| Senior Ensign & Changes to the Ranks
Two months ago, the Admiralty announced that we’ve been working on a new rank to bridge the gap between Ensign and Lieutenant. That rank is finally being unveiled: the new Senior Ensign rank. Creating a new rank to go between Ensign and Lieutenant required a whole lot of restructuring to fit it in. We’ve made overhauls to our training areas, the ribbons, and the other ranks as well in order to ensure everything fits together nicely.
Senior Ensign
Senior Ensign exists as a bridge between Ensign and Lieutenant. There has long existed a large gap between those two ranks, larger than from Cadet to Ensign and from Lieutenant to Captain. This rank is to ease that gap, provide more achievable goals for our Ensigns, and encourage movement up the promotion ladder.
This is a non-officer rank. It does not grant access to the Wardroom and other officer areas. As a non-officer rank members are not subject to retirement policies. Members who attain it will not be removed from an active status for inactivity.
The Rank Requirements for Senior Ensigns are as follows:
Changes to the Other Ranks
While structuring the Senior Ensign rank, a few things had to be changed in the other ranks’ requirements, and we took that opportunity to make a few other changes to the rank requirements as well. The current rank requirements for all ranks can be found here.
These are the changes we made, highlighted:
New Ribbons
Each rank needs a ribbon, and we could not implement the Senior Ensign rank without giving it one. However, there’s not much way to slot a ribbon between the Ensign and Lieutenant ribbons. With Ensign’s one chevron and Lieutenant’s two, how do you create a ribbon one one and a half chevrons? The answer is you don’t. You redesign the entire ribbon system.
I present the new rank ribbons:
Cadet
Ensign
Senior Ensign
Lieutenant
Captain
Admiral
Lieutenant Emeritus
Captain Emeritus
These ribbons replace the existing ribbons.
In designing the ribbons, I changed around the design structure of the ranks to create a more flexible system. The ribbons fall into two categories: Officer and non-Officer. The Officer ranks now have the pentagonal base at the bottom of their chevrons, which signifies the officer rank. The Officer Emeritus ranks have that same base, but with blue chevrons to honor their former officer status, while differentiating them from the officer ranks. The non-Officer ranks have just chevrons. With the ranks of Cadet previously having no chevrons and Ensign having only one, it left two chevrons for Senior Ensign, and the three chevron ribbon as a gap. Rather than having 0-1-2 it was decided the ribbons would be better with a 1-2-3 chevron distribution as actually seen in the ribbons above, to better fill out the space on the ribbons and give our Cadets a cooler design. One of the advantages of this design philosophy is its flexibility. Should any new ribbons need to be created, such as for the Tidal Force or for distinctions for Prime Minister and Ministers of Defense, there’s a lot of room to work with.
LUX! VERITAS! VIRTUS!
Admiral Utopia
Minister of Defense