The yeoman program

[Shamrock Holmes]

I don't know what the relative ranks of Tina Lawton and Simon Tarses might have been about a century apart and centuries in our future.

No-one does canonically, but certain posters (mostly Americans I assume), insist that Tarses - who seems to do at least some of the job of an Independent Duty Corpsman (minimum E5 promotable) or civilian pharmacy assistant (which is typically a two-year training course by itself, and ) - must be junior in rank to Tina Lawton, who is identified as "of your age" relative to 17-year old Charlie Evans just because "Crewman 1st Class" outranks "Petty Officer Third Class" in the US naval ratings. I reject that premise and prefer to look for other options.

Now I think about it, the various titles of Miles O'Brien indicate that Chief Specialist (Lawton and Rand would report to a Chief Yeoman) can be used generically instead of (Chief) Petty Officer, and logically that follows that PO1 to PO3 could therefore be expressed as Specialist 1st to Specialist 3rd, so as common sense tells us that Tarses must be a Specialist (ie rated), then logically he would be a Specialist 1st (BTW, Rand likely is as well) and Lawton would be a more junior Specialist 3rd.

Why can't someone be a grade lower in rank than someone younger in age?

So I see no reason to believe that in Starfleet every single person who has a specific pay grade must be older than every person who holds the next lower pay grade and younger than every person who holds the next higher pay grade - and even if Starfleet members don't get paid in the TNG era they do get paid in the TOS era.

I suppose it's not impossible, but as not above I reject the principle that a crewman who demonstrates considerable training and implied professional experience must be a junior crewman who has neither merely on the basis of rank equivalences during to two different time periods.

And apparently it is within Picard's authority to appoint a 15-year-old civilian an acting ensign. And Wesley is put in charge of a team investigating unstable planets as early as the age of 16 in "Pen Pals".

Yup.

I agree therefore that it's tricky to determine how experienced that Lawton might be as we are told nothing about her duties (other than that she seems to junior enough to be mainly "others started", so I typically lean towards determining relative rank based on Tarses scope of practice which appears to be mostly "self starting".

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Not that being totally to true to canon matters but you can become an officer without even entering the academy , Michael Burnham joined Starfleet after graduating the Vulcan Science Academy.

There may be a kind of test you can take, like the Starfleet Academy version of a GED - certifies you as knowing what you need to without having to go through the actual program.

I agree therefore that it's tricky to determine how experienced that Lawton might be as we are told nothing about her duties (other than that she seems to junior enough to be mainly "others started", so I typically lean towards determining relative rank based on Tarses scope of practice which appears to be mostly "self starting".

Perhaps she's something akin to a legislative page in space. In Canada, federal pages are high school seniors, while in my home province of Ontario, provincial pages are grade 7 or 8 students.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Yeah, I tend to think that Lawton outranks Tarses, but I figure that Lawton was in some sort of academic program (pre-Academy work study?) that gave her a higher rating. Tarses explicitly avoided the Academy and sought out an enlistment, implicitly to avoid too much background scrutiny.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

Yeah, I tend to think that Lawton outranks Tarses, but I figure that Lawton was in some sort of academic program (pre-Academy work study?) that gave her a higher rating. Tarses explicitly avoided the Academy and sought out an enlistment, implicitly to avoid too much background scrutiny.

We know for a fact that Tarses is a fully qualified crewman capable of working solo, so he must be an "able crewman" or "striker" to use the US naval term, therefore he could be a senior E-3 equivalent (Hospitalman Hospitalman) to Tina Lawton's E-4 Yeoman 3rd Class (possibly Tina was a "boomer" or similar and qualified for early promotion), except that Tarses has been explicitly promoted while being a rated crewman so "crewman first class" is clearly a step up from (able) crewman, which is logically a step up from (crewman) recruit, so we have the problem that while "recruit" could be disambiguated from "able crewman" by uniform (no colored collar/shoulders), a different designator is required for "able crewman" to "crewman first class".

As noted above, Contrary to various fansites neither the Specialist "chevron and rocker" or the naval "/" have been established canonically so the minimalist option for ranks is that like "Specialist"/"Corporal" and previously "Senior Airman"/"Sergeant" that both ranks exist at the same grade (this would make Crewman First Class equivalent of RN Leading Seaman, which dates back to the 1850s), and either designate differing responsibilities/career tracks or both (and that Lawton might therefore technically outrank Tarses), or that "Starfleet Personnel" has alternated usage at various points for unknown reasons and as all deployable personnel are "rated", the terms "crewman", "petty officer" and indeed "specialist" are somewhat interchangeable. Certainly UE Starfleet's "Crewman 1st Class" were assignable as "Engineering Officer of the Watch" per Vox Sola (it's not that unlikely that a PO1 and PO2 would be on watch solo, but a crewman and a crewman apprentice wouldn't be, even if they are "rated").

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

(possibly Tina was a "boomer" or similar and qualified for early promotion)

Perhaps she was the beneficiary of a prior learning assessment and recognition test given by Starfleet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_prior_learning

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

Perhaps she was the beneficiary of a prior learning assessment and recognition test given by Starfleet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_prior_learning

Even if we accept that Lawton and Tarses are of an equivalent rank, I think this is reasonably likely if she's an NCO while "Charlie's age" (she'd need to be in for an average of 18 months based on US averages and about 3yrs based on the USN), unless she also joined at a very young age (enlisting at 15 is far less likely than an "early entry" into the Academy at a similar age).

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

It's perhaps another parallel with 1800s America - Civil War drummer boys and the like. Maybe there's a maturity factor - kids grow up quicker on a hardscrabble colony world than a luxury big city (emotionally and physically).

 

[MAGolding]

In regard to Yeoman Third Clas Tina Lawton, see post number 11 in thread: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/your-dream-crew.301387/

 

[Qonundrum]

TOS gives me the impression it was a casting couch-type deal.

Par for the course in the 1960s...

As far as Roddenberry's casting of the actresses went, it probably was, unfortunately (e.g. Andrea Dromm as "Yeoman Smith" in the secon pilot, who was touted as the female lead in publicity but spoke exactly four words in the episode and was reportedly cast purely so Roddenberry could seduce her).

But in-story, that definitely wasn't meant to be the case. The original idea was that yeomen were usually male, which is why both Pike and Kirk were shown to be uneasy having female yeomen. And TOS made it quite clear that Kirk would never let himself act on his attraction to Rand, which was why he didn't like the temptation of a female yeoman (oy, the '60s). It's just that after Grace Lee Whitney left, they switched to a succession of female yeomen-of-the-week rather than replacing her with a new female regular, and so the original intent that female yeomen were rare gave way to a status quo where all yeomen were female.

Though we have glimpsed at least three male yeomen post-TOS, a patient of McCoy's in TAS: "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth" and the assassins Burke & Samno in TUC.

Very probable. Sitcoms, sketch variety shows, even the infrequent game show (I'd swear Paul Lynde did one in a Hollywood Squares episode and still make it more tame compared to some of his better quips!), up to the late-1990s (if not more recently?) used the notion of "casting couch" as joke fodder periodically.

TV has always been fiction to begin with, not a reflection of society - even if it's using a reflection/portion of society as a plot point to get the viewers to watch. That's all it really is. Especially as it's made by, for, and of humans. I tried getting my cats to watch a marathon of every episode of TNG featuring Data's cat Spot. They just did not care. Of course, they're cats, unless it smells like fish 'n' gibbets they're probably not going to care... Of course, Fido might care, at least when looking up and thinking "Mmmm, unscented Spot with gravy" with drool dripping off its semi-opened jaw.