I think it was more of a general warning from Personnel than naming any specific names. As you would expect... it would be highly prejudicial for them to point to a specific officer and say that person was "promoted early". You don't do that.
By the way, we all realize this is the nerdiest of nerdy debates, right?
Not to mention, additionally, as shortly ago as 3 years, we had to issue premature promotions due to lack of Captains. Our shipbuilding pace isn't going to slow any time soon, not with two classes of frigates upcoming.
Yeah, that's the real issue here. Most of the people who will command Keplers are going to be either science specialists or people who are ready for independent commands but who lack the seasoning we'd want in someone commanding a large generalist vessel. They will clearly not, in most cases, be interchangeable with Excelsior commanding officers. Or even Rennie commanding officers.
Counterargument: Samyr Kanil.
(I guess she's that exceptional case. That said, Bruce Ponting went from commanding the Oberth-class USS Hawking straight to commanding the Romulan Border Zone Sector Fleet, so.)
Also, Keplers are going to regularly be responding to P events, so. They are generalist large frigates, though with a bias towards science. It's only combat - and in particular, combat in the vanguard -> main phases - that they're unsuited for.
Had commanded an Oberth for a long time, and proved their mastery of all aspects of starship command several times, not least because in Betazed there is only free hydrogen and Samyr Kanil's unending laughter.
They might grow into it, sure. That's always possible. It's also what promotions are for. But the point is that when they are assigned, they're not interchangeable, and giving them a rank that makes them so is a little silly.
Something else to consider is what is the normal TIR for various ranks here in TBG Starfleet? The United States Navy uses:
Promotion
Time In Service
Minimum TIR
Promotion Opportunity
Ensign -> Lieutenant J.G
1.5 Years
1.5 Years
Fully qualified (nearly 100%)
Lieutenant J.G -> Lieutenant
4 Years
2 Years
Fully qualified (nearly 100%)
Lieutenant -> Lieutenant Commander
10 Years
3 Years
Best qualified (80%)
Lieutenant Commander -> Commander
16 Years
3 Years
Best qualified (70%)
Commander -> Captain
22 Years
3 Years
Best qualified (50%)
They also require that Captains not in the line for promotion to Rear Admiral require after 30 years of service. So generally in the USN you can serve as a captain for eight years before getting with up or out.
If we allowed Commanders to captain frigates then we go from a maximum of eight years in the big chair, ignoring Explorer Corps Captains who serve significantly longer as Captains thanks to FYMs, to fourteen years. That is a pretty significant jump.
Of course it's worth remembering we don't use the USN's TIR system, or any other RL military's for that matter. You need look no further then Samyr Kanil who captained the T'Mir for a minimum of eleven years (2306 -> 2317) at which point she was assigned to captain the USS Sarek for a FYM. So even assuming she's just a one mission girl that is still sixteen years as a Captain. That is twice as long as the USN would mandate.
Honestly the current system is kinda slapdash in that we have some (good) Captains remaining in rank for seemingly forever while others are promoted like lightning.
Had commanded an Oberth for a long time, and proved their mastery of all aspects of starship command several times, not least because in Betazed there is only free hydrogen and Samyr Kanil's unending laughter.
They might grow into it, sure. That's always possible. It's also what promotions are for. But the point is that when they are assigned, they're not interchangeable, and giving them a rank that makes them so is a little silly.
Keplers aren't science ships. Not purely, anyway. These aren't Oberths, guaranteed to only respond to science events; these are nearly as good as a Rennie at responding to diplomatic events [only outstripped due to tech giving +1 response roll to cruisers] (and perform better in the events themselves).
So, frankly, a Rennie captain is in my mind pretty near interchangeable with a Kepler captain.
(Ironically, I do support the whole 'frigates can have Commanders as COs' thing... just, maybe not necessarily for Keplers).
Yes, and I find "you don't have to be a captain to command a starship which can at any time be assigned to deal with a colonial separatist movement or something" to be equally radical.
The point is, "our captains are getting promoted to commodore too fast, so we don't get to keep them around on the Explorer Corps panel for long enough" is entirely a self-inflicted problem. The obvious solution is not "well, impose some other change in order to make things workable." It's "well, don't promote them that fast."
Either way we're changing a tradition. It's just a question of whether we respond to a self-inflicted problem caused by Tradition A by also changing Tradition B, or by going back and changing Tradition A.
Since Tradition A is "Humanoid Resources likes to promote captains after X years in rank," I don't see why it's a problem to amend the rule (say, by replacing "X" with "X+2"). Whereas Tradition B makes a lot of sense to me, namely "we want a certain minimum amount of seasoning and experience in ANY officer who may be called on to act as senior commanding officer present on the scene in an event response."
I feel instead that we're correcting for Tradition C and Tradition D: it is absolutely necessary that candidates for Explorer Corps captaincy require command rank achievements, but it is also necessary that candidates for Commodore rank require command rank achievements. These two requirements draw from the same pool of people as achievements take time. Adjusting the pool for EC captaincy to include Commanders by allowing Commanders to command our frigates solves that problem, whereas adjusting the Captain to Commodore promotion rules does not.
Alternatively, everyone is getting promoted more slowly, not just the frigate captains.
If opportunities for promotion to flag rank were numerous and the supply of qualified senior captains was slim, you'd expect rapid promotion, with most skilled captains being "gobbled up" as soon as they reach the requisite time in rank.
But that simply is not the case if opportunities to attain flag rank become relatively (not in absolute terms) fewer. And if the supply of qualified captains is growing rapidly, because the many many Ensign Rickies of the Biophage era are now becoming captains in their own right.
Well, I'm explicitly arguing that yes, we have seen skilled captains gobbled up as they reach requisite time in rank. I also think that opportunities to obtain flag rank are not relatively fewer, but that those opportunities are going to continue to grow at an even greater rate than they have already. With a fleet size cap that is increasing at a greater rate than ever before, with a constant stream of ratifications upcoming which will increase the cap and the growth rate of our expected fleet, with the constant growth of both our berth numbers and our PP income to buy berth numbers, with two upcoming frigate classes, and with the prospect of full-scale war in the upcoming decade, we've only scratched the surface at our expected growth.
This is exactly the outcome you'd expect if we were short of officers from the Academy graduating classes of, say, 2291-2298 or so. In 2315 those are exactly the people you expect to be seeing as newly minted captains. So a shortage of qualified candidates is unsurprising, but it's also a temporary problem with an easily justified reason for the problem to just 'go away.' Not necessarily a permanent state of affairs.
Also, remind me again who got promoted prematurely? I mean, it's not like Oneiros keeps track of every officer in the fleet with a rank of commander.
It was explicitly pointed out in the 2314 rat race update. Like, actual WoG, and an in-character statement. Not just me waving my hands at a few examples I thought of.
The more we grow the more we are going to require captains and commodores to feed into the maw. The upcoming border zones, for example, will created a host of positions, and we have also pledged to build starbases in all of them. We plan, what, something like a dozen Keplers in the first wave? And a number of the new generalist? And we have Centaur-A production planned, and might even build a few Centaur-Bs? And how many Rennies are under production right now? The idea that the shortage is temporary and will go away is false. Both our limits and our infrastructure are growing at a stupendous rate that outpaces academy development 15 years ago. If you think shoving recruits to crew fresh ships is hard enough to keep up with given current academy development, imagine trying to keep up with our current hulls but with our academy throughput 15-20 years in the past! That's the current challenge facing our ship-command-ranked numbers. Unless we stabilize Starfleet's growth for a full 15 years, the problem won't go away.
They also require that Captains not in the line for promotion to Rear Admiral require after 30 years of service. So generally in the USN you can serve as a captain for eight years before getting with up or out.
If we allowed Commanders to captain frigates then we go from a maximum of eight years in the big chair, ignoring Explorer Corps Captains who serve significantly longer as Captains thanks to FYMs, to fourteen years. That is a pretty significant jump.
Well, part of me did like the neat progression. Easier to manage movement of frigate COs to cruiser/capital COs that way. It's hardly necessary, but it has some appeal.
I liked the proposal of adding a Junior-Grade captain rank, honestly. Commander already covers pretty much everything bridge officer. Expanding its top reaches into running a ship I think would be a qualitative change that's something of an overreach. But by the same token, Captain is already too big - we have the same rank commanding Oberths as we do commanding EC Explorer. So how about a Captain JG? A step up from Commander so you can look at someone and instantly know that they have experience with interstellar diplomacy, First Contact and Prime Directive decisions, deploying WMDs, etcetera, and in the other direction giving you a distinction between "Flies Oberths" and "Flies FYMs".
(if I'm being honest, given what starships can do, I'd just want to maintain the hardest line possible in front of owning a military starship. our recent captain's logs demonstrate that even the smallest SF ship has more relative power-in-one-sophont's-hands than anything we have IRL that isn't a ballistic missile submarine loaded with nukes.)
The main problem with a jr. Grade captain rank is it is a speed bump for people we want to fast track to big ships. Explorer XOs are ready for Cruiser and Capital ships if we need more captains for them, and how long is expected time in rank as a jr. captain?
Well, part of me did like the neat progression. Easier to manage movement of frigate COs to cruiser/capital COs that way. It's hardly necessary, but it has some appeal.
I liked the proposal of adding a Junior-Grade captain rank, honestly. Commander already covers pretty much everything bridge officer. Expanding its top reaches into running a ship I think would be a qualitative change that's something of an overreach. But by the same token, Captain is already too big - we have the same rank commanding Oberths as we do commanding EC Explorer. So how about a Captain JG? A step up from Commander so you can look at someone and instantly know that they have experience with interstellar diplomacy, First Contact and Prime Directive decisions, deploying WMDs, etcetera, and in the other direction giving you a distinction between "Flies Oberths" and "Flies FYMs".
(if I'm being honest, given what starships can do, I'd just want to maintain the hardest line possible in front of owning a military starship. our recent captain's logs demonstrate that even the smallest SF ship has more relative power-in-one-sophont's-hands than anything we have IRL that isn't a ballistic missile submarine loaded with nukes.)
Hmm. Captain (Senior) would be alright. Something like the US Navy's Rear Admiral (Upper Half), provided it can be mostly handwaved. It's obvious that there's a different levels of responsibility; this just adds a bit of formality.
Well, part of me did like the neat progression. Easier to manage movement of frigate COs to cruiser/capital COs that way. It's hardly necessary, but it has some appeal.
The transition won't be particularly neat because we've already got a lot of captains commanding frigates; with the stroke of a pen you're cutting the number of spacegoing captain billets by about forty percent. Frigate captains will be gradually promoted into cruisers as new openings arise, and not replaced by new captains. And since a lot of our new construction in the future will be frigates, it's going to be a long time before enough new billets are created to make up for the gap (namely, long enough for us to build 28 new explorers and cruisers).
I mean, there's nothing stopping you from just making up new captains for frigates and moving them to cruisers and explorers after a few years, is there? The fact that their rank is "commander" versus "captain doesn't seem like the real problem? And since the time-in-rank numbers you use are numbers you literally made up for yourself, you could just... use different numbers?
I feel like you're in a bind created by one of your own rules, and you're proposing to change a second rule for the sake of preserving the first rule. It seems more elegant to just change the first rule.
We have minimum figures; normal figures can be assumed to be within 25-50% of those. I don't know where to find the minimums, though.
They also require that Captains not in the line for promotion to Rear Admiral require after 30 years of service. So generally in the USN you can serve as a captain for eight years before getting with up or out.
If we allowed Commanders to captain frigates then we go from a maximum of eight years in the big chair, ignoring Explorer Corps Captains who serve significantly longer as Captains thanks to FYMs, to fourteen years. That is a pretty significant jump.
Of course it's worth remembering we don't use the USN's TIR system, or any other RL military's for that matter.
Exactly. We don't need to marry ourselves to a system that's causing us problems. We don't need to force characters into retirement for not getting promoted enough times by the age of fifty or whatever. Oneiros gave Chekov an Excelsior when he was seventy years old, for instance. It was never commented on, even by me, except insofar as he feels like an old man.
You need look no further then Samyr Kanil who captained the T'Mir for a minimum of eleven years (2306 -> 2317) at which point she was assigned to captain the USS Sarek for a FYM. So even assuming she's just a one mission girl that is still sixteen years as a Captain. That is twice as long as the USN would mandate.
Correction: twenty years. She was captain of T'Mir during the Biophage crisis and originated as an omake character commenting on how miraculous her ship's survival seemed during the Battle of Kadesh.
Of course, she was also supposed to be a Vulcan.
Then again, Picard stayed a captain for a decade or more, probably 'more.' And the only reason we don't see a lot of other captains with multi-decade time in rank in Star Trek canon, I suspect, is because the canon consists of several isolated periods and tracks only a few ships.
Honestly the current system is kinda slapdash in that we have some (good) Captains remaining in rank for seemingly forever while others are promoted like lightning.
The system exists to serve the gameplay, not the gameplay to serve the system. Captaincies in the regular fleet are sometimes prolonged and sometimes not, and the one hard-and-fast rule is that almost everyone who commands a five-year mission gets promoted immediately thereafter (or fights tooth and nail for a second mission, or retires).
I think it was more of a general warning from Personnel than naming any specific names. As you would expect... it would be highly prejudicial for them to point to a specific officer and say that person was "promoted early". You don't do that.
Either that 'early promotion' was an objective fact that anyone could look up (commanders promoted to captains without sufficient time in rank), or it strikes me as largely irrelevant to the point SWB was trying to make. In the former case I can't agree with you that it would be prejudicial to point out an objective fact, and in the latter case SWB was making an argument I can't make heads or tails of.
[shrugs]
By the way, we all realize this is the nerdiest of nerdy debates, right?
I feel instead that we're correcting for Tradition C and Tradition D: it is absolutely necessary that candidates for Explorer Corps captaincy require command rank achievements, but it is also necessary that candidates for Commodore rank require command rank achievements. These two requirements draw from the same pool of people as achievements take time. Adjusting the pool for EC captaincy to include Commanders by allowing Commanders to command our frigates solves that problem, whereas adjusting the Captain to Commodore promotion rules does not.
If it becomes normative to remain a captain for a longer period of time, any given captain remains in the Explorer Corps pool of candidates longer before being 'poached' by the promotion boards. The effect is similar.
The fleet is growing rapidly; I have not disputed this. My suspicion is, specifically, that we will add ships and thus positions below flag rank faster than we add positions above flag rank- because while yes, we're adding new sectors right now, we're adding new ships at a pretty impressive rate.
If you think shoving recruits to crew fresh ships is hard enough to keep up with given current academy development, imagine trying to keep up with our current hulls but with our academy throughput 15-20 years in the past! That's the current challenge facing our ship-command-ranked numbers. Unless we stabilize Starfleet's growth for a full 15 years, the problem won't go away.
To be fair, we only need a handful of captains per ship; assuming more than a single digit percentage of the people we recruited back then are still with the fleet, we should be fine.
Also keeping in mind that the USN has Commanders in command of frigates.
Yes, and Starfleet is not the US Navy. It puts heavier demands on the political, diplomatic, and for lack of a better term 'exotic' skills of its captains. High standards and long experience are very much the order of the day, or should be.
From the point of view of "what would be realistic in-game," I don't think it would be realistic for Starfleet to come to a consensus like "you know what we should do, we should start opening up frigate captaincies to people about five years earlier in their careers!"
I'm reminded of the Flying Cloud where the base commander and the captain of the titular ship are both captains but Captain Michaelson (The base commander) is referred to as the senior captain while Captain Everett is just the captain.
The main problem with a jr. Grade captain rank is it is a speed bump for people we want to fast track to big ships. Explorer XOs are ready for Cruiser and Capital ships if we need more captains for them, and how long is expected time in rank as a jr. captain?
It is an intermediary rank, so propably best to treat it like that. So the only ones commanding Capitals are Senior Captains, Frigates can be captained by Senior and Junior Captains both according to what works out as most convenient, the XO's of our Capitals are either Junior Captains looking to be promoted straight to Senior Captains in command of their own Capital or Commanders that will either be promoted in place or into independent command of a Frigate, and the XO's of our Frigates are Commanders looking to gain experience for one of the two possible Junior Captain roles.
Expected TiR would propably be rather short on account of this. Two years or so at most. At the same time, that amount would propably be substracted from the required TiRs of Commander and/or Senior Captain.
The best solution is to stop treating the Peter Principle as an instruction, rather than a warning, and axe up or out.
The next best solution is to spread starship command over multiple ranks. Whether it's making escort commands available to commanders or adding a skippable Senior/Flag Captain rank for veteran starship captains.
Would there even be a TIR requirement at all? I feel like we occasionally promote standouts straight to Excelsiors, people like notable EC FYM XOs.
I guess the argument against that would be those officers should be JG Captains? They're qualified to have a ship, they already did the bridge officer thing on a smaller ship, they just ended up taking a different career path to the capital seat?
Would there even be a TIR requirement at all? I feel like we occasionally promote standouts straight to Excelsiors, people like notable EC FYM XOs. I guess the argument against that would be those officers should be JG Captains? R
JG Captain sounds as silly as Rear Admiral, Lower Half to my ear. Either extend the allowed TIR for captains or assign experienced commanders to be COs of frigates.
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Shipyard Operations Report
The following ships have completed refit:
USS Kearsage, Constellation-class, NCC-1811, Oreasa Starfleet Yards Berth 1
USS Vigour, Constellation-class, NCC-1804, Oreasa Starfleet Yards Berth 2
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Renaissance-class (Starfleet Build Order NCC-2625) to commence at Oreassa Starfleet Yards Berth 1 in 2318.Q1
Director's Log, Ship Design Bureau, Vice Admiral Victoria Eaton
The task force looking into the sensor anomalies encountered with the Konen ships is proceeding swimmingly. My fellow sensor boffins are starting to narrow down the investigation towards a series of interconnected hardware and software issues that have been present in the past few generations of senor technology. Exactly what mechanism is being employed to generate the effect, and how it is spoofing our sensors, is not yet known, but we strongly suspect that this is the cause. Very detailed analysis must have been required to develop this exploit - and that's what it is, a deliberate exploit. To accidentally stumble upon the extremely precise combination of necessary factors would have been terribly rotten luck.
On better news, we have welcomed in the Orion Union Aerocommandos, and a number of their veterans have been causing a stir in their newly expanded offices on our station. Very tough ladies, I must say, and I count myself as somewhat of an expert on the topic. In addition, we have expanded the number of shipyard design teams.
Big news out of Amarkia, as well. Amarkia Arsenal and Maia Selin have completed the prototypes of their new generation of frigates.
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