Patrick Goodman -- Tilting at Windmills
"I dare you to do better." -- Captain Christopher Pike
Beyond the Final Frontier: CODA Star Trek RPG Support
DanG/Darth Gurden
The Voice of Reason and Sith Lord
“Putting the FUNK! back into Dysfunctional!”
Coming soon. The USS Ganymede NCC-80107
"Ad astrae per scientia" (To the stars through knowledge)
Cool stuff here, guys.
It appears that a great many posts may be held by either a red shirt or a gold shirt, and I imagine the same goes for blue.
For instance, at least one of the Chief Engineers on USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) wore red, I'm pretty sure.
It appears that Command officers are given a wide range of experience, and that means they might be posted doing virtually anything for six months: commanding a Science team gathering data on stellar phenomena, commanding an engineering team working on a difficult project. So you can stick redshirts in just about any position on the ship and call it "gaining broad experience".
Re:Quartermaster. The confusion comes from the term having changed in its meaning over time. In the modern US Navy, Quartermaster is a job basicly identical to TNG's Conn: control the actual motions of the ship based upon orders from the commander.
In the Age of Sail, however, the Quartermaster has a very different job: the Quartermaster was an Officer in charge of the "practicalities of running the ship": he set the rations, he kept track of when the ship would need to take on fresh supplies, and other such things. On pirates ships, the Quartermaster was often in actual command of the ship, with the Captain only having authority in combat.
Apparently the term derives (somewhat obviously) from being the one who assigned people their quarters, both on land and at sea. From there it grew to encompass the doling out of all necessary supplies. "His main purpose was to distribute things. He distributed, rations, powder, work, prize, and punishment."
I'm not sure how that evolved into steering the ship, but it did, and now the term is applied to manning the tiller on a sailboat. That seems more like an evolution from Ship's Master (or Sailing Master) to me.
Meanwhile, the modern-day duties that used to go to the Quartermaster now seem to be done by the Purser or Steward. And by TNG, they all seem to be part of OPS ("allocation of ship's resources").
Last edited by spyone; 02-25-2010 at 07:14 PM.
You're a Starfleet Officer. "Weird" is part of the job.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn Pro
We're hip-deep in alien cod footsoldiers. Define 'weird'.
(I had this cool borg smiley here, but it was on my site and my isp seems to have eaten my site. )
US Air Force to the rescue!
One of the jobs that I thought would be handled by a Quartermaster in the Navy (based on old age-of-sail uses) was cargo management: the guy who decides what goes where.
On a starship, somebody is in charge of what is in each of the cargo bays. Somebody knows that you can't put the dilithium in Cargo Bay Three, because you are already storing boringzenite in there, and it is dangerous to store them close to each other. And the USAF would call that guy the Loadmaster.
I'd say each Cargo Bay would have a guy in charge of strapping things down and stuff, who would be that bay's Loadmaster, and the ship would have an overall Loadmaster who was their boss, and in charge of the bigger picture.Originally Posted by wikipedia
Again, likely part of OPS.
Last edited by spyone; 02-25-2010 at 08:07 PM.
You're a Starfleet Officer. "Weird" is part of the job.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn Pro
We're hip-deep in alien cod footsoldiers. Define 'weird'.
(I had this cool borg smiley here, but it was on my site and my isp seems to have eaten my site. )
As a retired flight engineer, I will deny ever saying this, but the loadmaster is the most important crewman on a cargo plane. Yeah, we made fun of them because they were usually the lowest ranking in the whole crew, and we always called them loadsmashers, but most of them were great workers and really dedicated to doing the job right.
+ <<<<<
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight. Psalm 144:1
They state the glaringly obvious?
No, wait, that's the Counsellor's job, not the Ops Officer!
Seriously, though, back in my FASA Movies-era campaign the Communications Chief was a critical part of the crew. Okay, she didn't beam down and get shot at, but since she had about 91% in Damage Control Procedures - and beat the Captain on a weekly basis at 3-D Chess - the PCs would go out on a limb for her without a second thought.