Romulan Ranks

[Nerroth]

For comparison's sake, the Romulans as portrayed over in the Star Fleet Universe have a full range of officer and enlisted ranks. This PDF shows the rank insignia used, while more detailed info is in the Romulan sourcebook for the Prime Directive RPG system.

In theory, the Romulan military is a "unified service", in which the ranks of the Star Navy and the Ground Legions are interchangeable. In practice, the skills needed to operate a starship are divergent enough from those needed for planetside duties to make "free" transfer from one sub-branch to the other less than common.

One thing worth noting about the SFU take on things is that Romulan society is dominated to a great extent by the ongoing rivalries between a number of Great Houses, which constantly vie with one another for power and influence. Thus, the career prospects of a given officer or enlistee often depend on which Great House they happen to be aligned with - or, indeed, if they are a "houseless" (as in, not part of a Great House) member of Romulan society.

The SFU Romulan "secret police" (the SSA) and Star Police forces maintain parallel rank structures to those in the military, yet are not considered to be "military" forces in their own right.

Candidates from a variety of services are liable to be recruited by the Praetorian Preditrate, which directs the operation of Praetorian teams (elite units which serve in a variety of both "military" and "civilian" troubleshooting roles).

Meanwhile, a series of four military bureaus were established in the wake of the Treaty of Smarba with the Klingons; these bureaus (of Planning, Starships, Analysis, and Research) are intended to provide the Empire with a broader set of logistical and intelligence tools needed for it to function as a "modern" military power.

Further, the Great Houses often operate their own security forces. These are not always inclined to keep the best interests of the Empire at large in mind, at least not if those are deemed to be contrary to the more narrow interests of the Great House they belong to...

 

[Arpy]

And a Commodore got extra pay, extra prize money, the right to wear a Rear-Admiral's jacket, and other priviledges - but it still wasn't a rank, it was a job. Or a WW2 American Technical Sergeant, who got extra money and senior NCO priviledges, and had special duties, but wasn't in the chain of command. That's the difference between a Rank and an Appointment or Position - again, to the limits of my understanding. I'm well aware I might be standing on Mount Stupid here.


Spura, not super. I mean, yes, in modern English all the super- this and super- that comes from supra, but for this purpose I'd use the older one.

"Over" whatever is not a normal English construction, most of the time, so to me it sounds like mispronounced German. I say as an Anglo-Canadian. We don't say "Oversergeant," we say "Sergeant Major." We don't say "Overlieutenant," we say "Lieutenant First Class." There are places where we use "over" as a prefix in words or phrases like overlook, over-exaggerate, overkill, but these are all verbs, a few of which have been retconned into nouns. And of course the mixing of latinate and english words just sounds even messier.

So, yeah - two points of data are not a trend, of course, but if I heard "Overoptio" or even "Overserjeant" on TV, it would knock me right out of the story. A comment I offer as feedback, though, not as a "you should do it the way I like it."

I hear your point about not wanting to overdo the Roman terminology, though.

I hear you. But I think we’ve crossed the Rubicon (teeheehee) of mixing terms. There are no Roman lieutenants, uhlans, colonels, chairmans, etc, yet they’re canon. And the structure of the Romulan government does not follow the Roman either, with a proconsul, vice-proconsul, and a single praetor as emperor.

For me part of the task was to mix ranks of different cultures. This is why I included with the Polish uhlans and French lieutenants, the Greek (and apparently Bajoran) navarchs and English overoptios, among others.

Finally, we should also remember that these are not Romans even if they’re stylized with a Roman motif. Too much historical symmetry should take one out of the narrative as much as anything. Now, if the crew went back in time to Rome and the ranks were off, that’s a different matter altogether.