Hans Rancke
Mongoose
The german special forces have O6s serving aboard ships and taking orders from the ship's captain? I strongly suspect you've misunderstood something. If you're right, I'd love to see a reference.rust said:
Hans
Sources of Social Standing and Structure of the Navy
- Thread starter rust
- Start date
Hans
Not permanently, but when a special forces unit goes intoHans Rancke said:
action it is always led by its commanding officer, and in the
case of the naval special forces this sometimes was a cap-
tain (currently it is a Fregattenkapitän, a commander) - in
the army and the federal police the special forces are com-
manded by generals, but the navy unit was rather small un-
til recently. While on board of the ship, the commander of
the special forces unit of course took orders from the ship's
captain where ship's matters were concerned.
By the way, I just remembered that there was one interes-
ting case where a single corvette was commanded by a high
ranking noble admiral, a Prince of Prussia, during a badly fai-
led publicity stunt, a German landing operation in Morocco -
the "Battle of Tres Forcas" in 1856:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tres_Forcas
Of course, the admiral rank in this case was only a courtesy
rank for a member of the royal house, but still ...
Random Thoughts.
Commodores.
In the early American navy many larger vessels were commanded by commodores as the USN kept admirals to a minimum, using Commodore as a promotion 'bone' to throw to senior captains, same in army. In US Civil War every Union general was a brigadier or major general but Scott (retired '62) and Grant (1864 onward) both Lt Generals. It created command conflicts where army commander MG Meade could not order IX corps commander MG Burnside who had seniority of rank and was an ex commander of the army himself.
Star Trek seems to have also used this system as several Constitution class CA's had a commodore instead of a captain. Decker being a single ship commander.
Nobles
Talk of all these planetary nobles is interesting, but few rule anything but on paper. The worlds of the Imperium are by and large independent with every conceivable government and the nobles and emperor mostly have starports and Imperial Reserves to run.
By my count Lanth has 7 representative republics, which Marquis gets to overrule that?
It would seem most Imperial nobles are really nothing but dilettantes. :lol:
Commodores.
In the early American navy many larger vessels were commanded by commodores as the USN kept admirals to a minimum, using Commodore as a promotion 'bone' to throw to senior captains, same in army. In US Civil War every Union general was a brigadier or major general but Scott (retired '62) and Grant (1864 onward) both Lt Generals. It created command conflicts where army commander MG Meade could not order IX corps commander MG Burnside who had seniority of rank and was an ex commander of the army himself.
Star Trek seems to have also used this system as several Constitution class CA's had a commodore instead of a captain. Decker being a single ship commander.
Nobles
Talk of all these planetary nobles is interesting, but few rule anything but on paper. The worlds of the Imperium are by and large independent with every conceivable government and the nobles and emperor mostly have starports and Imperial Reserves to run.
By my count Lanth has 7 representative republics, which Marquis gets to overrule that?
It would seem most Imperial nobles are really nothing but dilettantes. :lol:
Rick
Mongoose
Other random thoughts:
On a modern US Amphibious Warfare ship, you have a naval captain (06) and (often) a colonel (06) commanding the US Marine Battalion onboard. Usually the fact that the 2 officers have the same rank will never come into conflict as each will be operating under operational orders that clearly set out where each has command responsibility - usually that is; Naval Captain on ship, Marine Colonel on land.
Also - not all navies have the rank of 'commodore' being a flag rank - in some navies that have commodores the first flag rank is sometimes 'rear admiral'.
Another - although no navy will ever put an officer in the position of being under the orders of a lower-ranking officer of the same service - position and rank may not be the same thing. For example - the commanding officer of a flotilla may be of the same rank as his subordinate officers (captains or commanders), but be in command of them by virtue of his position as flotilla commander. A flotilla or squadron commander is often not a flag officer (but can be), whereas a fleet commander almost always is.
On a modern US Amphibious Warfare ship, you have a naval captain (06) and (often) a colonel (06) commanding the US Marine Battalion onboard. Usually the fact that the 2 officers have the same rank will never come into conflict as each will be operating under operational orders that clearly set out where each has command responsibility - usually that is; Naval Captain on ship, Marine Colonel on land.
Also - not all navies have the rank of 'commodore' being a flag rank - in some navies that have commodores the first flag rank is sometimes 'rear admiral'.
Another - although no navy will ever put an officer in the position of being under the orders of a lower-ranking officer of the same service - position and rank may not be the same thing. For example - the commanding officer of a flotilla may be of the same rank as his subordinate officers (captains or commanders), but be in command of them by virtue of his position as flotilla commander. A flotilla or squadron commander is often not a flag officer (but can be), whereas a fleet commander almost always is.
Yes, over here Commodore is no rank at all, it is the position of theRick said:
commander of a squadron, and currently only used for air squadrons.
There also is no Commander rank in our navy, we have three ranks
of Captain level (Korvettenkapitän, Fregattenkapitän, Kapitän zur See).
A Kapitän zur See (Captain) cannot give orders to a Fregattenkapitän
or Korvettenkapitän by virtue of his rank, only if he is in a command
position.
The biggest ships of our navy are frigates (well, with their displace-
ment they would have been called light cruisers not long ago), often
commanded by a Fregattenkapitän, so another navy officer with the
same rank on board of the ship is quite possible, since the comman-
der of the special forces also is a Fregattenkapitän.
Theoretically it is even possible that the second captain on a ship has
a higher rank than the ship's actual captain, and it probably happened
a few times, for example when a special forces unit operates from a
smaller ship like a corvette.
Hans Rancke
Mongoose
The early US navy had three grades of captain "roughly equivalent to the Army's brigadier general, colonel and lieutenant colonel". But that was three different grades, not one grade covering three levels.Easterner said:
This is a perfect illustration of my point. Congress didn't want to establish a flag officer rank, but the navy still needed someone to fulfil the role of a flag officer, so they created one and called it captain. No doubt they distinguished it in some way from the other two ranks likewise named captain. Captain/1st Grade, perhaps? I've been unable to google that bit. But note that whatever they called it, Captain/1st Grade was roughly equivalent to an army brigadier, not to an army colonel, because his job was the equivalent of a flag officer's.
"With the onset of the Civil War, the highest grade captains became commodores and rear admirals and wore one-star and two-star epaulettes, respectively. The lowest became commanders with oak leaves while captains in the middle remained equal to Army colonels and wore eagles."
[I was going to include a link to my source, but upon testing it I got a virus attack. The website was good back when I first visited it, so perhaps it will soon clear up again. Here it is, but use it with extreme caution: XXXXX//usmilitary.about.com/od/jointservices/a/rankhistory.htm (for XXXXX read http
] I'm talking about the reality of running an organization with hundreds of thousands of people. In the late 19th Century the USN didn't have four flag ranks (They omitted 1-stars and I think they didn't have 4-stars either), presumably because it wasn't big enough to need four flag ranks. The Danish Navy today doesn't need four flag ranks, so it only has two, 2-star and 3-star. I'm assuming the USN today has four flag ranks because it needs four command levels above that of individual ship command to run it (actually, I'd say it needs five but handles it by using the same rank for the two top levels), so I assume that four or even five command levels above individual ship command are needed to run an organization similar to a navy and of comparable size.
Is the USN over-admiraled? Perhaps. But how over-admiraled? If the USN has, say, 15% more flag officers than needed to run an organization of 500,000 men, it would STILL need almost 200 flag officers. The notion that a score of flag officers are enough to run an IN fleet implies that the USN is over-admiraled by about 500%!
By planetary nobles I refer to people who run individual worlds. They may not be actual nobles, but they'll be something comparable, e.g. governors, governor-generals, premiers, presidents, grand poobahs.
The Imperial dukes have what amounts to empires of around 30 worlds to run. This is, canonically, the lowest level of interstellar government. The Emperor has an empire of empires to run. Lower-ranking Imperial nobles help them do it or kick back and idle.
A world's high noble is the interface between the world and the Imperium. Or rather, an interface, since there's an Imperial consul too. The high noble is supposed to step in if the regular Imperial bureaucracy fails to meet an unexpected development. I like to think of him as a sort of ombudsman. Imperial nobles generally don't rule member worlds. When they do, they do using another hat. Although theortically the Imperial system and the memnder worlds are separate systems, world leaders, especially hereditary ones, are in an excellent position to get themselves an Imperial title in addition to their world rulership. An example is Delphine of Mora who is also Martiarch of Mora. In one capacity she runs the Duchy of Mora; in the other she rules Mora System. A counterexample is Norris, who doesn't run Regina despite his titles as Duke of Regina (the duchy) and Marquis of Regina (the system).
Hans
Hans Rancke
Mongoose
The tradition I referred to wasn't a prohibition against having someone with a similar-sounding, but totally different and lower, rank serving aboard. Marine captains were common aboard navy ships. And it wasn't against a ship carrying another navy captain either. Many admirals had a full captain for a chief of staff. It was against having an officer of the same rank as the commanding officer serving in the ship's company. Your commander of the special forces wouldn't be serving as part of the ship's company. An Aircraft Carrier's CAG is a full captain serving as part of the ship's company under the captain of the carrier. That's the break from earlier tradition I'm talking about.rust said:
Hans
Tobias
Banded Mongoose
This limit is certainly not going to be tested in the Navy. An army company of about 200 men has maybe five officers. The complement of the frigates I served on had 16 officers IIRC in a total of about 200 men.Hans Rancke said:
A task force is a form of task organization, usually temporary and formed ad hoc. It is independent of the standard admistrative organization.
Oh, IMTU there's absolutely going to be more admirals than just the fleet commanders and their superiors. But not 50 times more.
Look, yes: The information about squadrons in the Rebellion Sourcebook is contradictory, but that does not really matter, does it? What matters is the number of ships and this is pretty much set in stone.
Actually, the fleet organization bits are the most interesting part of it - the designs are almost all garbage. There is a diagram of various squadron organizations, but one thing has always baffled me and I still cannot make sense of it: The inclusion of the ship type "scout". For example, the CruRon is composed of 5 cruisers, one auxiliary, four escorts and two "scouts". But it's never really explained what kind of ships these are or what role they fulfil. There are no examples in the book either.
In relative size? Why that?
If you mean, not employed at sea, that is correct. In 1814, 43 out of 168 admirals were employed at sea.
That was not the same as simply not being employed and yellow admirals were not counted in my original calculations.
I did, didn't I? The differences in size (as in number of rated ships) were not dramatic - a little less than twice as many ships in 1812 as compared to ~1740. Compare to 20 times as many admirals.
Again, why? A Commodore is a fixed rank in the Imperial Navy; as such it is equivalent to a Rear Admiral (lower half) in the USN. But even if you did have an additional rank of Rear Admiral between Commodore and Fleet Admiral, it would not dramatically increase the number, since these would be commanding BatRons and these only make for a minority of squadrons.
The problem is that by canon we only have four flag-level ranks to work with and the hierarchy between them is pretty well defined. You could of course just go and replace "Commodore" with "Rear Admiral", and redefine "Commodore" as a senior captain with flag (pennant) officer characteristics and at the same time rename "Fleet Admiral" and "Sector Admiral" to Vice Admiral and Admiral respectively.
But in the organizational model I'm following, that still would not dramatically increase the number of admirals. Certainly not to figures in the tens of thousands.
An Imperial baron is not a big fish in the Imperium as a whole. Nor in the Imperial Navy.
Oh, let's not get into that discussion. Interstellar technology dissemination in Traveller is a whole other, bigger can of worms.
Of course it was hyperbole. But IMTU, and I am drawing on such canon sources as mentioned, neither local rulers nor low-ranking nobles are particularly awe-inspiring figures from the perspective of the interstellar community.
Tobias
Banded Mongoose
Erm. Not really. Kapitän zur See is simply a higher rank than Fregattenkapitän. And Fregattenkapitän is very much the equivalent of Commander in your navy, which is incidentally the same as my navy, as in "the navy I served in for several years".rust said:
I dunno about special forces, but the STO (chief engineering officer) is quite usually of the same rank as the commanding officer.
Tobias
Banded Mongoose
35? Geeze, that's even more top-heavy than it was in my day (IIRC... it's been a while.) Maybe it's because they have helicopters embarked. That department is almost all officers. I didn't count these guys because embarkment of helicopters used to be very irregular (due to overall scarcity of helos.)rust said:
Yes, of course, which is why I mentioned three ranks of Captain level.Tobias said:
My point was that the tradition of the ranks is slightly different, as far
as I know our navy did not have the separation of the captain and the
commander (= originally sailing master) functions which led to terms
like "Master and Commander" in the Royal Navy. Nowadays a Fregat-
tenkapitän is certainly the close equivalent of a Commander.
This seems to have changed, at least where I can find data the STO
normally seems to be a Kapitänleutnant while the captain is a Korvet-
tenkapitän or Fregattenkapitän - but I have data of only few ships.
Hans Rancke
Mongoose
But it shows that a formation smaller than a full fleet had an admiral in charge.Tobias said:
The group I listed above (the fleet admiral and his staff) is already ten times more than the number of fleets. For more than that, see below.
And seems to amount to about as many ships per fleet as the entire USN (depending a bit on just how many auxiliaries per combat vessel). So round about the same number of flag officers per fleet as in the entire USN does not seem ridiculous.
Because organizatorial complexity tends to increase with size.
So it seems that the trend is towards greater number of flag officers over time. The IN is 3000 years into the future. I don't see the case for thinking that it would reduce the number drastically.
Again, because 32000 people require a lot of organization.
Yes, and supposedly a Fleet Admiral is equivalent to a Rear Admiral (upper half), a Sector Admiral equivalent to a Vice Admiral, and a Grand Admiral equivalent to an Admiral. This is not reasonable.
I''m avoiding the whole subject of the official Imperial Navy ranks and talking about command levels. You can use one rank to cover more than one command level, but an organization of a certain size needs a certain number of command levels, and you can't change that by fiat; it's inherent in the size of the organization.
So I'm talking about subdividing the rank of fleet admiral into several command levels, either explicitly, the way Rear Admiral is divided into lower half (1 star) and upper half (two stars) in the USN, or according to seniority. In the latter case all fleet admirals would carry the same rank insignia (except they might only carry them on one shoulder for the first four years :wink
, but they'd still perform duties analogous to those of USN two, three, and four star admiral. Plus the admiral that actually commanded the numbered fleet, who'd be a command level above that.Or you could use 'commodore' to cover more than one command level. If it wasn't for the canonical references to rear and vice admirals, I'd have thought of that possibility before. An Imperial commodore could cover not just 1-star analogues, but also two-star and three-star analogues. That'll get you commodores for all squadrons from light cruiser squadrons to dreadnaught squadrons. Then you'd only need to use 'fleet admiral' for the 4-star and 5-star positions.
I made another argument on this subject in a later post. I'll repeat it here to concentrate the discussion a bit:
"I'm talking about the reality of running an organization with hundreds of thousands of people. In the late 19th Century the USN didn't have four flag ranks (They omitted 1-stars and I think they didn't have 4-stars either), presumably because it wasn't big enough to need four flag ranks. The Danish Navy today doesn't need four flag ranks, so it only has two, 2-star and 3-star. I'm assuming the USN today has four flag ranks because it needs four command levels above that of individual ship command to run it (actually, I'd say it needs five but handles it by using the same rank for the two top levels), so I assume that four or even five command levels above individual ship command are needed to run an organization similar to a navy and of comparable size.
Is the USN over-admiraled? Perhaps. But how over-admiraled? If the USN has, say, 15% more flag officers than needed to run an organization of 500,000 men, it would STILL need almost 200 flag officers. The notion that a score of flag officers are enough to run an IN fleet implies that the USN is over-admiraled by about 500%!"
But he'd still be a lot bigger than anyone from the upper middle class. And he'd be a fish in a much smaller pond in an organization of 90 million than in a population of 15 trillion.
They're not portrayed as such, no. Baron Marc hault-Oberlindes act more like a count out of The Three Musketeers than someone who can hob-nob with planetary royalty. I think that is due to the fact that Traveller social scale completely overlook the upper levels of planetary society. I see that as a unrealistic flaw in the scale.
Mllions and billions of people will have rulers who wouldn't include lawyers and doctors and corporate executives (SL9 types) in their social circle. And it isn't just a question of a few nobles and royals either. There's a reason why the social elite of New York in the 19th Century was called 'The 400'. And the 400, just the elite of a single city in one big world didn't include any SL9 people. Now take all the social elites of all the major cities on a world and how many of them will be invited to functions that the Imperial marquis will attend? One in a hundred perhaps, quite possibly less.
Hans
Hans Rancke
Mongoose
Here's one suggestion (Copied more or less verbatim from the Modern Western example of 3rd ed. GURPS, which just happens to have 10 classes):Jame Rowe said:
10 Country ruler
9 Governor, Senator, Councillor, Minister
8 Corporate head
7 Who's Who
6 Large-city mayor
5 Mayor
4 Doctor, councilman
3 Ordinary citizen
2 Poor
1 Homeless
Note that I'm not proposing this for an official Traveller interpretation. For that I usually try to make SL7 the middle middle class. But that makes it impossible for me to come up with enough meaningful distinctions for SL 1-6. So if you refrain from throwing dice for the SL of NPCs and assign them levels according to their occupation instead, and go with the "PCs are special" paradigm to explain why the average PC's family belongs in Who's Who, it could work.
Hans
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