Janeway and promotions

[queenhank]

Hey, if I can get paid for doing it, I'd be up for writing that book!

 

The way I see continutiy "errors" is the same way I see such inconsistencies in real life. Like, if a friend of yours went on vacation, and came back two weeks later with a different hair color, and would give no explanation, it is left up to you to figure out why. Now, you can't just say "it doesn't make any sense for my friend to have a different hair color, so it must be the fault of an innattentive writer!", because, well, there it is in front of you. Your friend has a different hair color. Same thing with Star Trek (and any other fictional setting. I just only talk about Trek here because, well, this is a Star Trek forum). It's there. You can see that there was an NX class Enterprise (or whatever other "error" you like), and have no explanation for why you've never seen or heard about it before. You can't deny it, because there it is. So, you must then blindly accept it (which I find boring) or seek out an explanation (such as "Why would people talk about the NX Enterprise a bunch, hundreds of years later? Sure, they probably mention it once in a while, about as often as we mention, say, the Mayflower, but we only see an hour's worth of their lives each episode. If somebody watched a total of a few hundred hours in your life, would they ever hear you mention the Mayflower? Probably not.")

 

Personally, I think all this trouble is rather unnecessary. If Paramount would just get somebody to actually work out the continuity, and make sure no script so much as challenges it, then nobody would need to interpret what seem to be errors. But, of course, talking about it is like giving Star Trek free advertising, so I doubt they'd ever do that.

[Mav]

Just curious, if this is the correct pip rank for O'Brien

 

 

From DS9 5x02 "The Ship"

[queenhank]

Well, according to my pips over yonder, that makes him a Command Chief, which I would think is right, given they call him "Chief", and he's in a command position.

[Hilander72]

It think it looks like: (Chief PO)

 

but the picture is not so sharp so it could also be: (Senior Chief PO) or (Master Chief PO)

 

Check out Wikipedia about ranks.

[Mav]

yea sorry about the quality, i used nite's 170 encode of season 5 for the screen shot. i tried to see if it would show up with O'Brien in a patch of light under his chin but no luck ;\ it could be the non-gold bars or gold bars from that picture though.

[Tenebrae]

Nah, I'm pretty sure that's Chief PO.

[queenhank]

Yeah, having looked at his collar, and not the drawing beside it, I, too, would say it is a single pip and not three.

[Steveo]

I just watched DS9 Season 5 Episode 15 - By Inferno's Light. It's white, with two dots on the chief's insignia.

 

Capture program seems not to work. Best place to see it is when him and Dr Bashir are talking about darts in the infirmary about 2/3 way through.

[Carnifex]

Wasn't he a command rank officer until the DS9 episode where he spent his 'entire life' in jail?..... when he got out he was demoted, not for bad reasons, but because he had to retrain.

[queenhank]

I don't think he was ever an officer.

[Tenebrae]

He was wearing the claret in Encounter At Farpoint. I've no recollection as to his rank though but he was on the bridge... maybe a lieutant but I assume he'd HAVE to be a comissioned officer to wear a command uniform.

 

There are a lot of non-sequiters in that episode though...

[queenhank]

I don't think a command uniform can only be worn by commissioned officers. This is shown by the fact that O'Brien wore one in the first season of TNG. He started as a tactical officer, and likely had command training (being that he was a soldier), which would put him in command, rather than engineering (or security). It was probably while on the Enterprise that he transferred to the engineering corps, and thus got the yellow uniform. You don't go from being commissioned to being non-commissioned. You have to have Starfleet Academy training to be a commissioned officer, and O'Brien did not. He enlisted during a war, and stayed in the military after it ended.

[Tenebrae]

Why would a soldier require command training?

 

Any screenshots of Colm Meaney in Farpoint?

[queenhank]

A soldier wouldn't require command training; a tactical officer would. A tactical officer is a bridge officer, and thus is in line to be captain, should something happen to all higher-ranked command-level personnel on board. Also, he would be in command of other NCOs during away missions. You don't wear the red uniform without command training. He wore the red uniform. Therefor: he had command training.

 

This might help: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Miles_O%27Brien

[maverick]

*GASP*

 

Until you mentioned it, I had never ever thought that Trek writers could be wrong! :|

 

 

thank god i did then ay?

 

no more sleepless nights for you my lad

[Tenebrae]

My insomnia gone and all thanks to an internet forum!

 

Ah, I see from that picture that on Memory Alpha he was a warrant officer.

 

Warrant Officer Problems...

 

So actually, we were both wrong - in that episode he's neither commissioned or non-commissioned. Although I await the inevitable circumvention of probability to explain this.

[queenhank]

How can one be neither commissioned nor non-commissioned? If you aren't commissioned, I am fairly sure that makes you non-commissioned.

 

I checked the entry, and it doesn't say he's neither commissioned nor non-commissioned, just that a Warrant Officer is a special kind of officer. And yes, he was probably given a warrant (or whatever the terminology is) to become Transporter Chief, as a transporter expert. When he left Enterprise to become an all-purpose engineer, he would no longer have use of a rank as transport expert, and would thus need some OTHER non-comissioned rank, such as Chief.

[Tenebrae]

A warrant officer is a specialized grade of service in a military operation, where an officer is given his authority through a warrant rather than a commission, usually for service in a single field, with the capacity of an expert.

 

Frankly, that doesn't really make it clear and the following exert from the Wiki entry on Warrant Officer will muddy the waters further:

 

A warrant officer (WO) is a member of a military organization holding one of a specific group of ranks. In most countries they are effectively senior non-commissioned officers, although technically in a class of their own between NCOs and commissioned officers. In the military of the United States, however, officers at the Chief Warrant Officer level are in fact commissioned officers and are afforded the same privileges and courtesies, such as terms of address and salutes, as other commissioned officers.

 

Anyway, I thought all the evidence supported the fact that he was only a Warrant officer in 1x01? And that the rank for all intents and purposes doesn't exist in starfleet and that on all subsequent occasions, he's a chief petty officer... and given the reason for his assignment in command uniform, there'd be no reason for him to be a warrant officer.

[queenhank]

Well, if he WAS a Warrant Officer, we can safely assume two things: 1-Starfleet DOES have Warrant Officers (we just don't see them much, which is understandable); 2-Warrant Officers, unlike in the US, are not commissioned officers.

[Tenebrae]

It would still be an effective demotion :p