At least, that's my interpretation.

In the TNG era, "Petty Officers" and "Warrant Officers" have been combined.

Upon achieving, say, Petty Officer First Class, the holder recieves a warrant of equivalent service to an Ensign, and as someone puts in more service, as well as a continually-increasing petty officer rank (rate?) they'd also get a continually-increasing warrant. (The rate might simply climb based on years of service while the warrant might advance on a merit-only system.)

In the uber-egalitarian world of TNG, petty officers w/warrants would actually get to wear the same rank insignia as their equivalently-qualified friends who'd gone through the Academy.

So, O'Brien in "Encounter at Farpoint" held an ensign's warrant, which bumped up to lieutenant (jg) by the second season and eventually hit full lieutenant. (Methinks Picard was impressed as hell with this guy.) This would explain why absolutely every extra on the show had officer's pips on, because some of them were in face enlistees w/warrants.

Anyway, as Riker "yes lieutenant" proved, this system promoted confusion when addressing these guys. So, around the time of "Realm of Fear," Starfleet ditches the Barneyriffic everyone-is-special system and makes all the petty officers wear single hollow pips.

This, too, is kinda unfair as well. So finally, compromise... the new rank system introduced in "The Visitor" has chevrons to indicate rating as a petty officer and pips alongside them to indicate warrant officer equivalency.

Evidently it's damn near impossible to get a lt. cmdr's equivalency in warrant form, as O'Brien would have kept a full lieutenant's equivalency from season 4 of TNG (yes/no?) to the end of DS9, or nine years.. which is in the Data zone.

So if you have that whole officer equivalency thing going, he would have made it to "the Data Zone".

O'Brien was head of an engineering department on a large starship. He was promoted to the chief engineer (called chief of operations) of an entire starbase. Definitely a promotion.

Not that I think your wrong. It would make sense if he got bumped up to Senior Chief around the same time. That may have even been the reasoning behind giving him (what appears to be) a senior chief insignia.

Go to this site. Now, click on the Database icon, then click on the UFP icon that loads up. OK, now scroll down until you find the "RANK COMPARISON CHARTS" and then click on the Starfleet insignia to access the section. Right, the first page is only concerned with officer ranks - we're not talking about them (although I must point out that they've missed out Fleet Captain) so goto the bottom and click "Continue".

OK, now we are on the page showing enlisted ranks of Starfleet. The bit I'd like to draw your attention to is the experience table at the bottom. As far as I can tell, this describes a similar promotion system to the one discussed by The_Tom. The reasons why I show you this are:

1) The person who made this site has put a lot of effort into it.

2) The site needs fresh blood to it - so join up! (Cheeky, ain't I?)

3) The pics are pretty decent

4) I'd like a better explaination for the Warrant Officer ranks and higher NCO ranks too (experience wise) as I'm not sure it works.

Anyway, as most people say: discuss (please).

What I'd suggest for aesthetics is moving the warrant ranks down one step, so that one black pip coincides with the one dot (plus three chevrons) of CPO rate, two black pips coincide with the two dots of SCPO, and *three* black pips coincide with the three dots of MCPO.

This would also mean that O'Brien's moving from his single-pipped TNG "warrant" to a supposed DS9 rate of SCPO would look like a promotion to him, not just a transfer. Of course, the collar markings of O'Brien never made real sense, but at least we could now pretend that he was a CPO all the time aboard the Enterprise, simply with a warrant given by Picard because he was short of real officers in "Encounter at Farpoint". This warrant expired some years into DS9, by which time O'Brien's "real" rate had been raised with a promotion from CPO to SCPO. O'Brien then reverted to this rate, since he and Sisko felt it unnecessary to play with warrants any more - things were less formal aboard the station than they had been aboard the Federation Flagship.

We could also pretend that during the times O'Brien wore two pips in TNG (and Riker stupidly mistook him for Lieutenant), his warrant was temporarily hitched up one notch for some reasons of bureaucracy (perhaps his status as transporter chief was endangered because another single-pip warrant officer had temporarily come aboard, and a pecking order had to be established?). Toying with warrants feels more acceptable than toying with actual ranks and rates - warrants come and go, while ranks at least are eternal.

Naturally, every time we thought we saw one of O'Brien's TNG pips was silver, we were just seeing things. The pips were solid black all the time. (Comparing the pips in "Encounter at Farpoint" and "All Good Things.." should be proof enough!)

That's some serious research, and would seem to match the canon data very well. Also, I see little reason to bump a Bajoran General down to the level of a Starfleet Fleet Captain - Generals should be flag officers (Admirals in Starfleet parlance) in all the naming systems.

The Romulan system looks all right to me, based on what precious little we know of it so far. One could, however, insert the putative rank of Sub-centurion there as well, and thus fill the gaps in comparison with Starfleet ranks (Centurion=Lt.Cmdr, Sub-centurion =Lt).

For the lowest rank in the Tal'Shiar system, I suggest sticking to good old US Army ranks, since all the other T'S ranks seem to follow that pattern as well. So instead of Uhlan, there would simply be 1st Lt.

The Cardassian system could be more complex than shown, for the simple reason that the Universal Translator refuses to translate the rank names. It could be that there is no correlation between Cardassian and Starfleet ranks at all. A Gul could correspond to any Starfleet rank, depending on circumstances - perhaps the position is more decisive than the rank, so that the commanding officer of a tiny patrol boat is a Gul, grossly outranked by the Glinn of a larger ship. It seems to matter which "Order" the officer is coming from, too - apparently, the smaller the number of the Order, the higher the influence of the officer.

The Klingon system is of course a total mess (not because you'd have messed it up, but because Paramount did). I simply refuse to believe that the Klingon Colonel could be a flag rank. More probably, the Klingon system once again is a perfect parallel of the US system, yet the Klingons utilize both Army *and* Navy ranks. What about this theory: Klingons vastly prefer Army ranks, since those show that the officer has shown prowess in ground combat, the highly honorable form of warfare. Naval warfare is less honorable because you can't slay starships with bare hands, but have to relinquish some of the honor of the kill to a *machine*. Thus, even the people flying the starships typically carry Army ranks, but there are special situations where they accept naval designations. OTOH, to proudly carry nothing but a naval rank shows that the guy or gal must be REALLY good at what he's doing in terms of space battle.

In fact, the only Klingon naval ranks we have heard so far are "Captain" and "Commander", right? And these might not be ranks at all, but simply positions: the top officer of a ship (probably a Colonel, Lt.Colonel or Major in rank) is the captain of the ship, or the commander of his crew, by job description!

quote:

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Master CPO - 3 chevrons & 3 dots
Senior CPO - 3 chevrons & 2 dots (O'Brien)

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Originally posted by Shik:
Alexander stated that he was a "bekk" in DS9.

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