No, division is indicated by both tunic color and the symbol on the emblem (Engineering & Support Services gets a spiral "lightning bolt", Sciences & Medical gets a stylized opening eye, everybody else gets an elongated star). Roddenberry said that his idea was that each ship would have a different patch, since originally he'd only thought about the 12 "Starship-class" craft in the first place, with the sunburst seen on starbase personnel being the generalized Starfleet symbol (remembering that "Starfleet" wasn't Roddenberry's idea originally anyway, but rather Gene Coon's). When the delta became the only symbol in TMP, his idea was that Starfleet was celebrating the massive success of the Enterprise's five-year mission under Kirk by adopting the ship's badge as the badge for the entire fleet.
Yeah, I know, none of that really makes sense, but let's be honest - ol' Gene was a great visionary, but not really much of an SF writer. There's a reason why it was Dorothy Fontana who touched up scripts, not Gene.
Star Trek was notoriously sloppy in terminology, especially so in the movie era and later. I was not talking about the four departments (Command, Sciences, Engineering, and Medical) which are denoted by tunic colors and the little symbols on the badges (which TNG sometimes did call "divisions" though I forgot about that).
While Roddenberry may have originally been thinking of using the shapes as ship patches, by the time they started shooting that had changed and there was an official policy on them that made the shapes denote the six main duty divisions within Starfleet:
Starship Duty (the delta)
Merchant Marine/Auxiliary (the lillypad like one)
Outpost division (the sideways pinecone like one)
Starfleet Academy (a small simplified starflower)
Starbase division (the big starflower)
Independent Fleet Command (the pretzel like one Commodore Decker wore)
There are a bunch of memos about that, including the infamous one by Bob Justman chewing out Bill Thiess about the new emblem that Captain Tracy and the empty uniforms on the Exeter had instead of the Starship duty division badges.
There was another emblem that was meant to be painted on ship hulls to denote that they are Starfleet ships instead of worn on uniforms, it looks a bit like a boomerang (it is painted in red just behind the deflector array on Enterprise's secondary hull and it appears as a wall hanging several times in various places in indoor scenes), as well as non-Starfleet ones used (like the prison authority badges and whatnot). ENT mistakenly used the general Starfleet ship emblem as the "Defiant emblem" in the episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", probably because it had been used as that in fanfic to the point it pretty much became "fanon".
Anyone else annoyed the space force was given to the air force and not the navy? Feels wrong, bloody colonials, no sense of style.
NASA has for a long time borrowed Air Force people as part of their programs. Yeah the US Navy also has planes, but it's USAF who gets the coolest stuff.
Seriously though, almost all the changes to the spacecom patch are design aspects used in the NASA "meatball" patch. And the Meatball patch is older than Star Trek.
Anyone else annoyed the space force was given to the air force and not the navy? Feels wrong, bloody colonials, no sense of style.
NASA has for a long time borrowed Air Force people as part of their programs. Yeah the US Navy also has planes, but it's USAF who gets the coolest stuff.
Seriously though, almost all the changes to the spacecom patch are design aspects used in the NASA "meatball" patch. And the Meatball patch is older than Star Trek.
I think it's because I'm British and love classic sci fi, when we get to building decent sized space vessels they should be part of the navy. I know the air force makes logical sense but TRIBBLE logic sometimes.
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Star Trek was notoriously sloppy in terminology, especially so in the movie era and later. I was not talking about the four departments (Command, Sciences, Engineering, and Medical) which are denoted by tunic colors and the little symbols on the badges (which TNG sometimes did call "divisions" though I forgot about that).
While Roddenberry may have originally been thinking of using the shapes as ship patches, by the time they started shooting that had changed and there was an official policy on them that made the shapes denote the six main duty divisions within Starfleet:
There are a bunch of memos about that, including the infamous one by Bob Justman chewing out Bill Thiess about the new emblem that Captain Tracy and the empty uniforms on the Exeter had instead of the Starship duty division badges.
There was another emblem that was meant to be painted on ship hulls to denote that they are Starfleet ships instead of worn on uniforms, it looks a bit like a boomerang (it is painted in red just behind the deflector array on Enterprise's secondary hull and it appears as a wall hanging several times in various places in indoor scenes), as well as non-Starfleet ones used (like the prison authority badges and whatnot). ENT mistakenly used the general Starfleet ship emblem as the "Defiant emblem" in the episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", probably because it had been used as that in fanfic to the point it pretty much became "fanon".
Seriously though, almost all the changes to the spacecom patch are design aspects used in the NASA "meatball" patch. And the Meatball patch is older than Star Trek.
My character Tsin'xing
I think it's because I'm British and love classic sci fi, when we get to building decent sized space vessels they should be part of the navy. I know the air force makes logical sense but TRIBBLE logic sometimes.