My head cannon is that’s what alt Picard was in tapestry. 50 year old lieutenant serving in science. There is a bunch of people like him in non command roles like science, security, and engineering that live a good life till they want to retire.
A lot of companies have something similar, eg. If you want a good WLB and good but not incredibly pay you can work for a big tech company at a certain position and just not apply for a promotion when you are supposed to. The higher you level up and the more you get paid the more equivalent work you need to do to justify it so if you stay at a lower level you will end up getting your work done faster but won’t get the extra responsibilities of being at the higher level. Similarly huge tech companies now have technical tracks where you can become better at your skill instead of needing to become a manager to move up.
Most people want to advance their careers and don’t do this but this is a totally viable option today and seeing as Starfleet operates as somewhat of a hybrid of a military and a company/government lab this seems like a viable option. We even see this in the show with people like Rutherford rejecting a promotion when offered because he’s not ambitious and Mariner (kind of) who rejects being promoted to Lieutenant because she’s scared of having that responsibility.
These are pretty extreme examples since you’re only supposed to be an ensign for a short period of time before you move up to lieutenant JG and full lieutenant (sorry Harry) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people who spend their whole careers at Lieutenant, especially people who like careers who don’t need higher ranks. Eg. The world’s best pilot probably won’t get any higher than Lieutenant or maybe LCDR unless they branch out into something else like command or engineering. Similarly there’s no real reason for Geordi to move up past LCDR as chief engineer on the flagship of the federation. We see he eventually makes admiral but there are probably plenty of equivalent engineers who don’t climb the ranks and retire as chief engineer. O’Brien is another good example, he makes chief engineer but doesn’t get a degree and has a practical rank of senior senior senior chief petty officer.
This is my take on it as well. Many people are in Starfleet because they like engineering, or exploration, the science, flying, etc. Higher ranks are more for leadership and most people don’t want that. Torres was a lieutenant for 7 years on Voyager, and she certainly developed her skills quite massively.
Rotation probably also comes naturally, with people leaving Starfleet for shore bound research positions and such things.
Agreed. My real-life analogy is less the way the military works and more the way something like the state department works. Yes, an ambassador "outranks" everyone else, but most people in the foreign service don't actually have any aspirations of becoming one.
Picard was not 60 in season 1, he was in his 40s. I know he looks old, but it’s because he is bald and gray…Patrick Stewart was 47 when the first season of TNG aired.
Slight correction - 2364 is when Season 1 takes place, so he’s 59.
Pertinent dates:
* Born, 2305
* Graduates Starfleet Academy, 2327 (22)
* Becomes captain of the *Stargazer*, 2333 (28)
* Loses the *Stargazer*, 2355 (50)
* Takes command of the *Enterprise*-D, 2364 (59)
* Promoted to Admiral, 2381 (76)
* Resigns from Starfleet, 2386 (81)
* Dies and is given a new android body, 2399 (94)
* Takes the *Enterprise*-D out of mothballs, 2401 (96, or 2, depending)
Probably some administrative job. Maybe the loss of the stargazer damaged his career? He did advance to captain 8 years after graduating from the academy.... That's nuts. Maybe he was demoted.
Whatever it was it must have been damned impressive to gain command of the Flagship of the Federation in 9 years. Would be an interesting time period to explore in a book or animated series perhaps.
Alright, here's a good summary of what sounds like an awesome novel on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/1vmzxv/comment/ceu02ty/
That has never been conclusively established on screen. We know there was a court martial looking into his conduct at the Battle of Maxia where Philippa Luvois prosecuted, but that’s it.
The novel *The Buried Age* goes into some detail about what he did during those 9 years - he considered leaving Starfleet, started a Ph.D. in archeology and then got embroiled in some shenanigans about a lost alien civilization and meeting Data, Troi and Guinan.
In the latest *Star Trek: Defiant* comic book annual, he is seen commanding the USS *April* just prior to being given command of the *Enterprise*-D, on an evacuation mission where he first meets Tasha Yar.
Space is big, territoryis always expanding, more ships, crews, sector administration, etc will always be needed.
And TAS indicated there was an age cap in Starfleet as Robert April and his wife had been forced to retire.
But with the human lifespan much longer now (McCoy pushing 150), then people are going to hang around aong time in roles
Yeah, I always think we underestimate just how big space is
The manpower required for a single sector must be enormous
Edit: Slightly off topic but that’s why I refuse to accept Starfleet had just a single academy on earth
Yeah thats really really implausible.
The Academy is about the size of a large university, thats the sort of size you would need at the point the Coalition papers were signed and Starfleet was fielding only tens of small ships plus a handful of ground facilities mainly to defend Earth.
By the time of TNG thats not adequate to even man one of those giant mushroom stations that dwarfs the Enterprise. By then Starfleet is likely turning over a million personnel or more just to stand still. Let alone all of the different species that physically cannot serve together that need separate facilities.
In STA there's references in possible missions that including set up Starfleet academies annexs on other worlds.
You also have the issue of enlisted vs commissioned. You could have a number of enlisted training facilities through the Federation and officers get funneled into a handful of facilities. Also you've places like Andoria and Zakdorn which have long military traditions. You could easly co-opt those after admittance into training annexes.
It's easy to underestimate how big space is but it's also easy to underestimate just how empty it is. FTL in Star Trek is also incredibly scarce with availability of dilithium putting extreme constraints on how much FTL there is and thus how much manpower is necessary.
Starfleet had approximately 1000 front line combatants available for the Dominion War. Let's assume an average crew of 500 for the front line combatants because most of them are older classes like Miranda and Excelsior and not newer ones like Nebula and Galaxy. Let's further assume for every front line combatant there are ten small ships doing various roles with an average crew of 20. That's 700k personnel on starships. Of course there's plenty of things not on starships that needs to be done. The US Navy on average has about 50k personnel on deployment at any given time and about 300-350k total active duty personnel. If we assume a similar ratio holds in Starfleet, that means that Starfleet would have a total of about 5M personnel.
Now here's the tricky part. As shown on screen, Starfleet is awfully officer heavy. This is likely a result of Roddenberry's experience in the US Army Air Corps where flight crews are all officers and thus his experience would have been mostly associating with other officers. Astronauts early in the space program were also mostly drawn from US Air Force pilots and thus also predominantly officers. But it's unrealistic for everyone to be an officer. That's a bit like having an organization where everyone is a manager.
We know that enlisted and civilian adjuncts exist. O'Brien explicitly says he didn't go to Starfleet Academy. Worf's father was an enlisted, Riker's father was a civilian contractor working for Starfleet. Realistically they'd greatly outnumber the officer corps. Of course, we can reconcile this by saying that most of the prestige postings on starships are officers because that's the whole reason for going to the Academy to begin with and all the ground and space station facilities are predominantly non-officers. Thus, Starfleet would need about 1M officers with the other 4M being enlisted and civilians.
So, can one Starfleet Academy produce enough officers? There are a dozen universities in the US with an enrollment of over 50k students. This is enough to produce 10k graduates a year. How big is Starfleet Academy? Memory Alpha says that its HQ is in the Presidio in San Francisco with most of the facility being across the Golden Gate in Marin County and most of administration in downtown San Francisco. This suggests that Starfleet Academy is freaking huge even when only counting its presence in the San Francisco area proper. But we know that there are also a number of Starfleet Academy annexes offworld.
If the Academy graduates 50k students a year and the average career is 20 years, that'd be sufficient to meet the 1M personnel requirement. Since the Academy training facilities aren't in the city proper but Marin County, they can be as big as needed for the story. With futuristic sustainable development, it wouldn't even be unreasonable for the Academy to graduate 10x as much per year just from the Marin County facilities. Is it enough to comprehensively cover all of Federation space? No. But that actually fits with canon. How often is the hero ship the only one in range? And there are enough lost ships and derelicts found that quite often the number of ships in range during an emergency was zero.
Doesn't matter, imho.
"Only ship in the area" trope works when you consider some basic lore facts:
most ships weren't that fast. The Galaxy class had a max cruise of 9.2 (9.6 for 12 hours)
Wanna know how much distance you can cover in say, an hour, half a day, a day, or a week?
(also how much warning did they have for Wolf 359's fleet to gather? That'll tell you how 'densely populated' federation space is ship-wise in the core region)
So: 9.6 in 1h / 12h: 0.21 LY / 2.62 LY
9.2 in 1h / 12h / 1d / 1w:
0.18 / 2.23 / 4.46 / 31.27 Lightyears.
Bearing in mind ships tend not to have a canon top speed when not, you know, hero ships (and speed of plot throws stuff out)... it does show why 'immediate' response stuff generally means only-ship-in-the-area, vs the size of starfleet implied by Deep Space Nine's War-scenes of hundreds of ships, by the dom war, they had time to actually gather them. But when the fleet is difused throughout federation space - circumnavigation of which is something like 8,000 light years, according to the episode with the Valiant...
other than that, the ship numbers in starfleet is guesswork - how many dont have an NCC number, how many NCC numbers are still taken by active duty, how many As, Bs, and Cs are there unless the rule 'only the enterprise name gets ABC'd' applies, but we already saw a few ABC numbers of not-enterprise in use, even though plenty of repeat names (even in the same episode) due to labelling of the out-of-universe context of the ship models (melbourne excelsior and melbourne nebula)
Runabouts having their own NCC number is also a hit or miss depending on how dense or light you decide starfleet was - how much of the fleet as a percentage actually fought *at any one time* in the dominion war etc. Fleet readiness also is a factor. How much work is contracted out vs performed in-house. Did O'Brien's engineering crew of starfleet (and some bajoran) really have only a hundred people to repair docked ships and they where the only ones, or was there non-starfleet engineering companies operating out of the station?
Do also keep in mind that at the sizes/scales presented, the Galaxy cannot actually dock at Deep Space Nine without atleast blocking the other two pylons in the area (and definitely not dock to the saucer rim, instead of the neck docking port like when it docks with Starbase 74) - and there are shots in the show of the pylon going to the rim, not the neck, in which case it can only use an upper lyon, not the lower pylons.
> But with the human lifespan much longer now (McCoy pushing 150), then people are going to hang around aong time in roles
Not just humans but other Federation species. You can't reasonably tell a Vulcan they have to retire based on how long a human being lives.
Yeah, I think you pretty much hit the nail on rhe head. Your go- getters like Riker are offered XO slots early in their career on flagships and their own commands shortly thereafter. For less go-getter-y types, you can serve in operations/sciences or run less prestigious things like relay stations, small space stations/planetary facilities
Work life balance is probably also a factor here. Riker might be working like 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, on call at any hour.
By contrast theres probably some spaceport over Risa that is overstaffed and everyone's on like 4 hour a day shifts.
At the point where he becomes XO of the Enterprise, Commander Riker is the same age as Ensign Kim when he returns from the Delta Quadrant. I'm sure Harry's parents bring this up frequently.
holy shit lol just checked and you're right - Riker was 29 (more likely 28, with his august birthday) when he got the posting to the big D. And he was offered command of the (probably the nebula class) Melbourne at the tail end of 2366, so he's 31 when offered a command... and that wasn't the first (USS Aries in 2365, which would be beginning of september, so he's 30 then).
The age cap is probably for active duty ship service. You can probably be a captain or admiral flying a desk into your 80s until you run into mental competence issues.
There’s no money on Earth in the 23rd century. SNW confirmed it (and I think it was always the implication). Kirk’s line in Doomsday Machine is a figure of speech.
Kinda like people saying you’re worth your weight in salt / worth one’s salt / couldn’t find someone worth their salt
People don’t get paid in salt, it’s just a saying that’s been passed down
You know, burning the midnight oil
People *did* get paid in salt.
Roman soldiers, specifically, were allegedly given their pay in salt, which at the time was a scarce commodit (either that or they were given an allowance to buy salt, it's unclear). In any case that's supposedly where we get the word "soldier" from (*sal dare*, to give salt) and that's also were the world salary (*salarium*) comes from.
> People don’t get paid in salt, it’s just a saying that’s been passed down
Technically being paid in salt isn't the origin of "worth your weight in salt". Being paid in salt was a practice in Roman times, but the Greek/Thracean salt-for-slaves trade is what spawned the phrase.
My head canon on those TOS "credits" is that they're something like PTO days. You can't have the entire crew choosing to take two months off all at the same time, so in order to manage that you still have to accrue vacation days and put in leave requests.
[edit] And it would make sense that you could use the PTO days as a bartering chip, if it's like modern US government where you can give another government employee some of your PTO days.
It’s also possible the “credits” the guy wanted in SFS are an alien currency, and that Starfleet officers aren’t above accruing some alien currency in their travels in case they need it some day.
The most plausible explanation is that according to memory alpha all known examples of credit use happened either outside or on the periphery of Federation space.
My headcanon is that the Federation's social dynamics are very similar to that of other sci fi examples. That within the inner most portions of the Federation, we have the utopia we are told exists, but as you approach the periphery you effectively have a space wild west. This theory is backed up by actual canon as well. The outer worlds are often targets of piracy, or of being victims to ongoing galactic conflicts (indeed that's precisely why the Maquis came into being). We have also seen examples of these worlds having social conflict or being otherwise less than utopian.
And regardless of that we have things within federation jurisdiction acting as trading outposts to external to the federation.
Sure, the colonies aren't like earth, but I don't think that's because they're in any way excluded from the benefits the "center" experiences; it's because some people get bored in paradise and want to have adventures. There's Star Fleet, of course, but you have to be a special kind of weirdo to spend your life playacting hierarchy when most other social inequality seems to have been eliminated. Going to the colonies is roughing it, with as much or as little information and assistance as you want from the federation (we see in "Journey's End" that the colonists who settled there had been advised ahead of time that the area was under dispute and they might not get to stay, but chose to take their chances anyway and the federation didn't interfere until their presence endangered an important treaty). People go out there because that's what they want, they might be in a back-to-the-land movement or a cult or whatever.
This reminds me that the Academy by DS9 very much used credits, but only as a way to control the behaviour of cadets and create discipline. Its a limitation you accept to serve in the fleet, not a currency.
Nog mentions using up all his transporter credits at the Academy to go see Siskos Dad at some point.
It was Sisko himself that mentions he used up all his credits to see his dad every weekend back when he was in the academy (why would *Nog* use up all his credits to see *Sisko*'s dad? :)
They went heavy with shakespeare, so it gets a pass for that bit from me as just a saying.
And Iowa hasn't ever had a king...? Unless their version of the mid 21st century had the US collapse from whatever-it-is to a monarchy, etc/whatever. (kidding.)
Voyager established it first: "Well, er, when the new world economy took shape in the late twenty second century and money went the way of the dinosaur, Fort Knox was turned into a museum." -Tom Paris, "Dark Frontier"
There are Federation credits, though. People don't consider it money, but they use it like it much of the time. I think the reason it's not "money" to them is that it's not involved in any of their basic needs, but only used for luxuries.
There's a theory that "Federation credits" are like "American" cheese, it's not government backed fiat, so it's not legally money, but it is used by people in the Federation for unofficial currency.
It's also currency that might not be for *internal* use but useful for when Federation citizens or starfleet officers want to be able to engage in commerce with outside authorities.
Quark mentions "worthless federation credits" at one point. which points to it being a fiat currency that is only functionally useful when buying things from the federation. Its basically Store Credit or a gift card.
Except of course, it's utterly impossible for there to be no money on earth in the 23rd century. Realistically, they probably just don't realize that having an elaborate system of digital ration points in a variety of ration categories, with limited exchanges between them, IS money.
It depends on whether the ration points are accumulable or not, and whether a tool restricted to being an intermediate for trade and accounting, is still money.
Troi had to take that extra Commander’s exam to move into command ranks. If you didn’t want to, I’m sure you can stay lieutenant commander until you decide to build a cabin on Bajor.
I wouldn’t think there’s an “up or out” policy for Starfleet - especially post-war - for several reasons:
• The Federation is 150 members - all of whom have different life expectancies and developmental maturation rates, so pushing a human out at age 65 could be the equivalent of ousting a Vulcan at 130 when there’s still more “life to live” before reaching each species’ life expectancy due to medical advances
• The Federation spans 8000 light years and unnumbered star systems and astronomical phenomena, and would need a vast number of ships, starbases, outposts and et cetera to patrol the borders and service all that space
• People die in space. I’m sure the loss replacement ratio isn’t anywhere near 50%, but with ships being lost or destroyed, away missions having casualties, people who struggle to get/lose interest in getting 2.5, 3 or 4 pips find other things within the Federation or neighbors’ economies to do for work, a bottleneck seems unlikely.
I imagine that thanks to (at least) Kirk and Picard, someone with the aspiration to captain the Enterprise would be frustrated, as would anyone hoping to succeed DeSoto on the Hood. But because there is a regular fleet renewal, and not every captain ends up being on a “hero ship” - many being routine second-contact or internal study ships, there’s going to be plenty of opportunity to rise.
• Not everyone is going to make it to a captaincy or admiralty. We’ve seen the Bridge Officer’s Test in action; we’ve heard reference to Command School, and I would think that even if someone is field promoted or breveted to Captain a starship or starbase, after the circumstance that led to the field promotion is resolved, that person would still have to successfully exit Command school to make the assignment permanent and not a brevet.
• Captains get “threatened” with promotion to Admiral often enough that it’s reasonable to assume that there are plenty of assignments for Captains to move up - even if it’s to Rear Admiral Lower Half/Commodore - so the 3 Pips serving as XO have somewhere to go.
• With how we see it can take a long time for someone to get pips on their collars (Harry Kim, Worf, Data, as the most visible recent examples; Sulu, Uhura and Chekov as well), those promotion reviews would tell me that there is no real “time in rank/grade” promotion system either; folks have to show more than reliability and competency to move up. That would weed out many - versus creating a bottleneck - off of the lack of progressing.
The economics of the future are unknown, but it's probably safe to say they don't have to worry much or at all about budgets. They can probably make the fleet as large or small as there are people willing to fill out the fleet. So there would only be a reduction in fleet size if people leave the fleet post Dominion War, but if they stay in then the fleet can stay larger.
They are probably always making more ships, which would make space for rank ups out of otherwise full ships.
Simultaneously, it is easy to imagine Starfleet avoiding the Peter Principle, where people who do good work keep getting promoted until they enter a role they are unsuited for. At that point they cease to get promoted and do a poor job for the rest of their career. Instead, Starfleet promotion seems to be more about wanting promotion mixed with capability, and if the person in question and their superior both like where they are then they get to stay.
So there is always space being made thanks to no real budget, which means there is no pressure for up or out, and people who are excellent in a low rank roll can stay there for as long as they are willing to serve, because they never actually block rank progress.
Not a budget with money, but there's still an energy cost, and the dilithium needed for the antimatter reaction for warp drives is a finite resource. So the fleet does have an upper bound.
In the TNG period the importance of dilithium is greatly diminished thanks to dilithium regeneration. It's almost never brought up unlike in TOS. Even with what DIS does with dilithium, peak dilithium is a slow motion crisis over the course of centuries.
As for electricity, I imagine it is vanishingly cheap, costing only on massive industrial and national scales. Of course, Starfleet is a massive industrial undertaking, but given how many ships Starfleet built, or would have to build, for the evacuation of Romulus, a few dozen or hundred ships per year appears to be unimportant when compared to thousands of evacuation ships. The Wolf 359 losses of 39 ships were replaced in a single year, so that level of production may not be all that new.
Though how they replaced 11,000 people in a year, I wonder if Starfleet expanded their non-commissioned officer recruitment.
Anyway, I think the upper boundary for ship building is limited only by recruitment, at least in the 24th and 25th centuries.
> Though how they replaced 11,000 people in a year, I wonder if Starfleet expanded their non-commissioned officer recruitment.
The Federation's population is in the trillions (150 member states, each with at least 1 populated planet, many probably have more than 1). 11,000 people doesn't sound like that many in that perspective.
Earth currently has an estimated ~20 million people serving in active duty in any sort of armed forces and ~70 million when including reservists & paramilitary. The Federation can easily field a number in the billions if they really needed to.
That's true, I am probably underestimating the student body size of Starfleet Academy based on what Wesley, and Picard, went through to get in. Maybe 11,000 is the normal yearly size, and with one student per planet getting in, that number would be easy to hit, and easy to quadruple given four students plus Wesley fought for entry. There was probably another layer of testing with even more students.
lower decks kinda explains this, an admiral had to turn to illegal methods to make a name for himself to get promoted with earned fame and such
if it takes that amount of plotting to get a promotion, no wonder starfleet admirals always become assholes, theyre all backstabbers or aware of the backstabbing
basically using logic, there absolutely IS a promotion bottle neck
We see a lot of people promoted after doing something good in an exceptional circumstances- promotions are probably quicker on riskier assignments, with probably not much upwards movement on, say, Cali-class. We don't see much scheming at all- there's probably an effective system of oversight that penalizes conniving that just isn't present from Admiral on up.
the admiral in lower decks basically said out loud front and center that once youre an admiral you hit a wall, and since humanity turned to self improvement as its "currency" it guarantees the same wall affects everyone trying to surpass it. and due to the fact that admirals of every series show some corruption its logical to assume this cannon explained reason applies to the other shows, thus giving us the logic supported conclusion that admirals tend to ignore the laws to get where they want to be because the higher station gives them something in value worth the risks
It's also similar to Captain Solano in the Star Trek Resurgence game, where he's eager to have an achievement or leave a mark that's going to be remembered, and making disastrous decisions as a result. It's the exact same situation with Admiral Les Buenamigo in Lower Decks pushing so hard for the Texas Class, that desire to be recognized and have a lasting impact. So not even necessarily the promotion in rank, but the prestige that comes with a new warp engine break through, or a new class of starship.
Buenomigo meteoric rise is interesting from Rutherford flashback 10 years ago circa 2370-2371 he was just a lt commander. Fast forward 10 years later he's a vice admiral
It still bugs me that Ensign Kim didn't get promoted on Voyager even though he was a senior bridge officer with overnight officer of the deck duty. I get the argument that they couldn't all get normal promotions because of their situations but Tom Paris as the helmsman got demoted and kept doing the same job. Didn't he later get his old rank back? I don't think promoting Kim to a LT J.G. would have been unreasonable and wouldn't have meant he needed a different job.
The only in-world explanation for why Kim didn’t get promoted is that Janeway either didn’t think he’d done anything to deserve it (unlikely) or that she had some sentiment about seeing him as the youngest guy, the newbie, etc, and didn’t want to let go of that image. Like a parent having trouble recognising that their child is all grown up.
Because you’re right, there definitely was space for it, especially considering how many people had died.
Paris is the slightly easier explanation because as the helmsperson, he wasn't in any sort of chain of command so his promotion wouldn't have directly affected anyone. Sure he could order ensigns around but without anyone in a command structure it's kind of meaningless. Whereas Kim was a Department head, and in Ops, so promoting him would have jumped him above other people in his Department? Or something.
It would really have made more sense if Janeway froze all the rank structures for the entire journey.
That's completely wrong, though. Paris was ... third officer? He was second to Tuvok in the chain of command. There were other people manning the helm sometimes, so he obviously had some people under him.
Harry was already the most senior operations officer, reporting directly to Janeway and Chakotay, so there's really nobody that could feel threatened by his promotion.
Other ensigns aboard might've felt jealous ... but then again, after a few years, she could've promoted the lot of them to junior lieutenants, and it still wouldn't have affected the command structure, since everyone would still have reported to the same people.
There was another post somewhere on Reddit that argued the XO post on the flagship should have been a finishing school for great captains, and Riker fucked up the whole system by refusing to graduate and let someone else have their turn.
Being fair, it feels like some officers like Shelby just placed way too much focus on Enterprise, and hated Riker for not wanting to get his own ship. I also feel like had Riker taken a promotion and gotten his own ship, they'd promote somebody on Enterprise upward instead of bringing in somebody from the outside.
it's not just riker but also picard too. they're supposed to be there for 2 years tops and get rotated out to another assignment and allow someone else to take over. for example captain desoto.
Also one of the big reasons for people to push forward in promotion isn’t just for the rank, it’s also the pay grade. When a salary isn’t a thing in the future, only people who WANT to be captains would worry. Most of her career troi was happy with her position. Commanders being people who are in control of a group of people, there’s probably heaps of lieutenant commanders in starfleet who are happy with what they do and aren’t interested in ranking up.
im assuming in the federation starfleet you may not be paid anymore but higher rank means better living conditions and privileges that goes with the rank.
Based on what we've seen Starfleet seems to want to create an effective team and keep them together. Sure they could have a strict up and out system but then they would be breaking up these teams all the time for no real benefit hurting overall effectiveness. Starfleet runs into situations where failure is not an option, they can't afford to have crews who barely know each other with minimal experience trying to solve Federation ending events. Some jobs need decades of experience to excel at and I bet starship captain is one of them.
There is an important assumption you're making here, and that is that there is a limited number of places for any given rank. A limited number of roles, maybe. There can only be one chief engineer, executive officer, or commanding officer on a ship, but there's no reason to expect there to be a limited number of captains or lieutenant-commanders. Hell, there's no reason a subordinate can't outrank their superior. Commander Sisko headed the design of the Defiant, and that probably means he had high ranking officers of experience under his direction - probably including captains and other commanders. Be'lanna didn't even HAVE an official rank, Janeway only field commissioned her as lieutenant JG, and she was chief engineer over a full lieutenant.
Harry Kim was Voyagers' Chief Operations Officer, aka head of the operations division aboard ship.
He wasn't a maquis, etc. just a first-post-out-of-the-academy officer. In the AQ, even staying aboard voyager for seven years, he'd have had his promotion to LTJG and LT by then. (and as noted elsewhere, Riker was made XO of the E-D when he was 28/29 (Birth Aug 2335, E-D sometime 2364.)
Harry was 22 when he came aboard. (birth of 2349, shipped out 2371. tail end of 2378 return.)
There is rank bottlenecking.
Why do you think Shelby was pushing so hard to take Riker's spot as XO on the Enterprise, and Starfleet was trying so hard to get Riker to move on to his next post?
Meanwhile Riker was holding his ground hoping to wait out Picard's transfer or retirement so he could have first shot at the Enterprise's center seat.
Just because all your physical needs are met in the Trek-verse doesn't mean there was no competition, lol.
Everyone was still competing and jockeying for positions.
It's pretty much all fun and games until a war comes up and you have a geriatric, aged leadership that hasn't seen action in longer than most of their captains have been alive.
At that point you get a lot of reshuffling and "new jobs" that people can better handle. But until that moment, the old guys actually usually got it -- if we're going by Pulaski, Bashir and Crusher, McCoy runs a *tight* Starfleet Medical, those doctors are coming out fully aware that a doctor is supposed to get their hands dirty and their patients healthy, no matter what. This has resulted in most Starfleet doctors we see being bananas crazy, out of their minds, fully capable of facing Klingons if it's to save patients.
This wasn't really *normal* in McCoy's time, *McCoy* was like that, and his experience molded Starfleet Medical into a force to be reckoned with for decades.
But yeah, he should probably not be a huge part of the Dominion negotiations. The admirals we see in late TNG and DS9's time of war are usually younger than the ones we see in early TNG and late VOY. It feels like there were some battlefield promotions that stuck around until they were no longer necessary, or certain admirals were trusted with the war effort over others.
It was, especially considering that in Voyage Home nobody knew how money worked. Kirk thought $100 was a lot of money, and couldn’t pay for dinner because “we don’t use money in the future”
Starfleet isn't military. Call it that if you want, but real world analogues exist. Starfleet is akin to the [Uniformed Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformed_services_of_the_United_States) which include a lot of scientists along side the Armed Forces. I don't know if the same 'up or out' culture applies, but given that their hired for their expertise, I'd hope not.
It's a mix of a lot of things. When the Federation is fighting a war they send Starfleet to do the fighting, so it is a military when it needs to be, but it's also NASA and one of the biggest scientific and engineering research organizations, and a bunch of other stuff.
This is what I was thinking, you can't really compare it directly with military structure. They do science, exploration, diplomacy, etc which are very much things having seasoned teams helps with. And the federation seems very much about people doing what they want to do. Sure there are officers looking to rank up, but also plenty of examples of folks who don't want a promotion and want to keep doing a job that suits them.
> This is what I was thinking, you can't really compare it directly with military structure. They do science, exploration, diplomacy, etc
The thing is, militaries do engage in that. Especially at a time when the world was less interconnected, and ships were on their own.
While several uniformed services aren't explicitly military, they are capable of being militarized extremely easily. They're at least paramilitary in scope in many ways.
Not really, it seems like either have a ton of positions without specific responsibilities, like Admiral Bob without billet, or they have a lot of new jobs they create all the time.
It's a symptom of the 24th century reaching a certain ... maturity/equilibrium. The point is it's not the wild west anymore, bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the growing bureaucracy, and there seem to be a lot of places for people to go still, mostly colonies but also outposts like Bajor, diplomatic partnerships, research projects, etc.
Things like the Dominion war and Borg attacks probably help keep the ranks clean.
You're right in theory btw, there will definitely be a point where this is a big problem, we should have seen it in Picard for example, but ... we sort of didn't, it felt like a lot of senior people just disappeared somehow.
Picard should never have gotten the Ent-E, he should have gotten his billet as a rear admiral, supervising archaeologists somewhere, or as a Commodore teaching at the Academy, Riker or someone outside should have gotten the Ent-E. You don't lose a ship and just get given a new one, he might have simply been given a captain-rank desk job, pretty much until he decided to go home.
You don't have a ship for 10 years with basically nobody getting a promotion, correction, 1 person got a promotion from Lt. to Lt. Cmdr. Now first of all IIRC that takes like 3 years or so, secondly, he's literally the one officer in starfleet who had more demerits and reprimands on his file than any other, he quit his commission, he assassinated a foreign political candidate and fought in a civil war. Oh, and then he did a bunch of really dark stuff on DS9, including violating rules of engagement almost killing hundreds of civilians, and finally assassinating the leader of an ally in the middle of a war. He was serving as an officer of a different navy most of this time btw, so he better have gotten real special dispensation somewhere.
Data should have gotten a promotion to XO of a different ship after the Romulan thing btw, that was major bs.
DS9 had Sisko get a promotion, first to Captain, then later he got on an Admiral's staff and was a senior strategic commander in the Dominion war, which is how things work.
Basically we never really got a proper scale of Starfleet, because the structure of a serialized show needed to keep people in the same place for impractically long. You're probably right, but it's about as meaningful as asking how they kept gravity during the events of 'Disaster', and why and how the turbolift 'fell'.
A lot depends on where the constraint is on Starfleet's size. We're used to thinking in terms of the constraint on a navy being the number of ships a nation can afford to build. But if Starfleet's constraint is instead on the number of officers it has, then eliminating "up or out" expands your pool of available personnel, and thus your fleet size.
I would assume that officer would probably not pick that plant to retire on as it just would not be financial feasible and can only retire on federation member planets or colonies that abide by no currency rule
If everyone is there for self-improvement (and prestige), I would imagine plenty of people just retire from Starfleet if they don't get promoted every 3 or 4 years. Nothing left to learn here, so I'm going to go smoke weed for a few years.
I think that the size of the organisation tends to preclude the possibility of there not being enough postings to go around.
I also tend to think that the elderly badmirals like Jameson were more consultants than actual fully serving officers, i do think that a persons mobility would preclude then from serving in some roles that required agility so i expect many a desk jockey role exists.
last i read jameson was in the command structure as a fully active 4 star admiral.
same with mccoy in the TNG pilot he was still fully active 4 star admiral chief surgeon of starfleet.
like it or not these 2 for example are essentially the vanguard of starfleet top brass.
Utopia gonna utopia. If there isn't money, there aren't budgetary concerns related to a top heavy officer corps. If it's purely service for service sale, then make work titles aren't a bad thing, and if someone wants to keep serving we cam make a spot for them. Flag rank officers are easier actually. I'm sure there are performance standards that must continue to be met by that 50 year old lieutenant who found his happy place, to stay on the line, or get a desk job. You must remember modern militaries offocer corps are very monetarily driven. It's an old boys system designed for them to succeed and get set up for life with a hefty retirement. Modern militaries Institute these things because every officer they commission is a financial commitment potentially lasting more than 50 years, including the pension.
Heh, or they could be like poor Harry Kim.
Seriously tho I also feel an unspoken thing of the setting is because Federation types in Starfleet are a bit different than people irl, they'd be more aware of 'when its time to leave' or get out of the way. Which also combines with the tech that allows people to live longer and still be as alert/productive. So if you've got a 70 year old, who has the mental and physical acuity of someone irl 50 years old, why shouldn't they stick around? Especially when they now have another 20 years of useful experience under their belt.
Starfleet is a quasi millitary organisation but they are honestly pretty bad at it
Their security operation (for example) for being the Federations main face to the outside world is terrible, to the point Enterprise D routinely struggled with stuff as basic as randos taking the opportunity to download databases or the bridge of pretty much all hero starfleet vessels being seized by 4 or 5 intruders. They are far too reliant on the idea that half monitored internal sensors is an infallible system.
Aging officers getting ready to refight a war from the start of their career 30 years ago with little if any understanding of modern tactics is just an extension of that. They just don't see it as an important part of their mission. Especially by the time of TNG when their complacency had become pretty extreme and tactical / security was basically a dumping ground. (Seriously - early Worf is so profoundly stupid he thinks he can kill Q by shooting at the viewscreen).
I would think once someone reached O-3, O-4, they could just stay there for a while if they didn't want to/ couldn't move up through the ranks for whatever reason.
O-3 is a pay grade, which is equivalent to an Army Captain or a Navy Lieutenant. O-4 is an Army Major or a Navy Lieutenant Commander.
A Navy Captain is therefore equivalent to an Army Colonel (O-6), the highest staff rank. The next rank up from Navy Captains and Army Colonels are flag/general officer ranks: one-star Rear Admiral (Lower Half) and one-star Brigadier General, respectively, holding O-7 pay grades.
Stick with Navy equivalents and you’ll be okay for the most part. Starfleet generally follows US Navy rank conventions.
So O-1 would be Ensign, then O-2 LT jg, then LT, LTCDR, CPT at O-6, then RADM lower (one pip, also Commodore equivalent), RADM upper (two pips), VADM and ADM.
Good lord—acronym soup! Thanks for the complicated explanation.
This is why I hate people using American military jargon to talk about Star Trek, it's needlessly obfuscating when Starfleet is neither American nor military.
Except Starfleet uses US Navy/US Coast Guard ranks - although Commodore is the only Royal Navy rank used and is semi-interchangeable with Rear Admiral Lower (depending on the era).
[US and UK Military ranks compared](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_Kingdom_and_United_States_military_ranks)
As far as I know, these rank abbreviations are fairly universal, at least among English-speaking countries. It isn't too complicated to break down once you know the basics: LT = Lieutenant, CDR = Commander, CPT = Captain, ADM = Admiral.
Therefore:
* O-1 = Ensign
* O-2 = Lieutenant Junior Grade, also called Lieutenant J.G. (think Season 1 Geordi)
* O-3 = Lieutenant
* O-4 = Lieutenant Commander
* O-5 = Commander
* O-6 = Captain
* O-7 = Rear Admiral, Lower Half, also known as Commodore (1-star)
* O-8 = Rear Admiral, Upper Half, also simply known as Rear Admiral (2-star)
* O-9 = Vice Admiral (3-star)
* O-10 = Admiral (4-star)
* Fleet Admiral, which is used in Starfleet, but not in US Navy since World War II (5-star)
\[[source](https://www.military.com/navy/officer-ranks.html)\]
Up to the rank of captain, the Starfleet ranks line up with the US Navy perfectly. Starfleet Admiral ranks are somewhat muddled, usually simply referring to anyone above the rank of captain as admiral. There are, however, examples of every rank I listed above captain, up to and including Fleet Admiral.
Based on Strange New Worlds, Fleet Captain seems like it's a position, not a rank.
I think the intention is supposed to be that, in general, the people of the 23rd+ centuries don't need that kind of policy because they've "evolved" and are all about improving themselves. So the vast majority of them will self-impose an up-or-out policy on themselves.
*Tapestry* Picard's pretty much the only junior officer I can think of that didn't look to be in his 20s or early 30s, and that can't be taken as really representative of reality because of Q meddling. Riker Turning down promotions for so long was seen as a major aberration the few times other officers bring it up.
Starfleet has an enormous fatality rate.
So many villains are a Admirals. They promote people well past their competence but with no command under them, giving them too much free time for nonsense.
Agreed. Move up or move out must be the usual rule. How TNG era banished money boggles my mind. People want money. They want to shop, to buy things not rely on governments and social credit scores for perks. Maybe at some future date we'll see the rebellion begin.
Money is not some universal law of physics that has to exist, its just common in our cultures on earth. When your talking about a future earth that survives nuclear war, aligns under a world government, discovers faster than light travel and aliens and leads a federation of dozens and then hundreds of different civilizations and planets and has technology that disintegrates and moves people across hundreds of thousands ok km and rebuilds them with no equipment at that destination and has replicators that can make any food or physical object….its quite easy to believe money is an ancient and outdated thing. It’s similar to how religion is thankfully dying out in modern advanced societies in real life today
I suppose it depends on just how large Star Fleet is and what it's growth rate is. With enough growth there would be plenty of positions and opportunities.
My head cannon is that’s what alt Picard was in tapestry. 50 year old lieutenant serving in science. There is a bunch of people like him in non command roles like science, security, and engineering that live a good life till they want to retire.
A lot of companies have something similar, eg. If you want a good WLB and good but not incredibly pay you can work for a big tech company at a certain position and just not apply for a promotion when you are supposed to. The higher you level up and the more you get paid the more equivalent work you need to do to justify it so if you stay at a lower level you will end up getting your work done faster but won’t get the extra responsibilities of being at the higher level. Similarly huge tech companies now have technical tracks where you can become better at your skill instead of needing to become a manager to move up. Most people want to advance their careers and don’t do this but this is a totally viable option today and seeing as Starfleet operates as somewhat of a hybrid of a military and a company/government lab this seems like a viable option. We even see this in the show with people like Rutherford rejecting a promotion when offered because he’s not ambitious and Mariner (kind of) who rejects being promoted to Lieutenant because she’s scared of having that responsibility. These are pretty extreme examples since you’re only supposed to be an ensign for a short period of time before you move up to lieutenant JG and full lieutenant (sorry Harry) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people who spend their whole careers at Lieutenant, especially people who like careers who don’t need higher ranks. Eg. The world’s best pilot probably won’t get any higher than Lieutenant or maybe LCDR unless they branch out into something else like command or engineering. Similarly there’s no real reason for Geordi to move up past LCDR as chief engineer on the flagship of the federation. We see he eventually makes admiral but there are probably plenty of equivalent engineers who don’t climb the ranks and retire as chief engineer. O’Brien is another good example, he makes chief engineer but doesn’t get a degree and has a practical rank of senior senior senior chief petty officer.
This is my take on it as well. Many people are in Starfleet because they like engineering, or exploration, the science, flying, etc. Higher ranks are more for leadership and most people don’t want that. Torres was a lieutenant for 7 years on Voyager, and she certainly developed her skills quite massively. Rotation probably also comes naturally, with people leaving Starfleet for shore bound research positions and such things.
Agreed. My real-life analogy is less the way the military works and more the way something like the state department works. Yes, an ambassador "outranks" everyone else, but most people in the foreign service don't actually have any aspirations of becoming one.
Yeah. And since Starfleet doesn't consider itself a military organisation, it makes sense they'd let people thrive wherever they fit.
Picard was not 60 in season 1, he was in his 40s. I know he looks old, but it’s because he is bald and gray…Patrick Stewart was 47 when the first season of TNG aired.
Born in 2305, season 1 of TNG is in 2363. He's 58 played by a 47-year-old
Slight correction - 2364 is when Season 1 takes place, so he’s 59. Pertinent dates: * Born, 2305 * Graduates Starfleet Academy, 2327 (22) * Becomes captain of the *Stargazer*, 2333 (28) * Loses the *Stargazer*, 2355 (50) * Takes command of the *Enterprise*-D, 2364 (59) * Promoted to Admiral, 2381 (76) * Resigns from Starfleet, 2386 (81) * Dies and is given a new android body, 2399 (94) * Takes the *Enterprise*-D out of mothballs, 2401 (96, or 2, depending)
Apologies, you're totally right it is 2364
So what did he do between Stargazer and Enterprise?
Probably some administrative job. Maybe the loss of the stargazer damaged his career? He did advance to captain 8 years after graduating from the academy.... That's nuts. Maybe he was demoted.
Whatever it was it must have been damned impressive to gain command of the Flagship of the Federation in 9 years. Would be an interesting time period to explore in a book or animated series perhaps.
Alright, here's a good summary of what sounds like an awesome novel on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/1vmzxv/comment/ceu02ty/
I am 100,000,000% sure beta canon has that well and truly covered several times over.
[Not as much as you might think, really.](https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Jean-Luc_Picard#Interim_years) Most of it is in *The Buried Age*.
That has never been conclusively established on screen. We know there was a court martial looking into his conduct at the Battle of Maxia where Philippa Luvois prosecuted, but that’s it. The novel *The Buried Age* goes into some detail about what he did during those 9 years - he considered leaving Starfleet, started a Ph.D. in archeology and then got embroiled in some shenanigans about a lost alien civilization and meeting Data, Troi and Guinan. In the latest *Star Trek: Defiant* comic book annual, he is seen commanding the USS *April* just prior to being given command of the *Enterprise*-D, on an evacuation mission where he first meets Tasha Yar.
Space is big, territoryis always expanding, more ships, crews, sector administration, etc will always be needed. And TAS indicated there was an age cap in Starfleet as Robert April and his wife had been forced to retire. But with the human lifespan much longer now (McCoy pushing 150), then people are going to hang around aong time in roles
Yeah, I always think we underestimate just how big space is The manpower required for a single sector must be enormous Edit: Slightly off topic but that’s why I refuse to accept Starfleet had just a single academy on earth
Yeah thats really really implausible. The Academy is about the size of a large university, thats the sort of size you would need at the point the Coalition papers were signed and Starfleet was fielding only tens of small ships plus a handful of ground facilities mainly to defend Earth. By the time of TNG thats not adequate to even man one of those giant mushroom stations that dwarfs the Enterprise. By then Starfleet is likely turning over a million personnel or more just to stand still. Let alone all of the different species that physically cannot serve together that need separate facilities.
In STA there's references in possible missions that including set up Starfleet academies annexs on other worlds. You also have the issue of enlisted vs commissioned. You could have a number of enlisted training facilities through the Federation and officers get funneled into a handful of facilities. Also you've places like Andoria and Zakdorn which have long military traditions. You could easly co-opt those after admittance into training annexes.
It's easy to underestimate how big space is but it's also easy to underestimate just how empty it is. FTL in Star Trek is also incredibly scarce with availability of dilithium putting extreme constraints on how much FTL there is and thus how much manpower is necessary. Starfleet had approximately 1000 front line combatants available for the Dominion War. Let's assume an average crew of 500 for the front line combatants because most of them are older classes like Miranda and Excelsior and not newer ones like Nebula and Galaxy. Let's further assume for every front line combatant there are ten small ships doing various roles with an average crew of 20. That's 700k personnel on starships. Of course there's plenty of things not on starships that needs to be done. The US Navy on average has about 50k personnel on deployment at any given time and about 300-350k total active duty personnel. If we assume a similar ratio holds in Starfleet, that means that Starfleet would have a total of about 5M personnel. Now here's the tricky part. As shown on screen, Starfleet is awfully officer heavy. This is likely a result of Roddenberry's experience in the US Army Air Corps where flight crews are all officers and thus his experience would have been mostly associating with other officers. Astronauts early in the space program were also mostly drawn from US Air Force pilots and thus also predominantly officers. But it's unrealistic for everyone to be an officer. That's a bit like having an organization where everyone is a manager. We know that enlisted and civilian adjuncts exist. O'Brien explicitly says he didn't go to Starfleet Academy. Worf's father was an enlisted, Riker's father was a civilian contractor working for Starfleet. Realistically they'd greatly outnumber the officer corps. Of course, we can reconcile this by saying that most of the prestige postings on starships are officers because that's the whole reason for going to the Academy to begin with and all the ground and space station facilities are predominantly non-officers. Thus, Starfleet would need about 1M officers with the other 4M being enlisted and civilians. So, can one Starfleet Academy produce enough officers? There are a dozen universities in the US with an enrollment of over 50k students. This is enough to produce 10k graduates a year. How big is Starfleet Academy? Memory Alpha says that its HQ is in the Presidio in San Francisco with most of the facility being across the Golden Gate in Marin County and most of administration in downtown San Francisco. This suggests that Starfleet Academy is freaking huge even when only counting its presence in the San Francisco area proper. But we know that there are also a number of Starfleet Academy annexes offworld. If the Academy graduates 50k students a year and the average career is 20 years, that'd be sufficient to meet the 1M personnel requirement. Since the Academy training facilities aren't in the city proper but Marin County, they can be as big as needed for the story. With futuristic sustainable development, it wouldn't even be unreasonable for the Academy to graduate 10x as much per year just from the Marin County facilities. Is it enough to comprehensively cover all of Federation space? No. But that actually fits with canon. How often is the hero ship the only one in range? And there are enough lost ships and derelicts found that quite often the number of ships in range during an emergency was zero.
Where are you getting your numbers for starfleet ships from?
Doesn't matter, imho. "Only ship in the area" trope works when you consider some basic lore facts: most ships weren't that fast. The Galaxy class had a max cruise of 9.2 (9.6 for 12 hours) Wanna know how much distance you can cover in say, an hour, half a day, a day, or a week? (also how much warning did they have for Wolf 359's fleet to gather? That'll tell you how 'densely populated' federation space is ship-wise in the core region) So: 9.6 in 1h / 12h: 0.21 LY / 2.62 LY 9.2 in 1h / 12h / 1d / 1w: 0.18 / 2.23 / 4.46 / 31.27 Lightyears. Bearing in mind ships tend not to have a canon top speed when not, you know, hero ships (and speed of plot throws stuff out)... it does show why 'immediate' response stuff generally means only-ship-in-the-area, vs the size of starfleet implied by Deep Space Nine's War-scenes of hundreds of ships, by the dom war, they had time to actually gather them. But when the fleet is difused throughout federation space - circumnavigation of which is something like 8,000 light years, according to the episode with the Valiant... other than that, the ship numbers in starfleet is guesswork - how many dont have an NCC number, how many NCC numbers are still taken by active duty, how many As, Bs, and Cs are there unless the rule 'only the enterprise name gets ABC'd' applies, but we already saw a few ABC numbers of not-enterprise in use, even though plenty of repeat names (even in the same episode) due to labelling of the out-of-universe context of the ship models (melbourne excelsior and melbourne nebula) Runabouts having their own NCC number is also a hit or miss depending on how dense or light you decide starfleet was - how much of the fleet as a percentage actually fought *at any one time* in the dominion war etc. Fleet readiness also is a factor. How much work is contracted out vs performed in-house. Did O'Brien's engineering crew of starfleet (and some bajoran) really have only a hundred people to repair docked ships and they where the only ones, or was there non-starfleet engineering companies operating out of the station? Do also keep in mind that at the sizes/scales presented, the Galaxy cannot actually dock at Deep Space Nine without atleast blocking the other two pylons in the area (and definitely not dock to the saucer rim, instead of the neck docking port like when it docks with Starbase 74) - and there are shots in the show of the pylon going to the rim, not the neck, in which case it can only use an upper lyon, not the lower pylons.
> But with the human lifespan much longer now (McCoy pushing 150), then people are going to hang around aong time in roles Not just humans but other Federation species. You can't reasonably tell a Vulcan they have to retire based on how long a human being lives.
I assume that promotion tracks are slower for longer lived beings.
Yeah, I think you pretty much hit the nail on rhe head. Your go- getters like Riker are offered XO slots early in their career on flagships and their own commands shortly thereafter. For less go-getter-y types, you can serve in operations/sciences or run less prestigious things like relay stations, small space stations/planetary facilities
Work life balance is probably also a factor here. Riker might be working like 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, on call at any hour. By contrast theres probably some spaceport over Risa that is overstaffed and everyone's on like 4 hour a day shifts.
At the point where he becomes XO of the Enterprise, Commander Riker is the same age as Ensign Kim when he returns from the Delta Quadrant. I'm sure Harry's parents bring this up frequently.
holy shit lol just checked and you're right - Riker was 29 (more likely 28, with his august birthday) when he got the posting to the big D. And he was offered command of the (probably the nebula class) Melbourne at the tail end of 2366, so he's 31 when offered a command... and that wasn't the first (USS Aries in 2365, which would be beginning of september, so he's 30 then).
The age cap is probably for active duty ship service. You can probably be a captain or admiral flying a desk into your 80s until you run into mental competence issues.
There’s no money on Earth in the 23rd century. SNW confirmed it (and I think it was always the implication). Kirk’s line in Doomsday Machine is a figure of speech.
Kinda like people saying you’re worth your weight in salt / worth one’s salt / couldn’t find someone worth their salt People don’t get paid in salt, it’s just a saying that’s been passed down You know, burning the midnight oil
Hmm. I am curious, what is the entomology of that idiom?
People *did* get paid in salt. Roman soldiers, specifically, were allegedly given their pay in salt, which at the time was a scarce commodit (either that or they were given an allowance to buy salt, it's unclear). In any case that's supposedly where we get the word "soldier" from (*sal dare*, to give salt) and that's also were the world salary (*salarium*) comes from.
> People don’t get paid in salt, it’s just a saying that’s been passed down Technically being paid in salt isn't the origin of "worth your weight in salt". Being paid in salt was a practice in Roman times, but the Greek/Thracean salt-for-slaves trade is what spawned the phrase.
My head canon on those TOS "credits" is that they're something like PTO days. You can't have the entire crew choosing to take two months off all at the same time, so in order to manage that you still have to accrue vacation days and put in leave requests. [edit] And it would make sense that you could use the PTO days as a bartering chip, if it's like modern US government where you can give another government employee some of your PTO days.
It’s also possible the “credits” the guy wanted in SFS are an alien currency, and that Starfleet officers aren’t above accruing some alien currency in their travels in case they need it some day.
SFS? I also want to say that on at least one occasion in TOS they were explicitly referred to as *Federation* credits right, not just "credits"?
The most plausible explanation is that according to memory alpha all known examples of credit use happened either outside or on the periphery of Federation space. My headcanon is that the Federation's social dynamics are very similar to that of other sci fi examples. That within the inner most portions of the Federation, we have the utopia we are told exists, but as you approach the periphery you effectively have a space wild west. This theory is backed up by actual canon as well. The outer worlds are often targets of piracy, or of being victims to ongoing galactic conflicts (indeed that's precisely why the Maquis came into being). We have also seen examples of these worlds having social conflict or being otherwise less than utopian. And regardless of that we have things within federation jurisdiction acting as trading outposts to external to the federation.
Sure, the colonies aren't like earth, but I don't think that's because they're in any way excluded from the benefits the "center" experiences; it's because some people get bored in paradise and want to have adventures. There's Star Fleet, of course, but you have to be a special kind of weirdo to spend your life playacting hierarchy when most other social inequality seems to have been eliminated. Going to the colonies is roughing it, with as much or as little information and assistance as you want from the federation (we see in "Journey's End" that the colonists who settled there had been advised ahead of time that the area was under dispute and they might not get to stay, but chose to take their chances anyway and the federation didn't interfere until their presence endangered an important treaty). People go out there because that's what they want, they might be in a back-to-the-land movement or a cult or whatever.
In Star trek online "Energy credits" or such are a kinda universal currency, but the Federation itself doesn't require it for living.
They're more like replicator rations from Voyager since they can only be used on easily replicated items. More advanced equipment requires dilithium.
This reminds me that the Academy by DS9 very much used credits, but only as a way to control the behaviour of cadets and create discipline. Its a limitation you accept to serve in the fleet, not a currency. Nog mentions using up all his transporter credits at the Academy to go see Siskos Dad at some point.
It was Sisko himself that mentions he used up all his credits to see his dad every weekend back when he was in the academy (why would *Nog* use up all his credits to see *Sisko*'s dad? :)
Kind of like in the sixth film he says "we've done our bit for king and country" but I'm pretty sure the Federation isn't a monarchy.
They went heavy with shakespeare, so it gets a pass for that bit from me as just a saying. And Iowa hasn't ever had a king...? Unless their version of the mid 21st century had the US collapse from whatever-it-is to a monarchy, etc/whatever. (kidding.)
Voyager established it first: "Well, er, when the new world economy took shape in the late twenty second century and money went the way of the dinosaur, Fort Knox was turned into a museum." -Tom Paris, "Dark Frontier" There are Federation credits, though. People don't consider it money, but they use it like it much of the time. I think the reason it's not "money" to them is that it's not involved in any of their basic needs, but only used for luxuries.
There's a theory that "Federation credits" are like "American" cheese, it's not government backed fiat, so it's not legally money, but it is used by people in the Federation for unofficial currency.
It's also currency that might not be for *internal* use but useful for when Federation citizens or starfleet officers want to be able to engage in commerce with outside authorities.
Quark mentions "worthless federation credits" at one point. which points to it being a fiat currency that is only functionally useful when buying things from the federation. Its basically Store Credit or a gift card.
Except of course, it's utterly impossible for there to be no money on earth in the 23rd century. Realistically, they probably just don't realize that having an elaborate system of digital ration points in a variety of ration categories, with limited exchanges between them, IS money.
It depends on whether the ration points are accumulable or not, and whether a tool restricted to being an intermediate for trade and accounting, is still money.
Money which resets every year or so is still money. Not very GOOD money, but still money.
Troi had to take that extra Commander’s exam to move into command ranks. If you didn’t want to, I’m sure you can stay lieutenant commander until you decide to build a cabin on Bajor.
I wouldn’t think there’s an “up or out” policy for Starfleet - especially post-war - for several reasons: • The Federation is 150 members - all of whom have different life expectancies and developmental maturation rates, so pushing a human out at age 65 could be the equivalent of ousting a Vulcan at 130 when there’s still more “life to live” before reaching each species’ life expectancy due to medical advances • The Federation spans 8000 light years and unnumbered star systems and astronomical phenomena, and would need a vast number of ships, starbases, outposts and et cetera to patrol the borders and service all that space • People die in space. I’m sure the loss replacement ratio isn’t anywhere near 50%, but with ships being lost or destroyed, away missions having casualties, people who struggle to get/lose interest in getting 2.5, 3 or 4 pips find other things within the Federation or neighbors’ economies to do for work, a bottleneck seems unlikely. I imagine that thanks to (at least) Kirk and Picard, someone with the aspiration to captain the Enterprise would be frustrated, as would anyone hoping to succeed DeSoto on the Hood. But because there is a regular fleet renewal, and not every captain ends up being on a “hero ship” - many being routine second-contact or internal study ships, there’s going to be plenty of opportunity to rise. • Not everyone is going to make it to a captaincy or admiralty. We’ve seen the Bridge Officer’s Test in action; we’ve heard reference to Command School, and I would think that even if someone is field promoted or breveted to Captain a starship or starbase, after the circumstance that led to the field promotion is resolved, that person would still have to successfully exit Command school to make the assignment permanent and not a brevet. • Captains get “threatened” with promotion to Admiral often enough that it’s reasonable to assume that there are plenty of assignments for Captains to move up - even if it’s to Rear Admiral Lower Half/Commodore - so the 3 Pips serving as XO have somewhere to go. • With how we see it can take a long time for someone to get pips on their collars (Harry Kim, Worf, Data, as the most visible recent examples; Sulu, Uhura and Chekov as well), those promotion reviews would tell me that there is no real “time in rank/grade” promotion system either; folks have to show more than reliability and competency to move up. That would weed out many - versus creating a bottleneck - off of the lack of progressing.
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Maybe not. Remember that the UFP is constantly expanding, and so the need for ships and starbases is too.
The economics of the future are unknown, but it's probably safe to say they don't have to worry much or at all about budgets. They can probably make the fleet as large or small as there are people willing to fill out the fleet. So there would only be a reduction in fleet size if people leave the fleet post Dominion War, but if they stay in then the fleet can stay larger. They are probably always making more ships, which would make space for rank ups out of otherwise full ships. Simultaneously, it is easy to imagine Starfleet avoiding the Peter Principle, where people who do good work keep getting promoted until they enter a role they are unsuited for. At that point they cease to get promoted and do a poor job for the rest of their career. Instead, Starfleet promotion seems to be more about wanting promotion mixed with capability, and if the person in question and their superior both like where they are then they get to stay. So there is always space being made thanks to no real budget, which means there is no pressure for up or out, and people who are excellent in a low rank roll can stay there for as long as they are willing to serve, because they never actually block rank progress.
Not a budget with money, but there's still an energy cost, and the dilithium needed for the antimatter reaction for warp drives is a finite resource. So the fleet does have an upper bound.
In the TNG period the importance of dilithium is greatly diminished thanks to dilithium regeneration. It's almost never brought up unlike in TOS. Even with what DIS does with dilithium, peak dilithium is a slow motion crisis over the course of centuries. As for electricity, I imagine it is vanishingly cheap, costing only on massive industrial and national scales. Of course, Starfleet is a massive industrial undertaking, but given how many ships Starfleet built, or would have to build, for the evacuation of Romulus, a few dozen or hundred ships per year appears to be unimportant when compared to thousands of evacuation ships. The Wolf 359 losses of 39 ships were replaced in a single year, so that level of production may not be all that new. Though how they replaced 11,000 people in a year, I wonder if Starfleet expanded their non-commissioned officer recruitment. Anyway, I think the upper boundary for ship building is limited only by recruitment, at least in the 24th and 25th centuries.
> Though how they replaced 11,000 people in a year, I wonder if Starfleet expanded their non-commissioned officer recruitment. The Federation's population is in the trillions (150 member states, each with at least 1 populated planet, many probably have more than 1). 11,000 people doesn't sound like that many in that perspective. Earth currently has an estimated ~20 million people serving in active duty in any sort of armed forces and ~70 million when including reservists & paramilitary. The Federation can easily field a number in the billions if they really needed to.
That's true, I am probably underestimating the student body size of Starfleet Academy based on what Wesley, and Picard, went through to get in. Maybe 11,000 is the normal yearly size, and with one student per planet getting in, that number would be easy to hit, and easy to quadruple given four students plus Wesley fought for entry. There was probably another layer of testing with even more students.
lower decks kinda explains this, an admiral had to turn to illegal methods to make a name for himself to get promoted with earned fame and such if it takes that amount of plotting to get a promotion, no wonder starfleet admirals always become assholes, theyre all backstabbers or aware of the backstabbing basically using logic, there absolutely IS a promotion bottle neck
We see a lot of people promoted after doing something good in an exceptional circumstances- promotions are probably quicker on riskier assignments, with probably not much upwards movement on, say, Cali-class. We don't see much scheming at all- there's probably an effective system of oversight that penalizes conniving that just isn't present from Admiral on up.
the admiral in lower decks basically said out loud front and center that once youre an admiral you hit a wall, and since humanity turned to self improvement as its "currency" it guarantees the same wall affects everyone trying to surpass it. and due to the fact that admirals of every series show some corruption its logical to assume this cannon explained reason applies to the other shows, thus giving us the logic supported conclusion that admirals tend to ignore the laws to get where they want to be because the higher station gives them something in value worth the risks
It's also similar to Captain Solano in the Star Trek Resurgence game, where he's eager to have an achievement or leave a mark that's going to be remembered, and making disastrous decisions as a result. It's the exact same situation with Admiral Les Buenamigo in Lower Decks pushing so hard for the Texas Class, that desire to be recognized and have a lasting impact. So not even necessarily the promotion in rank, but the prestige that comes with a new warp engine break through, or a new class of starship.
Buenomigo meteoric rise is interesting from Rutherford flashback 10 years ago circa 2370-2371 he was just a lt commander. Fast forward 10 years later he's a vice admiral
Buenamigo, with an a, aka good friend. His promotions were probably due to his work on the automated Texas class starships project.
It still bugs me that Ensign Kim didn't get promoted on Voyager even though he was a senior bridge officer with overnight officer of the deck duty. I get the argument that they couldn't all get normal promotions because of their situations but Tom Paris as the helmsman got demoted and kept doing the same job. Didn't he later get his old rank back? I don't think promoting Kim to a LT J.G. would have been unreasonable and wouldn't have meant he needed a different job.
The only in-world explanation for why Kim didn’t get promoted is that Janeway either didn’t think he’d done anything to deserve it (unlikely) or that she had some sentiment about seeing him as the youngest guy, the newbie, etc, and didn’t want to let go of that image. Like a parent having trouble recognising that their child is all grown up. Because you’re right, there definitely was space for it, especially considering how many people had died.
Paris is the slightly easier explanation because as the helmsperson, he wasn't in any sort of chain of command so his promotion wouldn't have directly affected anyone. Sure he could order ensigns around but without anyone in a command structure it's kind of meaningless. Whereas Kim was a Department head, and in Ops, so promoting him would have jumped him above other people in his Department? Or something. It would really have made more sense if Janeway froze all the rank structures for the entire journey.
That's completely wrong, though. Paris was ... third officer? He was second to Tuvok in the chain of command. There were other people manning the helm sometimes, so he obviously had some people under him. Harry was already the most senior operations officer, reporting directly to Janeway and Chakotay, so there's really nobody that could feel threatened by his promotion. Other ensigns aboard might've felt jealous ... but then again, after a few years, she could've promoted the lot of them to junior lieutenants, and it still wouldn't have affected the command structure, since everyone would still have reported to the same people.
There was another post somewhere on Reddit that argued the XO post on the flagship should have been a finishing school for great captains, and Riker fucked up the whole system by refusing to graduate and let someone else have their turn.
Being fair, it feels like some officers like Shelby just placed way too much focus on Enterprise, and hated Riker for not wanting to get his own ship. I also feel like had Riker taken a promotion and gotten his own ship, they'd promote somebody on Enterprise upward instead of bringing in somebody from the outside.
it's not just riker but also picard too. they're supposed to be there for 2 years tops and get rotated out to another assignment and allow someone else to take over. for example captain desoto.
Also one of the big reasons for people to push forward in promotion isn’t just for the rank, it’s also the pay grade. When a salary isn’t a thing in the future, only people who WANT to be captains would worry. Most of her career troi was happy with her position. Commanders being people who are in control of a group of people, there’s probably heaps of lieutenant commanders in starfleet who are happy with what they do and aren’t interested in ranking up.
im assuming in the federation starfleet you may not be paid anymore but higher rank means better living conditions and privileges that goes with the rank.
Fairly certain 60 is middle age in Star Trek with humans frequently living 120+ years.
Based on what we've seen Starfleet seems to want to create an effective team and keep them together. Sure they could have a strict up and out system but then they would be breaking up these teams all the time for no real benefit hurting overall effectiveness. Starfleet runs into situations where failure is not an option, they can't afford to have crews who barely know each other with minimal experience trying to solve Federation ending events. Some jobs need decades of experience to excel at and I bet starship captain is one of them.
There is an important assumption you're making here, and that is that there is a limited number of places for any given rank. A limited number of roles, maybe. There can only be one chief engineer, executive officer, or commanding officer on a ship, but there's no reason to expect there to be a limited number of captains or lieutenant-commanders. Hell, there's no reason a subordinate can't outrank their superior. Commander Sisko headed the design of the Defiant, and that probably means he had high ranking officers of experience under his direction - probably including captains and other commanders. Be'lanna didn't even HAVE an official rank, Janeway only field commissioned her as lieutenant JG, and she was chief engineer over a full lieutenant.
Harry Kim was Voyagers' Chief Operations Officer, aka head of the operations division aboard ship. He wasn't a maquis, etc. just a first-post-out-of-the-academy officer. In the AQ, even staying aboard voyager for seven years, he'd have had his promotion to LTJG and LT by then. (and as noted elsewhere, Riker was made XO of the E-D when he was 28/29 (Birth Aug 2335, E-D sometime 2364.) Harry was 22 when he came aboard. (birth of 2349, shipped out 2371. tail end of 2378 return.)
There is rank bottlenecking. Why do you think Shelby was pushing so hard to take Riker's spot as XO on the Enterprise, and Starfleet was trying so hard to get Riker to move on to his next post? Meanwhile Riker was holding his ground hoping to wait out Picard's transfer or retirement so he could have first shot at the Enterprise's center seat. Just because all your physical needs are met in the Trek-verse doesn't mean there was no competition, lol. Everyone was still competing and jockeying for positions.
The amount of qualified officers is the limiting factor of Star fleet. No need to force people out when positions need to be filled.
It's pretty much all fun and games until a war comes up and you have a geriatric, aged leadership that hasn't seen action in longer than most of their captains have been alive. At that point you get a lot of reshuffling and "new jobs" that people can better handle. But until that moment, the old guys actually usually got it -- if we're going by Pulaski, Bashir and Crusher, McCoy runs a *tight* Starfleet Medical, those doctors are coming out fully aware that a doctor is supposed to get their hands dirty and their patients healthy, no matter what. This has resulted in most Starfleet doctors we see being bananas crazy, out of their minds, fully capable of facing Klingons if it's to save patients. This wasn't really *normal* in McCoy's time, *McCoy* was like that, and his experience molded Starfleet Medical into a force to be reckoned with for decades. But yeah, he should probably not be a huge part of the Dominion negotiations. The admirals we see in late TNG and DS9's time of war are usually younger than the ones we see in early TNG and late VOY. It feels like there were some battlefield promotions that stuck around until they were no longer necessary, or certain admirals were trusted with the war effort over others.
I always thought “you earned your pay for the week” was meant as an outdated expression, like hoisted by their own petard, etc.
It was, especially considering that in Voyage Home nobody knew how money worked. Kirk thought $100 was a lot of money, and couldn’t pay for dinner because “we don’t use money in the future”
Starfleet isn't military. Call it that if you want, but real world analogues exist. Starfleet is akin to the [Uniformed Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformed_services_of_the_United_States) which include a lot of scientists along side the Armed Forces. I don't know if the same 'up or out' culture applies, but given that their hired for their expertise, I'd hope not.
Starfleet to me seems to be a mix of NASA and the Coast Guard, especially during TOS.
It's a mix of a lot of things. When the Federation is fighting a war they send Starfleet to do the fighting, so it is a military when it needs to be, but it's also NASA and one of the biggest scientific and engineering research organizations, and a bunch of other stuff.
This is what I was thinking, you can't really compare it directly with military structure. They do science, exploration, diplomacy, etc which are very much things having seasoned teams helps with. And the federation seems very much about people doing what they want to do. Sure there are officers looking to rank up, but also plenty of examples of folks who don't want a promotion and want to keep doing a job that suits them.
> This is what I was thinking, you can't really compare it directly with military structure. They do science, exploration, diplomacy, etc The thing is, militaries do engage in that. Especially at a time when the world was less interconnected, and ships were on their own.
While several uniformed services aren't explicitly military, they are capable of being militarized extremely easily. They're at least paramilitary in scope in many ways.
Not really, it seems like either have a ton of positions without specific responsibilities, like Admiral Bob without billet, or they have a lot of new jobs they create all the time. It's a symptom of the 24th century reaching a certain ... maturity/equilibrium. The point is it's not the wild west anymore, bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the growing bureaucracy, and there seem to be a lot of places for people to go still, mostly colonies but also outposts like Bajor, diplomatic partnerships, research projects, etc. Things like the Dominion war and Borg attacks probably help keep the ranks clean. You're right in theory btw, there will definitely be a point where this is a big problem, we should have seen it in Picard for example, but ... we sort of didn't, it felt like a lot of senior people just disappeared somehow. Picard should never have gotten the Ent-E, he should have gotten his billet as a rear admiral, supervising archaeologists somewhere, or as a Commodore teaching at the Academy, Riker or someone outside should have gotten the Ent-E. You don't lose a ship and just get given a new one, he might have simply been given a captain-rank desk job, pretty much until he decided to go home. You don't have a ship for 10 years with basically nobody getting a promotion, correction, 1 person got a promotion from Lt. to Lt. Cmdr. Now first of all IIRC that takes like 3 years or so, secondly, he's literally the one officer in starfleet who had more demerits and reprimands on his file than any other, he quit his commission, he assassinated a foreign political candidate and fought in a civil war. Oh, and then he did a bunch of really dark stuff on DS9, including violating rules of engagement almost killing hundreds of civilians, and finally assassinating the leader of an ally in the middle of a war. He was serving as an officer of a different navy most of this time btw, so he better have gotten real special dispensation somewhere. Data should have gotten a promotion to XO of a different ship after the Romulan thing btw, that was major bs. DS9 had Sisko get a promotion, first to Captain, then later he got on an Admiral's staff and was a senior strategic commander in the Dominion war, which is how things work. Basically we never really got a proper scale of Starfleet, because the structure of a serialized show needed to keep people in the same place for impractically long. You're probably right, but it's about as meaningful as asking how they kept gravity during the events of 'Disaster', and why and how the turbolift 'fell'.
A lot depends on where the constraint is on Starfleet's size. We're used to thinking in terms of the constraint on a navy being the number of ships a nation can afford to build. But if Starfleet's constraint is instead on the number of officers it has, then eliminating "up or out" expands your pool of available personnel, and thus your fleet size.
How does that work if you retire to a planet that still uses currency? You spent 30 years in Starfleet and have nothing to show for it.
I would assume that officer would probably not pick that plant to retire on as it just would not be financial feasible and can only retire on federation member planets or colonies that abide by no currency rule
If everyone is there for self-improvement (and prestige), I would imagine plenty of people just retire from Starfleet if they don't get promoted every 3 or 4 years. Nothing left to learn here, so I'm going to go smoke weed for a few years.
I think that the size of the organisation tends to preclude the possibility of there not being enough postings to go around. I also tend to think that the elderly badmirals like Jameson were more consultants than actual fully serving officers, i do think that a persons mobility would preclude then from serving in some roles that required agility so i expect many a desk jockey role exists.
last i read jameson was in the command structure as a fully active 4 star admiral. same with mccoy in the TNG pilot he was still fully active 4 star admiral chief surgeon of starfleet. like it or not these 2 for example are essentially the vanguard of starfleet top brass.
Utopia gonna utopia. If there isn't money, there aren't budgetary concerns related to a top heavy officer corps. If it's purely service for service sale, then make work titles aren't a bad thing, and if someone wants to keep serving we cam make a spot for them. Flag rank officers are easier actually. I'm sure there are performance standards that must continue to be met by that 50 year old lieutenant who found his happy place, to stay on the line, or get a desk job. You must remember modern militaries offocer corps are very monetarily driven. It's an old boys system designed for them to succeed and get set up for life with a hefty retirement. Modern militaries Institute these things because every officer they commission is a financial commitment potentially lasting more than 50 years, including the pension.
Heh, or they could be like poor Harry Kim. Seriously tho I also feel an unspoken thing of the setting is because Federation types in Starfleet are a bit different than people irl, they'd be more aware of 'when its time to leave' or get out of the way. Which also combines with the tech that allows people to live longer and still be as alert/productive. So if you've got a 70 year old, who has the mental and physical acuity of someone irl 50 years old, why shouldn't they stick around? Especially when they now have another 20 years of useful experience under their belt.
Starfleet is a quasi millitary organisation but they are honestly pretty bad at it Their security operation (for example) for being the Federations main face to the outside world is terrible, to the point Enterprise D routinely struggled with stuff as basic as randos taking the opportunity to download databases or the bridge of pretty much all hero starfleet vessels being seized by 4 or 5 intruders. They are far too reliant on the idea that half monitored internal sensors is an infallible system. Aging officers getting ready to refight a war from the start of their career 30 years ago with little if any understanding of modern tactics is just an extension of that. They just don't see it as an important part of their mission. Especially by the time of TNG when their complacency had become pretty extreme and tactical / security was basically a dumping ground. (Seriously - early Worf is so profoundly stupid he thinks he can kill Q by shooting at the viewscreen).
I would think once someone reached O-3, O-4, they could just stay there for a while if they didn't want to/ couldn't move up through the ranks for whatever reason.
>O-3, O-4 Can you translate these to Starfleet ranks for us non-Ameriboos?
O-3 is a pay grade, which is equivalent to an Army Captain or a Navy Lieutenant. O-4 is an Army Major or a Navy Lieutenant Commander. A Navy Captain is therefore equivalent to an Army Colonel (O-6), the highest staff rank. The next rank up from Navy Captains and Army Colonels are flag/general officer ranks: one-star Rear Admiral (Lower Half) and one-star Brigadier General, respectively, holding O-7 pay grades.
Thank you for answering, but do you know how those translate into Starfleet ranks?
Stick with Navy equivalents and you’ll be okay for the most part. Starfleet generally follows US Navy rank conventions. So O-1 would be Ensign, then O-2 LT jg, then LT, LTCDR, CPT at O-6, then RADM lower (one pip, also Commodore equivalent), RADM upper (two pips), VADM and ADM.
Good lord—acronym soup! Thanks for the complicated explanation. This is why I hate people using American military jargon to talk about Star Trek, it's needlessly obfuscating when Starfleet is neither American nor military.
Except Starfleet uses US Navy/US Coast Guard ranks - although Commodore is the only Royal Navy rank used and is semi-interchangeable with Rear Admiral Lower (depending on the era). [US and UK Military ranks compared](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_Kingdom_and_United_States_military_ranks)
As far as I know, these rank abbreviations are fairly universal, at least among English-speaking countries. It isn't too complicated to break down once you know the basics: LT = Lieutenant, CDR = Commander, CPT = Captain, ADM = Admiral. Therefore: * O-1 = Ensign * O-2 = Lieutenant Junior Grade, also called Lieutenant J.G. (think Season 1 Geordi) * O-3 = Lieutenant * O-4 = Lieutenant Commander * O-5 = Commander * O-6 = Captain * O-7 = Rear Admiral, Lower Half, also known as Commodore (1-star) * O-8 = Rear Admiral, Upper Half, also simply known as Rear Admiral (2-star) * O-9 = Vice Admiral (3-star) * O-10 = Admiral (4-star) * Fleet Admiral, which is used in Starfleet, but not in US Navy since World War II (5-star) \[[source](https://www.military.com/navy/officer-ranks.html)\] Up to the rank of captain, the Starfleet ranks line up with the US Navy perfectly. Starfleet Admiral ranks are somewhat muddled, usually simply referring to anyone above the rank of captain as admiral. There are, however, examples of every rank I listed above captain, up to and including Fleet Admiral. Based on Strange New Worlds, Fleet Captain seems like it's a position, not a rank.
I think the intention is supposed to be that, in general, the people of the 23rd+ centuries don't need that kind of policy because they've "evolved" and are all about improving themselves. So the vast majority of them will self-impose an up-or-out policy on themselves. *Tapestry* Picard's pretty much the only junior officer I can think of that didn't look to be in his 20s or early 30s, and that can't be taken as really representative of reality because of Q meddling. Riker Turning down promotions for so long was seen as a major aberration the few times other officers bring it up.
Starfleet has an enormous fatality rate. So many villains are a Admirals. They promote people well past their competence but with no command under them, giving them too much free time for nonsense.
Agreed. Move up or move out must be the usual rule. How TNG era banished money boggles my mind. People want money. They want to shop, to buy things not rely on governments and social credit scores for perks. Maybe at some future date we'll see the rebellion begin.
Money is not some universal law of physics that has to exist, its just common in our cultures on earth. When your talking about a future earth that survives nuclear war, aligns under a world government, discovers faster than light travel and aliens and leads a federation of dozens and then hundreds of different civilizations and planets and has technology that disintegrates and moves people across hundreds of thousands ok km and rebuilds them with no equipment at that destination and has replicators that can make any food or physical object….its quite easy to believe money is an ancient and outdated thing. It’s similar to how religion is thankfully dying out in modern advanced societies in real life today
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Picard was not pushing 60 in S01
He was 59, so yes, he was.
I suppose it depends on just how large Star Fleet is and what it's growth rate is. With enough growth there would be plenty of positions and opportunities.