He’s made a captain after defiant had been a thing. They opened an episode with Miles toasting him (kind of racist) for being made captain and i was like “what the fuck was he before “
I watched for 10 min assuming it was a mirror universe! Then I decided to stop because I need to sleep and have been Redditing for 2 hours
Yes, in the pilot episode I recall Captain Picard (who clearly outranks Sisko at the time) is the officer who oversees his start at that assignment—which wasn’t supposed to be as important as it turned out to be when they discovered the wormhole shortly afterward.
You’d think Starfleet would have assigned some additional staff and resources to the station once its new strategic importance became so apparent, but that’s bureaucracy for you.
Starting with TNG you had commanding officers wearing red probably to lay to rest the classic trope of the redshirt always getting killed so maybe the idea of the goatee was the same or Avery Brooks just wanted to get back to the look he had in Spenser: for hire. Either way, he looks far better with that and the shaved head.
He was a commander before becoming captain as you’ll see from the 3 pips he was wearing up until then. The station can kinda move using thrusters but it’s not designed to, they moved it to the wormhole in the pilot episode but I don’t recall it moving any other time because it’s a bit dicey. Also, the defiant can’t fit inside the station, it’s usually docked to the outer ring.
In the US Navy, Captain (O6) is a pretty high rank, and is charge of major ships like aircraft carriers and cruisers, perhaps SSBNs .On other, smaller ships (destroyers, frigates, attack submarines), a commander (O5) is in charge. Really small ships and boats may be skippered by a officer of even lower rank.
(Admirals and commodores command groups of ships. An admiral typically commands from a flagship, which is typically large enough to merit a captain as commanding officer.)
In the first Aubrey Maturin book, Master and Commander, Jack Aubrey, a newly promoted commander, takes command of the fourteen gun HMS Sophie. He later becomes a Post Captain and is assigned various larger ships-- the most famous being the 28 gun HMS Suprise. I think Starfleet takes its cues from later navies, though. Otherwise, Picard would be a Yellow admiral by now!
Most likely, the earlier TOS redshirts formed a political action group to investigate what was going on with some odd activity in their actuarial table. This collegial red-shirted grouping would probably have shown a lot more motivation and energy than groups that weren’t mysteriously dying, making them top-track candidates for leadership roles, advancing up the Starfleet ladder generationally by the time of TNG.
That would make the most sense. I was just reading the Soonish chapter on cheaper rocketry. If you bring in way more real-world science than you need, you could assume that Serenity starts off with a simple jet intake in atmo, maybe switches over to to some kind of ramjet as it picks up speed, and then goes to a fuel/liquid oxygen mix once in space.
ETA: Come to think of it, from what I remember of the show, those engines aren’t even really used for most of the space transport? They mostly seem to be atmospheric and maneuvering thrusters. When Serenity starts moving at speed, the thrust appears to come from the back section of the ship, rather than the lateral rockets.
There have been occasions when they’ve assigned large task forces to Picard and it was no big deal.
I guess being the captain of the “flagship of the Federation” carries some kind of extra rank. (I cringed every time they used that term in its civilian meaning.)
She struck me as still too passionate and enthusiastic for this to be 100% applicable; but the hollow-eyed computer janitor assessment of those sorts of situations is “Bloody users; though I guess it’s job security…”
It goes back quite a ways. Early SF cinema-snoozer Destination Moon posits a corporate sponsored moon launch because the US government was too slow to act.