So? Back when the equivalency of navy captains with army colonels was established, they could be far more.
But THEY WERE NOT.
I'm not quite sure what you think I was saying, Wil, because I don't understand what your rebuttal is, but what I was saying was that the size of the crew a senior navy captain might command could be far more than 200-300.
The point of the establishment of that equivalency predates the intermediate rank of Major.
What's the relevance?
Seniority was indicated by size of ship.
Yes. Junior navy captains commanded ships with crews on the same order as army companies; senior navy captains commanded crews on the same order as army regiments; therefore all navy captains were the rank-equivalent of an army colonel.
A captain with 200 men under him might only be the equivalent of an army major, but one with almost a thousand would be the equivalent of a colonel. So which army rank did they end up considering equivalent with a navy captain? The highest or the lowest? That's right, the highest.
actually, no the middle. See the history.navy links provided.
What links? After spending time googling it, I conclude that you're referring to the early US navy having 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.
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." [
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/jointservices/a/rankhistory.htm]
That you're misapplying modern US notions to a system which is based on older tropes and only borrows modern ranks as a convenience.
I'm not talking about tropes, I'm talking about the reality of running an organization with hundreds of thousands of people. I'm assuming the USN has four flag ranks because it needs four command levels above that of individual ship command to run it, so I assume that four command levels above individual ship command are needed to run an organization similar to a navy and of comparable size. Because if it wasn't needed, they wouldn't use four flag ranks (As evidently was the case for the USN in the late 19th Century and is the case for the Danish Navy today).
That you (and Chris) should really give up the Yanks in Space model and especially the brass heavy US model, because it's not supported by canon.
Brass heavy? Perhaps. But
how brass heavy? If the USN has, say, 15% more flag officers than needed to run an organization of 500,000 men, it would STILL need 190 flag officers. Your notion that 20 flag officers are enough to run an IN fleet implies that the USN is over-officered by about 500%!
that Naval Captain's commands have climbed in size over time, a factor you are BLATANTLY ignoring, but one that is implicit from the size of vessels in canon with listed captains commanding. (AHLs)
Why am I ignoring that fact? I've never not assumed that AHLs were commanded by a Captain. Nor
Kokirraks and
Plankwells and
Tigresses.
I admit that I'd give you an argument about another ship that canonically is commanded by a captain, namely the
Kinunirs. IMO the proper lower bound would be a light cruiser. But I don't see why that would make any difference to the current subject.
During the 1860-1870 period, we had 2 flag ranks: Rear and Vice Admirals, and only one Vice Admiral, the commanding Admiral of the USN. Our admiralty titles were borrowed from the UK at direct rank comparisons. 1870-1910, we had one each Admiral and Vice Admiral, and 9 Rear Admirals for the USN.
That would be interesting and even useful if you could tell me the size of the US Navy during that time. I wonder if it might not be somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000?
The 3I has the following explicit levels of command in canon:
Domain HQ
Sector HQ
Numbered Fleet/Reserve Fleet
Squadron
Ship
The Royal Navy had three: ship, squadron, and fleet, and they had nine admiral's ranks. Also, it's irrelevant to my main point, that if a flag officer runs a fleet of 300,000 men (or even 100,000) he'd be the equivalent of or superior to an army general, no matter what his title, and irrespective of the number of navy ranks below him.
Coincidentally, the rules provide ranks that fit that model AND traditional use for Captain and Commodore
Domain HQ - Grand Admiral
Sector HQ - Sector Admiral
Numbered Fleet/Reserve Fleet - Fleet Admiral
Squadron - Commodore
Ship - Captain
And once again, you ignore my main point. I'll repeat it here to save you the bother of paging back through old posts:
"Assuming there is no need for admirals that correspond to army brigadeers, and major generals and lieutenants generals and generals (which I don't accept, but don't want to get into here), but that there IS a need for admirals at a level higher than than that of an army general, then you wouldn't have one- and two- and three- and four-star admirals, true, but you WOULD, I submit, have five- and six- and seven-star admirals." [HRM]
HG/MT AdvCGen implies a roughly 36:1 dropoff between commodores and FAdms...
IMO the CGen system is useless for drawing that kind of inferences because of its extreme simplicity.
Now, I can get Santanocheev from O7 to O9 in two years under HG/MT AdvCGen. He's doing shore duty in 1105, gets promoted to O8. 1106, he goes to Attache, then in 1107, early, gets promoted to O9, and takes over sector command from the O9 he was attache to before.
Point to you.
And that's presuming RAdm is an alternate term for an O7 not commanding a squadron, rather than an alternate for O8.
'Rear admiral' would appear to be someone who fulfils a position roughly analogous to a USN rear admiral. Every time a Traveller author mentions a rear or vice admiral, it's in a position where it would make sense if the IN had rear and vice admirals that were roughly analogous to USN rear and vice admirals (Please note than I'm not saying that some of them can't be interpreted as something else). We have a rear admiral running a department of a regular fleet, a vice admiral running a task force of two or three squadrons, a vice admiral running a naval base.
I will point out that assuming that Santanocheev is an IN-O8 puts an IN-O8 in as one of a dozen department heads in a single fleet, with the implication that there are lots and lots of IN-O8s in a single fleet.
Also note that according to other parts of canon, there are no such thing as rear and vice admirals in the IN (in ANY navy in Charted Space, in fact), and according to yet another bit of canon, 'rear admiral' is another term for Fleet Admiral and 'vice admiral' is another term for Sector Admiral.
Hans
