TOS insignia

[THX1138]

Hi folks,

One of the little details I always loved about TOS was the fact that each starship had its own insignia, worn on the chest of crewmembers' uniforms.

It has always bugged me that the feature films and subsequent series have simply ignored this feature; suddenly, EVERYONE in Star Fleet is wearing the Enterprise crew's logo.

It's a detail that costs comparitively little to add but greatly contributes to the texture of the Star Trek universe. It always struck me as just plain lazy of the later productions to have ignored it.

 

[scotpens]

I believe it was a conscious artistic decision to use the Enterprise's lopsided-arrowhead badge as a generic Starfleet symbol starting with ST:TMP, to give Starfleet vessels and uniforms a more consistent look.

 

[Christopher]

It's also a matter of branding. A single, familiar symbol that represents your series is useful from a promotional and marketing standpoint. Look at all the various ST logos and posters that have been built around the arrowhead emblem, not to mention all the memorabilia. It's a familiar symbol that says "Star Trek" to people, so if you're trying to build a brand identity, you want to play it up.

Of course, there is precedent in TOS for multiple-ship use of the arrowhead. "Court-martial" showed us a bar full of Starfleet officers who were not Enterprise crew -- people who had been Academy classmates of Kirk and spoke to him as an equal rather than a commanding officer -- but who wore arrowhead insignias. Beyond TOS, Voyager's "Friendship One" established that the arrowhead, turned on its side, had been a UESPA insignia in the late 21st century. So I prefer to believe that the different insignias seen in TOS were not for individual ships but for divisions or fleets within the overall Starfleet. Maybe the arrowhead was the division insignia for all the starships whose command base was Starbase 11, which was why everyone in the Starbase 11 bar had the arrowhead.

 

[Nero's Shadow]

According to several tech manuals each ship in the TOS era had there on ship insignia I loved that idea we see some in TOS episodes I liked how each ship had It's own insignia it made things different imagine been in a room with several dozen starfleet captains least u would no which ship they come from .

As for kirk probally the most distinguish starfleet officer and the missions the enterprise completed starfleet decided to honor this by using the delta symbol for all of starfleet.

The delta symbol is one of the most popular and recognisable symbols in star trek whatever the era.

 

[Christopher]

According to several tech manuals each ship in the TOS era had there on ship insignia I loved that idea we see some in TOS episodes I liked how each ship had It's own insignia it made things different imagine been in a room with several dozen starfleet captains least u would no which ship they come from .

I know what the tech manuals say, but canon supersedes such speculations.

As for kirk probally the most distinguish starfleet officer and the missions the enterprise completed starfleet decided to honor this by using the delta symbol for all of starfleet.

That's been the fan explanation for decades, but personally I find it very distasteful, because it would be an insult to the crews of all the other starships. Also it's just so damn fannish, assuming that just because Kirk was the focus on the TV show we watched, he would automatically have to be the center of all things from an in-universe perspective too. That's small-universe syndrome. Surely there must be other Starfleet officers with equally great careers. What about Kirk's own hero, Captain Garth? How do we know his accomplishments before he went insane didn't surpass anything Kirk ever did? Why didn't Starfleet adopt the insignia of his ship?

Also, as I said, canon has definitively scuttled this notion by establishing that the arrowhead emblem was already 200 years old at the time of TOS. It's an outdated theory, no longer viable.

 

[GSchnitzer]

All the times we saw the "Enterprise" patch on people who weren't from the Enterprise can be found here:

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=119183&highlight=insignia

Hi folks,

One of the little details I always loved about TOS was the fact that each starship had its own insignia, worn on the chest of crewmembers' uniforms.

It has always bugged me that the feature films and subsequent series have simply ignored this feature; suddenly, EVERYONE in Star Fleet is wearing the Enterprise crew's logo.

It's a detail that costs comparitively little to add but greatly contributes to the texture of the Star Trek universe. It always struck me as just plain lazy of the later productions to have ignored it.

 

[Captain Robert April]

That's been the fan explanation for decades, but personally I find it very distasteful, because it would be an insult to the crews of all the other starships. Also it's just so damn fannish, assuming that just because Kirk was the focus on the TV show we watched, he would automatically have to be the center of all things from an in-universe perspective too. That's small-universe syndrome. Surely there must be other Starfleet officers with equally great careers. What about Kirk's own hero, Captain Garth? How do we know his accomplishments before he went insane didn't surpass anything Kirk ever did? Why didn't Starfleet adopt the insignia of his ship?

I'm pretty sure the rationale for Starfleet adopting the Enterprise's insignia was from Gene Roddenberry, because Kirk was the only captain to return from one of those five-year missions with ship and crew largely intact. It's detailed in the novelization of TMP, i.e., it's not a fannish conceit.

Also, as I said, canon has definitively scuttled this notion by establishing that the arrowhead emblem was already 200 years old at the time of TOS. It's an outdated theory, no longer viable.

It's a theory that needs serious tweaking, but it's not without merit, if for no other reason than that it was the producer's intent that each ship would have its own insignia, even if the budget for a given episode didn't always allow for some custom embroidered patches. One nifty idea that was cooked up over in Fan Productions is that the insignia represents the fleet the ship is in, and not necessarily the ship itself. This would allow for the various insignia we saw on Commodore Decker, Captain Tracey (and the crystalized remains of the Exeter crew), the Defiant uniforms (granted, this requires one to squint a bit when watching "The Tholian Web", but just go with it), and that lovely starburst pin on the folks on ground assignments, while still allowing for scenes like the bar in "Court Martial" and Commodore Mendez's secretary in "The Menagerie".

As for that arrowhead preceding TOS, so what? It just means that when the new uniform designs were being finalized and the various insignia were being worked up, they pulled an old UESPA design into the mix. It's not like anybody's claiming that the rectangle didn't exist prior to its use on the Exeter uniforms.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Roddenberry could be fannish at times.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Yeah, but unlike our fannishness, his fannishness carried a great deal of authority.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yeah, but unlike our fannishness, his fannishness carried a great deal of authority.

Up to a point and then he was just a guy mentioned in Paramount's check book.

 

[Duane]

I recall reading somewhere (decades ago) that the Delta shield was adopted for all of Starfleet since the Enterprise was the only ship to return from it's 5 year mission. All others were missing or destroyed. Now where I read this, I haven't the faintest idea. Maybe someone out there knows.

 

[Christopher]

I recall reading somewhere (decades ago) that the Delta shield was adopted for all of Starfleet since the Enterprise was the only ship to return from it's 5 year mission. All others were missing or destroyed. Now where I read this, I haven't the faintest idea. Maybe someone out there knows.

Sounds like a conflation of a couple of different things. Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in a footnote in the preface, claims that Kirk "became the first starship captain in history to bring back both his vessel and his crew relatively intact after such a mission." That doesn't mean every other ship was missing or destroyed; since he was allegedly the first to bring back both his ship and crew "relatively intact," that suggests that some brought back their ships but with very high crew losses, while others saved their crews but lost their ships or had them crippled beyond repair.

Now, the TMP novelization is the same book that claimed that 23rd-century Starfleet put communications implants into its captains' brains and that they already had routine holographic communication, so its conjectures are far from authoritative.

The notion that the delta shield was universally adopted to honor the E comes from elsewhere, I'm not sure where. It's a bit of fan conventional wisdom that's been around for decades. But in the face of the onscreen evidence from "The Cage," "Court-martial," and "The Menagerie Part 2," it was clearly a flawed idea from the beginning.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Sounds like a conflation of a couple of different things. Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in a footnote in the preface, claims that Kirk "became the first starship captain in history to bring back both his vessel and his crew relatively intact after such a mission." That doesn't mean every other ship was missing or destroyed; since he was allegedly the first to bring back both his ship and crew "relatively intact," that suggests that some brought back their ships but with very high crew losses, while others saved their crews but lost their ships or had them crippled beyond repair.
.

Given Kirk's record of "redshirt" deaths, I shudder to think what the death toll on those other ships were.

 

[Nick M]

I believe it was a conscious artistic decision to use the Enterprise's lopsided-arrowhead badge as a generic Starfleet symbol starting with ST:TMP, to give Starfleet vessels and uniforms a more consistent look.

The US Navy has a consistant look, but each ship has its own patch to identify the crew as being from that ship. Or the US Army, you know we are Soldiers, but we also wear a patch on our left shoulder that identifies the Brigade Combat Team or Division we are assigned to. I like that in TOS, that the ships and starbases each had a different ID. It was a simple yet realistic costume item that made sense.

 

[Christopher]

Sounds like a conflation of a couple of different things. Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in a footnote in the preface, claims that Kirk "became the first starship captain in history to bring back both his vessel and his crew relatively intact after such a mission." That doesn't mean every other ship was missing or destroyed; since he was allegedly the first to bring back both his ship and crew "relatively intact," that suggests that some brought back their ships but with very high crew losses, while others saved their crews but lost their ships or had them crippled beyond repair.
.

Given Kirk's record of "redshirt" deaths, I shudder to think what the death toll on those other ships were.

In the TMP novelization's preface, which is supposedly written by Kirk himself, he resists others' characterization of himself as a great man and points out that he lost 94 members of his crew during the 5-year mission, and blames himself for not acting faster or better to save them.

And we do know about some pretty massive death tolls -- 100% crew losses on Constellation, Intrepid, Defiant, and Excalibur, the loss of everyone but the captain on the Exeter, at least 53 fatalities aboard the Lexington and unspecified fatalities aboard the Hood and Potemkin in the M-5 incident. Pretty much every Constitution-class starship other than the big E that we saw in TOS ended up wrecked or badly damaged. So one can sort of see the basis of Roddenberry's claim that Kirk was the only captain to come back from a 5-year mission with his ship and crew largely intact.

 

[MANT!]

Sounds like a conflation of a couple of different things. Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in a footnote in the preface, claims that Kirk "became the first starship captain in history to bring back both his vessel and his crew relatively intact after such a mission." That doesn't mean every other ship was missing or destroyed; since he was allegedly the first to bring back both his ship and crew "relatively intact," that suggests that some brought back their ships but with very high crew losses, while others saved their crews but lost their ships or had them crippled beyond repair.
.

Given Kirk's record of "redshirt" deaths, I shudder to think what the death toll on those other ships were.

In the TMP novelization's preface, which is supposedly written by Kirk himself, he resists others' characterization of himself as a great man and points out that he lost 94 members of his crew during the 5-year mission, and blames himself for not acting faster or better to save them.

And we do know about some pretty massive death tolls -- 100% crew losses on Constellation, Intrepid, Defiant, and Excalibur, the loss of everyone but the captain on the Exeter, at least 53 fatalities aboard the Lexington and unspecified fatalities aboard the Hood and Potemkin in the M-5 incident. Pretty much every Constitution-class starship other than the big E that we saw in TOS ended up wrecked or badly damaged. So one can sort of see the basis of Roddenberry's claim that Kirk was the only captain to come back from a 5-year mission with his ship and crew largely intact.

Holy shit!! can you even think of the Congressional Investigation..Senate hearings.. C-Span..talking heads..Faux News going on and on about wasteful expenditure of money and manpower...


Damn right they'd honor Kirk and the Big E..just before they cancelled the program...

 

[A beaker full of death]

Yeah, but unlike our fannishness, his fannishness carried a great deal of authority.

Up to a point and then he was just a guy mentioned in Paramount's check book.

I have to agree. Roddenberry did a great service in bringing currents in scifi of the 1950s-1960 to the tv format, albeit in watered down format, in the 1960s. By the late 1980s he was really out of the loop of contemporary sci fi, and had been believing his own bullshit (and that of the more rabid fans) for 20 years.

 

[A beaker full of death]

Sounds like a conflation of a couple of different things. Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in a footnote in the preface, claims that Kirk "became the first starship captain in history to bring back both his vessel and his crew relatively intact after such a mission." That doesn't mean every other ship was missing or destroyed; since he was allegedly the first to bring back both his ship and crew "relatively intact," that suggests that some brought back their ships but with very high crew losses, while others saved their crews but lost their ships or had them crippled beyond repair.
.

Given Kirk's record of "redshirt" deaths, I shudder to think what the death toll on those other ships were.

Not to mention...
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra_z3xhiKVI[/yt]

 

[StarryEyed]

Is an insignia for each ship really practical in the 24th century? We don't know for sure how many ships Starfleet has but DS9 implied it is in the thousands. A lot of those insigias are going to look alike.

 

[jayrath]

The best explanation I ever heard -- and it's from a thread here from long ago -- is that the arrowhead was always the Starfleet insignia. Captains and starbase commanders were free come up with their own, as an exception. (Sort of egotistic, when you think about all the variations we saw.)