in the coffin lid of his career... Three Strikes...
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Aside from the stupidity of putting Troi in the chair, can you name any other examples? Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank. Who else ended up in the chair that shouldn't have?
The examples of Riker and Worf I disagree with because the "up or out" mentality makes no sense. Why remove a talented officer from a position he's good at just because he doesn't want a different one?
Because, according to what Sander said on the subject, that's how the USN works... Simples... It doesn't have to make sense -- least of all to a civilian... If that's the policy, then that's the policy...
I found an article on the policy on Wikipedia:
The DOPMA "system" generally provides two opportunities to advance to the next rank. Officers typically will go before selection boards in cohorts based on the year they were commissioned. The majority of officers are promoted "in zone" (or "primary zone"); officers not selected will go before the next board ("above zone"), typically held a year later. Officers who are not selected "above zone" (twice fail promotion) are required to separate from the service, retire if eligible, or by exception may continue to serve until retirement in their current grade (but will never again be considered for promotion). At the discretion of the services a small number of promotions may go to exceptional officers ("below zone") who are promoted one or two years ahead of their cohort.
Key point to note there, is those who twice fail promotion (failing to accept promotion may come under that umberella) are, most realistically, getting discharged, or held at their current rank till retirement...
By that criteria, by the end of TNG's run, Riker had passed up enough promotions (including a willing demotion) that he simply would not have been promoted to captain, let alone admiral
Once Picard retired, he'd probably accept command then (it's stated he doesn't want to get bumped before he's had a chance to maximize his time working under and learning from him), but even if not and he's more comfortable as a second in command with more experience and authority than usual, so? Find him a flag vessel to serve on where he's captaining for an Admiral who calls the shots and he carries them out similar to how he served on Enterprise-D. Part of the advantage of Starfleet not being a military as we know it is that they can be more flexible.
And as Admiral Hansen pointed out to Picard in Best of Both Worlds, Riker was hurting his career by staying put. Of course, the real-world answer is that Jonathan Frakes had a job, and as a rule, shows don't split up their principle cast without good reason, but in-verse, it had been acknowledged that declining command opportunities, was damaging to Riker's career, and that he was at risk of looking poor, due to officers like Shelby, who were coming up through the ranks looking for command... Young Riker wanted command, then all of a sudden, he slammed the brakes on career-wise, and got complacent (a theme which was then directly examined by the discovery of his transporter duplicate)
[
As to Worf, if he's unqualified so is every commander in the entire KDF because he doesn't act any differently than any other Klingon commander in the history of ever. The whole point of the Defiant class in the first place is they're small, overpowered, and expendable. You build and field ten of those for the same investment in materials and manpower as one Galaxy class and if you lose some in battle, so what? If the blaze of glory destroys the enemy and advances your overall strategic goals, so be it. That's why you put people like him in the chair of a Defiant and not a Galaxy. Defiants are practically purpose built for do or die / suicide missions, keeping them alive isn't the priority, achieving the mission objective at any cost is. They might as well call them the Kamikaze class.
Any other examples?
Complete strawman... Worf did not serve in the KDF, he was a Starfleet officer, bound to follow Starfleet's rules, regulations and codes of conduct...
As for your assertion that the Defiant Class was designed to be expendable, please provide some backup for that theory... Everything I ever saw on screen, was that they were designed to hit hard and fast and keep going under a pounding, not that they were considered expendable nor kamikaze in intent... :-\
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Aside from the stupidity of putting Troi in the chair, can you name any other examples? Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank. Who else ended up in the chair that shouldn't have?
The examples of Riker and Worf I disagree with because the "up or out" mentality makes no sense. Why remove a talented officer from a position he's good at just because he doesn't want a different one?
Because, according to what Sander said on the subject, that's how the USN works... Simples... It doesn't have to make sense -- least of all to a civilian... If that's the policy, then that's the policy...
Once Picard retired, he'd probably accept command then (it's stated he doesn't want to get bumped before he's had a chance to maximize his time working under and learning from him), but even if not and he's more comfortable as a second in command with more experience and authority than usual, so? Find him a flag vessel to serve on where he's captaining for an Admiral who calls the shots and he carries them out similar to how he served on Enterprise-D. Part of the advantage of Starfleet not being a military as we know it is that they can be more flexible.
And as Admiral Hansen pointed out to Picard in Best of Both Worlds, Riker was hurting his career by staying put. Of course, the real-world answer is that Jonathan Frakes had a job, and as a rule, shows don't split up their principle cast without good reason, but in-verse, it had been acknowledged that declining command opportunities, was damaging to Riker's career, and that he was at risk of looking poor, due to officers like Shelby, who were coming up through the ranks looking for command... Young Riker wanted command, then all of a sudden, he slammed the brakes on career-wise, and got complacent (a theme which was then directly examined by the discovery of his transporter duplicate)
[
As to Worf, if he's unqualified so is every commander in the entire KDF because he doesn't act any differently than any other Klingon commander in the history of ever. The whole point of the Defiant class in the first place is they're small, overpowered, and expendable. You build and field ten of those for the same investment in materials and manpower as one Galaxy class and if you lose some in battle, so what? If the blaze of glory destroys the enemy and advances your overall strategic goals, so be it. That's why you put people like him in the chair of a Defiant and not a Galaxy. Defiants are practically purpose built for do or die / suicide missions, keeping them alive isn't the priority, achieving the mission objective at any cost is. They might as well call them the Kamikaze class.
Any other examples?
Complete strawman... Worf did not serve in the KDF, he was a Starfleet officer, bound to follow Starfleet's rules, regulations and codes of conduct...
As for your assertion that the Defiant Class was designed to be expendable, please provide some backup for that theory... Everything I ever saw on screen, was that they were designed to hit hard and fast and keep going under a pounding, not that they were considered expendable nor kamikaze in intent... :-\
Far as the Defiant goes, they were not a Kamikaze class. That ablative armor wasn't very easy to make and notice after the got the quirks out of the ship, the Federation didn't build them enmasse. Want to call a ship a kamikaze class, that would of been the Saber class.
Built around the Defiant's needs of being absolutely spartan, low crew, easy to mass produce and didn't have the same kind of ablative armoring the Defiant had and was heavily armed for it's size.
No no. Saber class is what you'd call a low cost throw away ship.
And furthermore, Worf is a good example. He was the Tactical and Security officer and wore gold in TNG. He wasn't command track but was the tactical officer, though when he first came on the show he was a red shirt.
But eventually those who want to sit in the captain's chair eventually have to switch to the command track, it's the preferred way of doing it. Hell Ezri Dax had to do that to get command of the Vesta.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
Aside from the stupidity of putting Troi in the chair, can you name any other examples? Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank. Who else ended up in the chair that shouldn't have?
McCoy seemed to have a general dislike for serving shipside. In TNG he was working at a Federation hospital on ground.
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Aside from the stupidity of putting Troi in the chair, can you name any other examples? Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank. Who else ended up in the chair that shouldn't have?
The examples of Riker and Worf I disagree with because the "up or out" mentality makes no sense. Why remove a talented officer from a position he's good at just because he doesn't want a different one?
Because, according to what Sander said on the subject, that's how the USN works... Simples... It doesn't have to make sense -- least of all to a civilian... If that's the policy, then that's the policy...
Once Picard retired, he'd probably accept command then (it's stated he doesn't want to get bumped before he's had a chance to maximize his time working under and learning from him), but even if not and he's more comfortable as a second in command with more experience and authority than usual, so? Find him a flag vessel to serve on where he's captaining for an Admiral who calls the shots and he carries them out similar to how he served on Enterprise-D. Part of the advantage of Starfleet not being a military as we know it is that they can be more flexible.
And as Admiral Hansen pointed out to Picard in Best of Both Worlds, Riker was hurting his career by staying put. Of course, the real-world answer is that Jonathan Frakes had a job, and as a rule, shows don't split up their principle cast without good reason, but in-verse, it had been acknowledged that declining command opportunities, was damaging to Riker's career, and that he was at risk of looking poor, due to officers like Shelby, who were coming up through the ranks looking for command... Young Riker wanted command, then all of a sudden, he slammed the brakes on career-wise, and got complacent (a theme which was then directly examined by the discovery of his transporter duplicate)
[
As to Worf, if he's unqualified so is every commander in the entire KDF because he doesn't act any differently than any other Klingon commander in the history of ever. The whole point of the Defiant class in the first place is they're small, overpowered, and expendable. You build and field ten of those for the same investment in materials and manpower as one Galaxy class and if you lose some in battle, so what? If the blaze of glory destroys the enemy and advances your overall strategic goals, so be it. That's why you put people like him in the chair of a Defiant and not a Galaxy. Defiants are practically purpose built for do or die / suicide missions, keeping them alive isn't the priority, achieving the mission objective at any cost is. They might as well call them the Kamikaze class.
Any other examples?
Complete strawman... Worf did not serve in the KDF, he was a Starfleet officer, bound to follow Starfleet's rules, regulations and codes of conduct...
As for your assertion that the Defiant Class was designed to be expendable, please provide some backup for that theory... Everything I ever saw on screen, was that they were designed to hit hard and fast and keep going under a pounding, not that they were considered expendable nor kamikaze in intent... :-\
Far as the Defiant goes, they were not a Kamikaze class. That ablative armor wasn't very easy to make and notice after the got the quirks out of the ship, the Federation didn't build them enmasse. Want to call a ship a kamikaze class, that would of been the Saber class.
Built around the Defiant's needs of being absolutely spartan, low crew, easy to mass produce and didn't have the same kind of ablative armoring the Defiant had and was heavily armed for it's size.
No no. Saber class is what you'd call a low cost throw away ship.
And furthermore, Worf is a good example. He was the Tactical and Security officer and wore gold in TNG. He wasn't command track but was the tactical officer, though when he first came on the show he was a red shirt.
But eventually those who want to sit in the captain's chair eventually have to switch to the command track, it's the preferred way of doing it. Hell Ezri Dax had to do that to get command of the Vesta.
I think the real flaw in the situation, was that the writer's thought 'The Defiant's badass... Worf's a badass... Let's put the two together to get Superbadass...' (and Worf has always been one of my favorite characters) without fully thinking it through If I remember, it was something of a WTF moment, when they realized that the Lakota had been equipped with ablative armor
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Aside from the stupidity of putting Troi in the chair, can you name any other examples? Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank. Who else ended up in the chair that shouldn't have?
The examples of Riker and Worf I disagree with because the "up or out" mentality makes no sense. Why remove a talented officer from a position he's good at just because he doesn't want a different one?
Because, according to what Sander said on the subject, that's how the USN works... Simples... It doesn't have to make sense -- least of all to a civilian... If that's the policy, then that's the policy...
Once Picard retired, he'd probably accept command then (it's stated he doesn't want to get bumped before he's had a chance to maximize his time working under and learning from him), but even if not and he's more comfortable as a second in command with more experience and authority than usual, so? Find him a flag vessel to serve on where he's captaining for an Admiral who calls the shots and he carries them out similar to how he served on Enterprise-D. Part of the advantage of Starfleet not being a military as we know it is that they can be more flexible.
And as Admiral Hansen pointed out to Picard in Best of Both Worlds, Riker was hurting his career by staying put. Of course, the real-world answer is that Jonathan Frakes had a job, and as a rule, shows don't split up their principle cast without good reason, but in-verse, it had been acknowledged that declining command opportunities, was damaging to Riker's career, and that he was at risk of looking poor, due to officers like Shelby, who were coming up through the ranks looking for command... Young Riker wanted command, then all of a sudden, he slammed the brakes on career-wise, and got complacent (a theme which was then directly examined by the discovery of his transporter duplicate)
[
As to Worf, if he's unqualified so is every commander in the entire KDF because he doesn't act any differently than any other Klingon commander in the history of ever. The whole point of the Defiant class in the first place is they're small, overpowered, and expendable. You build and field ten of those for the same investment in materials and manpower as one Galaxy class and if you lose some in battle, so what? If the blaze of glory destroys the enemy and advances your overall strategic goals, so be it. That's why you put people like him in the chair of a Defiant and not a Galaxy. Defiants are practically purpose built for do or die / suicide missions, keeping them alive isn't the priority, achieving the mission objective at any cost is. They might as well call them the Kamikaze class.
Any other examples?
Complete strawman... Worf did not serve in the KDF, he was a Starfleet officer, bound to follow Starfleet's rules, regulations and codes of conduct...
As for your assertion that the Defiant Class was designed to be expendable, please provide some backup for that theory... Everything I ever saw on screen, was that they were designed to hit hard and fast and keep going under a pounding, not that they were considered expendable nor kamikaze in intent... :-\
"That's the rule, that's just how the USN works"... it's fortunate for Riker then that Starfleet isn't the Us Navy, huh? Regardless of what the real life Navy policy is, it's clear that Starfleet doesn't have the same policy. That's why Riker is told he's harming his career, worded as personal advice for his benefit, rather than a "do what we say or gtfo" ultimatum. And in this case I am of the opinion that the Starfleet way is better for all involved.
And yet Starfleet was clearly heavily inspired by the USN in terms of address, rank and protocols etc...
As I said, from an external perspective, we can acknowledge that the reason why being down to not messing with a good cast, and the dramatic tension which those discussions created... From an internal perspective, it makes no sense for 'career slovenliness' to be tolerated... As another example, in the reality Q facilitated so Picard could appreciate his life, he was clearly an example of that 'held at rank till retirement' scenario, which Troi was too kind to explicitly state to him, so gave him a prettified reason wrapped up in some psychoanalysis...
As to the Defiant, this is yet another case where DS9 lifted a concept directly from Babylon 5 but executed it in an inferior way. The B5 example is the White Star, the prototype ship built with Minbari technology with an assist from the Vorlons, making it the baddest thing in local space designed to take on the big bad of the galaxy nothing else would be able to stand up to. Sound familiar? The difference is, in B5 they did the logical thing and, as soon as the prototype had proven itself capable of doing the job it was designed for, they put them into mass production and built as many of them as they could crank out. The exact same thing should have happened to the Defiant class, but the showrunners chose to keep it as a unique hero ship instead because they're television writers and not military strategists. That doesn't change what the role of the ship should have logically been in any sane strategic plan.
Defiant goes against traditional Starfleet doctrine, which is normally to build a relatively few ships that are bigger, more tricked out in every way, and generally superior vessels that project force and act in a multi-role capacity. In a naval force analogy, they're like aircraft carriers except they're expected to act alone and thus they're even more lavishly equipped. They are singular vessels that are incredibly valuable and the loss of even one is a tragedy and a strategic disaster. Hence the reaction to losing the Galaxy class USS Odyssey, as a major event that sent ripples through the fleet and sent command scurrying like ants in a kicked in anthill.
Defiant turns that doctrine on its head. It's a ship with no creature comforts at all, designed for short duration tactical missions where the goal is achieve objective and then return to base (if possible). Compared to Galaxy, it's a vastly lower investment in materials and time to build as well as crew compliment. As compassionate as Starfleet is, they're a hell of a lot more willing to risk 50 people than they are 500 in a ship like a Constitution or several times that in something like a Galaxy. So, by Starfleet standards, it's an expendable gunboat designed to seek and destroy and return if possible. They're still Starfleet though, so they won't just throw them away if at all possible but again, we're speaking in relative terms. When you have a risky job you need done, you send a Defiant not a Galaxy because you can afford to lose the former a hell of a lot better than you can the latter.
From this perspective, the Saber makes no sense as a Starfleet vessel and neither does throwing Mirandas into a wood chipper like they did. Both are just a waste of resources and lives in what amounts to a starship version of a human wave attack, a zerg rush which is not something Starfleet would do. If it wasn't for the producers wanting to keep Defiant as a unique hero vessel for dramatic purposes, logically Starfleet would have put the class into maximum production and used it as the gunboat it was designed to be.
None of any of that, gives an example of the Defiant Class being considered expendable or kamikaze, it's just your thoughts on the subject... :-\
Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank.
McCoy seemed to have a general dislike for serving shipside. In TNG he was working at a Federation hospital on ground.
McCoy was just grumpy by nature, and yes he did have a pretty strong expressed distaste for at least some of the aspects of serving on a Starfleet ship. On the other hand, he did love his job as a doctor and he signed up to help people in a medical capacity. I think serving on or in fact commanding a dedicated medical vessel would have suited him a lot better and allowed him to avoid more of the parts of Starfleet duty he didn't care for and allowed him to use his medical talents on the front lines of where the medical need was strongest. As I said commanding a medical vessel is basically akin to running a hospital, you have people who handle the flying and such while you're applying your expertise to making medical decisions and allocating staff and resources to the needs of the patients and the like. The most Captain like thing you actually do is have a subordinate say "Sir, we're getting orders to respond to a medical emergency at (x location)" and telling your helmsman "Ok then get us there as fast as you can, dammit, lives are on the line!". You then step into your office and read up on the nature of the medical emergency and begin preparing your staff and supplies to handle it the moment you get there. That fits McCoy's priorities to a T, and it also means he'd probably never have to step onto a transporter pad again which would make him quite happy indeed
Well, he DID end up running a hospital. Just not on a ship.
@marcusdkane: That's correct; the "command"/"conn" uniforms in TOS actually weren't yellow/gold; they were actually a lime/avocado green. The stage lighting that they used, as well as the film they shot TOS on, tended to make them look yellow or even kind of a beige in some scenes.
Interestingly in the very early episodes of TOS, there were no red shirts; eng/ops wore a beige/khaki (like Scotty's khaki shirt he wore back then) and red wasn't used for eng/ops/security until around 2265, and then only until about 2271 or so, when they had ostensibly switched to the TMP style where things got a bit weird and confusing with the division colors. So apparently there was only a short period of time when the TOS-era red shirts were actually in use.
With the Wrath Of Khan-type red coats they wore later (which would've looked a lot better in navy blue imho, but whatever), they had a lot of different division colors, not just the three from TOS; command actually had its own division color, white. I always felt that this made more sense, so that was why when I designed my own uniforms in STO, I spun command off into its own division and gave it the white color (made the base color navy blue with a white stripe instead of the white shoulders).
The rule is incredibly simple: if you are any sort of main character and you wear a Starfleet uniform you will INEVITABLY* end up in the captain's chair. It doesn't matter what your skill set or training are. It doesn't matter if that's the dumbest idea ever. You get a chair. Suck it up.
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Aside from the stupidity of putting Troi in the chair, can you name any other examples? Crusher commanding a medical ship makes sense, as it's a flying hospital and commanding it is more akin to being the administrator of a medical facility than traditional starship command. It would have made sense for McCoy to end up in a similar position if not for the need to keep the cast together instead of breaking them out into their more logical career paths as they attained seniority and rank. Who else ended up in the chair that shouldn't have?
The examples of Riker and Worf I disagree with because the "up or out" mentality makes no sense. Why remove a talented officer from a position he's good at just because he doesn't want a different one?
Because, according to what Sander said on the subject, that's how the USN works... Simples... It doesn't have to make sense -- least of all to a civilian... If that's the policy, then that's the policy...
Once Picard retired, he'd probably accept command then (it's stated he doesn't want to get bumped before he's had a chance to maximize his time working under and learning from him), but even if not and he's more comfortable as a second in command with more experience and authority than usual, so? Find him a flag vessel to serve on where he's captaining for an Admiral who calls the shots and he carries them out similar to how he served on Enterprise-D. Part of the advantage of Starfleet not being a military as we know it is that they can be more flexible.
And as Admiral Hansen pointed out to Picard in Best of Both Worlds, Riker was hurting his career by staying put. Of course, the real-world answer is that Jonathan Frakes had a job, and as a rule, shows don't split up their principle cast without good reason, but in-verse, it had been acknowledged that declining command opportunities, was damaging to Riker's career, and that he was at risk of looking poor, due to officers like Shelby, who were coming up through the ranks looking for command... Young Riker wanted command, then all of a sudden, he slammed the brakes on career-wise, and got complacent (a theme which was then directly examined by the discovery of his transporter duplicate)
[
As to Worf, if he's unqualified so is every commander in the entire KDF because he doesn't act any differently than any other Klingon commander in the history of ever. The whole point of the Defiant class in the first place is they're small, overpowered, and expendable. You build and field ten of those for the same investment in materials and manpower as one Galaxy class and if you lose some in battle, so what? If the blaze of glory destroys the enemy and advances your overall strategic goals, so be it. That's why you put people like him in the chair of a Defiant and not a Galaxy. Defiants are practically purpose built for do or die / suicide missions, keeping them alive isn't the priority, achieving the mission objective at any cost is. They might as well call them the Kamikaze class.
Any other examples?
Complete strawman... Worf did not serve in the KDF, he was a Starfleet officer, bound to follow Starfleet's rules, regulations and codes of conduct...
As for your assertion that the Defiant Class was designed to be expendable, please provide some backup for that theory... Everything I ever saw on screen, was that they were designed to hit hard and fast and keep going under a pounding, not that they were considered expendable nor kamikaze in intent... :-\
"That's the rule, that's just how the USN works"... it's fortunate for Riker then that Starfleet isn't the Us Navy, huh? Regardless of what the real life Navy policy is, it's clear that Starfleet doesn't have the same policy. That's why Riker is told he's harming his career, worded as personal advice for his benefit, rather than a "do what we say or gtfo" ultimatum. And in this case I am of the opinion that the Starfleet way is better for all involved.
And yet Starfleet was clearly heavily inspired by the USN in terms of address, rank and protocols etc...
As I said, from an external perspective, we can acknowledge that the reason why being down to not messing with a good cast, and the dramatic tension which those discussions created... From an internal perspective, it makes no sense for 'career slovenliness' to be tolerated... As another example, in the reality Q facilitated so Picard could appreciate his life, he was clearly an example of that 'held at rank till retirement' scenario, which Troi was too kind to explicitly state to him, so gave him a prettified reason wrapped up in some psychoanalysis...
As to the Defiant, this is yet another case where DS9 lifted a concept directly from Babylon 5 but executed it in an inferior way. The B5 example is the White Star, the prototype ship built with Minbari technology with an assist from the Vorlons, making it the baddest thing in local space designed to take on the big bad of the galaxy nothing else would be able to stand up to. Sound familiar? The difference is, in B5 they did the logical thing and, as soon as the prototype had proven itself capable of doing the job it was designed for, they put them into mass production and built as many of them as they could crank out. The exact same thing should have happened to the Defiant class, but the showrunners chose to keep it as a unique hero ship instead because they're television writers and not military strategists. That doesn't change what the role of the ship should have logically been in any sane strategic plan.
Defiant goes against traditional Starfleet doctrine, which is normally to build a relatively few ships that are bigger, more tricked out in every way, and generally superior vessels that project force and act in a multi-role capacity. In a naval force analogy, they're like aircraft carriers except they're expected to act alone and thus they're even more lavishly equipped. They are singular vessels that are incredibly valuable and the loss of even one is a tragedy and a strategic disaster. Hence the reaction to losing the Galaxy class USS Odyssey, as a major event that sent ripples through the fleet and sent command scurrying like ants in a kicked in anthill.
Defiant turns that doctrine on its head. It's a ship with no creature comforts at all, designed for short duration tactical missions where the goal is achieve objective and then return to base (if possible). Compared to Galaxy, it's a vastly lower investment in materials and time to build as well as crew compliment. As compassionate as Starfleet is, they're a hell of a lot more willing to risk 50 people than they are 500 in a ship like a Constitution or several times that in something like a Galaxy. So, by Starfleet standards, it's an expendable gunboat designed to seek and destroy and return if possible. They're still Starfleet though, so they won't just throw them away if at all possible but again, we're speaking in relative terms. When you have a risky job you need done, you send a Defiant not a Galaxy because you can afford to lose the former a hell of a lot better than you can the latter.
From this perspective, the Saber makes no sense as a Starfleet vessel and neither does throwing Mirandas into a wood chipper like they did. Both are just a waste of resources and lives in what amounts to a starship version of a human wave attack, a zerg rush which is not something Starfleet would do. If it wasn't for the producers wanting to keep Defiant as a unique hero vessel for dramatic purposes, logically Starfleet would have put the class into maximum production and used it as the gunboat it was designed to be.
None of any of that, gives an example of the Defiant Class being considered expendable or kamikaze, it's just your thoughts on the subject... :-\
Inspired by US Navy yes, exactly the same as US Navy no. Starfleet cares a lot more about its people on a personal level, as befits an all-volunteer force with a civilian origin as a scientific exploration entity a la NASA that later grew to encompass more Naval and military functions and duties as time went on without ever forgetting where it came from or what those core values were.
Personal supposition... I'm not getting into a 'my opinion beats yours because reasons' discussion...
[
And I point out to you where I said that regarding Defiant being "expendable" I was speaking in relative terms. Starfleet wouldn't field truly expendable vessels nor engage in one way or suicide missions except when absolutely forced to by desperate necessity --and then only on a volunteer basis. More than once it was said in canon "I can't order you on a suicide mission". That's why I think it makes no sense we saw Sabers and Mirandas thrown into a wood chipper as we did on DS9 so often, they'd have mass produced Defiants instead to fill those roles where high-risk combat missions were necessary. They'd want to both minimize the cost of losing them and maximize their chance of returning alive. The only logical time and place you'd ever see such clearly flimsy and inferior vessels deployed where they're almost certainly doomed is in desperate planetary defense scenarios where there's nothing else available and you're throwing anything you have at the enemy to avoid your core worlds being blasted to slag. But the producers wanted pretty scenes of ships going boom in battle to raise dramatic tension, so that's what we got. Again, it's the difference between the priorities of television producers and what real life fleet strategists would order.
Noo, you clearly stated that they were expendable and could/should be considered a kamikaze class... I asked you for citation of that, and now you're claiming you were just speaking figuratively... Sorry, but that's just shifting the goalposts to cover up your inability to cite a canon reference of the Defiant Class ever being refered to or implied to be, 'expendable'...
The rest, as with the above point, is just your own personal conjectures...
That said, Defiant class ships in such a logically ordered fleet doctrine is where you'd put hot blooded self-sacrificing warrior types like Worf because when you deploy a Defiant or a group of them you're in need of a commander who will prioritize mission completion over self-preservation. You don't send those ships unless you have something that has to get done period because there are a lot more lives on the line than just the crews in question. It's their job to put themselves on the line to save others, risking the fewest number of lives and amount of resources for the maximum chance of preserving those who stay behind on base or behind the lines. You want them to come back, you want them to want to come back, but if the choice comes down to getting the job done at the cost of their lives or not at all, you want the ones who will say "perhaps today is a good day to die!".
Seriously?!?
I've already given the example of where Worf has put his own personal priorities above completion of a mission! Sisko specifically told him, that while he understood Worf's action, it was a career-costing mistake... Yes, not 'career-costing' in the sense of getting Worf kicked out (same reason as Jonathan Frakes/Riker, they're not going to break a good cast for no reason) but enough to mean he would likely never be given a command of his own... You're talking absolute nonsense based on nothing more than hero-worship... Worf was someone temperamentally unsuited to command, and all the badassery in the world can't change that...
@marcusdkane: That's correct; the "command"/"conn" uniforms in TOS actually weren't yellow/gold; they were actually a lime/avocado green. The stage lighting that they used, as well as the film they shot TOS on, tended to make them look yellow or even kind of a beige in some scenes.
Interestingly in the very early episodes of TOS, there were no red shirts; eng/ops wore a beige/khaki (like Scotty's khaki shirt he wore back then) and red wasn't used for eng/ops/security until around 2265, and then only until about 2271 or so, when they had ostensibly switched to the TMP style where things got a bit weird and confusing with the division colors. So apparently there was only a short period of time when the TOS-era red shirts were actually in use.
With the Wrath Of Khan-type red coats they wore later (which would've looked a lot better in navy blue imho, but whatever), they had a lot of different division colors, not just the three from TOS; command actually had its own division color, white. I always felt that this made more sense, so that was why when I designed my own uniforms in STO, I spun command off into its own division and gave it the white color (made the base color navy blue with a white stripe instead of the white shoulders).
This is an ancient thread, but it does have a lot of interesting information on the original series's costumes and how stage lighting and film treatments affected their colors as our eyes perceive them, even in later series like TNG:
Comments
Spock was a captain in rank in Wrath of Khan, but he was also an academy lecturer, not a ship's commander... It's been suggested that Mad Kathy's career background was science, but look how well that turned out...
when i was in, officers generally earned that qualification when they were doing their executive officer tour. I served with one who earned that qualification as an O-3 lieutenant, because he XOed a PHM.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
(* unless you skip ahead directly to pan-dimensional demigod)
Probably because this is a fantasy culture written by people whose eagerness to tell you than that their "indistinguishable-from-a-military-organization isn't actually a military" is only exceeded by their need to demonstrate their utter ignorance of how military cultures actually work. In this case the writers simply don't know any other way of saying "I want to show this character is good at the whole Starfleet thing." Partially because they're hamstrung by the unspoken notion that you can't have an admiral without them having been butt-in-the-big-chair first.
Command? Not a hobby. Its a real, primary, lifelong career. One for which many people are not temperamentally equipped. One for which people are often not intellectually equipped. And one which thankfully most real rank-based organizations don't foist on the disinterested, unsuited, or unprepared (because 9 times out of 10 when they do, you don't get a Picard, you get a cluster****). And all that is in addition to the reality that massive, technically diverse organizations have far more need for good, capable 'indians' than there is for 'chiefs' and wasting a superb engineer, doctor, or researcher by dragooning them into command is a tragedy, the gleeful mismanagement so common in bad television writing.
Now that sounds suspiciously like sanity
Janeway - Science captain with Command Specialization
Archer - Tactical captain with Pilot Specialization
Daniels - Tactical Captain with Temporal Specialization
Sisko - Engineering Captain with Intelligence Specialization
Sela - Tactical Captain with Intelligence Specialization
Specializations and captain professions now leave a large palette of options. So you can't go wrong.
Absolutely so, especially the boldened text...
Two such examples, are Riker and Worf.
Riker declined so many oportunities to advance to captain, even accepting demotion after a valid promition, that in the US Navy, he would he been either desk-jobbed, or outright discharged... Sander once mantioned the way it was phrased, I can't remember his exact words, but it was something along the lines of 'up or out'...
Worf, was simply temperementally unsuited to command. When the Klingons framed him with the 'ghost ship', although plot let him off the consequences of the action, it couldn't hid that, both in battle and in the safety of a courtroom setting, he lost control and lashed out. His order to 'prepare for ramming speed' (which the helmsman wisely chose to ignore) showed again his 'blaze of glory' mentality, and his decision to save Dax's life over the outcome of a mission, was the nail in the coffin lid of his career... Three Strikes...
Command-yellow in TOS, anyone?! Red was for Security there.
I found an article on the policy on Wikipedia:
Key point to note there, is those who twice fail promotion (failing to accept promotion may come under that umberella) are, most realistically, getting discharged, or held at their current rank till retirement...
By that criteria, by the end of TNG's run, Riker had passed up enough promotions (including a willing demotion) that he simply would not have been promoted to captain, let alone admiral
And as Admiral Hansen pointed out to Picard in Best of Both Worlds, Riker was hurting his career by staying put. Of course, the real-world answer is that Jonathan Frakes had a job, and as a rule, shows don't split up their principle cast without good reason, but in-verse, it had been acknowledged that declining command opportunities, was damaging to Riker's career, and that he was at risk of looking poor, due to officers like Shelby, who were coming up through the ranks looking for command... Young Riker wanted command, then all of a sudden, he slammed the brakes on career-wise, and got complacent (a theme which was then directly examined by the discovery of his transporter duplicate)
Complete strawman... Worf did not serve in the KDF, he was a Starfleet officer, bound to follow Starfleet's rules, regulations and codes of conduct...
As for your assertion that the Defiant Class was designed to be expendable, please provide some backup for that theory... Everything I ever saw on screen, was that they were designed to hit hard and fast and keep going under a pounding, not that they were considered expendable nor kamikaze in intent... :-\
Far as the Defiant goes, they were not a Kamikaze class. That ablative armor wasn't very easy to make and notice after the got the quirks out of the ship, the Federation didn't build them enmasse. Want to call a ship a kamikaze class, that would of been the Saber class.
Built around the Defiant's needs of being absolutely spartan, low crew, easy to mass produce and didn't have the same kind of ablative armoring the Defiant had and was heavily armed for it's size.
No no. Saber class is what you'd call a low cost throw away ship.
And furthermore, Worf is a good example. He was the Tactical and Security officer and wore gold in TNG. He wasn't command track but was the tactical officer, though when he first came on the show he was a red shirt.
But eventually those who want to sit in the captain's chair eventually have to switch to the command track, it's the preferred way of doing it. Hell Ezri Dax had to do that to get command of the Vesta.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
My character Tsin'xing
As I said, from an external perspective, we can acknowledge that the reason why being down to not messing with a good cast, and the dramatic tension which those discussions created... From an internal perspective, it makes no sense for 'career slovenliness' to be tolerated... As another example, in the reality Q facilitated so Picard could appreciate his life, he was clearly an example of that 'held at rank till retirement' scenario, which Troi was too kind to explicitly state to him, so gave him a prettified reason wrapped up in some psychoanalysis...
None of any of that, gives an example of the Defiant Class being considered expendable or kamikaze, it's just your thoughts on the subject... :-\
Maybe in YOUR century. In mine they wear gold.
My character Tsin'xing
Interestingly in the very early episodes of TOS, there were no red shirts; eng/ops wore a beige/khaki (like Scotty's khaki shirt he wore back then) and red wasn't used for eng/ops/security until around 2265, and then only until about 2271 or so, when they had ostensibly switched to the TMP style where things got a bit weird and confusing with the division colors. So apparently there was only a short period of time when the TOS-era red shirts were actually in use.
With the Wrath Of Khan-type red coats they wore later (which would've looked a lot better in navy blue imho, but whatever), they had a lot of different division colors, not just the three from TOS; command actually had its own division color, white. I always felt that this made more sense, so that was why when I designed my own uniforms in STO, I spun command off into its own division and gave it the white color (made the base color navy blue with a white stripe instead of the white shoulders).
Noo, you clearly stated that they were expendable and could/should be considered a kamikaze class... I asked you for citation of that, and now you're claiming you were just speaking figuratively... Sorry, but that's just shifting the goalposts to cover up your inability to cite a canon reference of the Defiant Class ever being refered to or implied to be, 'expendable'...
The rest, as with the above point, is just your own personal conjectures...
Seriously?!?
I've already given the example of where Worf has put his own personal priorities above completion of a mission! Sisko specifically told him, that while he understood Worf's action, it was a career-costing mistake... Yes, not 'career-costing' in the sense of getting Worf kicked out (same reason as Jonathan Frakes/Riker, they're not going to break a good cast for no reason) but enough to mean he would likely never be given a command of his own... You're talking absolute nonsense based on nothing more than hero-worship... Worf was someone temperamentally unsuited to command, and all the badassery in the world can't change that...
This is an ancient thread, but it does have a lot of interesting information on the original series's costumes and how stage lighting and film treatments affected their colors as our eyes perceive them, even in later series like TNG:
http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/kirks-tunic-color.79291/