Community Conversation: New Rank!

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Help Us Name a New Rank!

The Admiralty and Officer Corps of the SPSF have been secretly designing a new rank for our hierarchy. We’ve long felt that the training and expectations jump between Ensign and Lieutenant was rather large – larger than either Cadet to Ensign or Lieutenant to Captain. In an effort to provide more achievable goals that encourage movement up the promotion letter, we have designed a new rank in this gap that will be implemented alongside some much-overdue rank requirement updates in the next couple of weeks. There’s just one problem: we haven’t found a name we love for this new rank. We need your help!

Here’s a few things you should know:

  • The new rank will be a non-officer rank. It will not grant access to the Wardroom, nor come with the responsibilities that officer status entails.
  • The rank requirements are still subject to change, but the provisional requirements we have devised include (but are not limited to!):
    • Improved performance on fundamental on-update skills over Ensign
    • Spotting for active raider operations
    • Finding tags and leading simple detag operations
    • Familiarity with some of the more advanced capabilities of common Defender Tech
  • As a non-officer rank, it will not be subject to the retirement policies. Members who attain it will not be removed from an active status for inactivity.
  • The ability to train for it will be more open to existing Ensigns than the Lieutenant is, which requires a careful Admiralty decision of when someone is ready for that training material.

With all that in mind, if you have any ideas for what we should call this new rank, please post them below! The Officers Corps will be selecting from those suggested that we like, and may open it up to a community vote. Some of the names that have arleady been suggested are: Senior Ensign, Midshipman and Warrant Officer.

Happy Defender Day! LUX, VERITAS, VIRTUS!

Admiral Heliseum

P.S. We are also looking for ideas for the rank ribbon design!

5 Likes
2

I like Senior Ensign. We can do Jr. Lieutenant as well.

3

I prefer Senior Ensign over Jr Lieutenant. Jr Lieutenant implies that the person is a junior officer, which they aren’t.

Warrant Officer is fine, but I worry most of our membership aren’t actually Naval-literate enough to understand where that fits into the order. Our current rank structure is relatively straightforward - pretty much everyone knows a Cadet is still learning, it’s easy to intuit that Ensign is the standard rank-and-file member rank, and then Lieutenant is pretty clearly below Captain. Warrant Officer would introduce a good amount of confusion for people (including me) about how to compare Ensign vs. Warrant Officer vs. Lieutenant.

4

How about “Soldier”? :face_with_tongue:

5

Helmsman, Quartermaster, Veteran Ensign, Ensign Helmsman, Ensign Quartermaster

6

Not gonna lie, I like Helmsman a lot.

7

ensign of 2nd class

8

Helmsman will introduce weird gendered considerations that none of our prior ranks have (e.g. Helmsman vs. Helmswoman vs. Helmsperson), which makes me lean against it. We could just make the rank be Helmsperson for everyone, but my worry is that will not catch on and be too clunky, and then in practice we’ll still have the aforementioned awkward messiness.

9

My own first impressions are that Lieutenant could be the name and the old LT rank becomes Commander, keeping in line with RL rank structures (subtracting things like Sublieutenant, Lieutenant Junior Grade and Lieutenant Commander), but if we don’t want to return to using Commander as a rank title, then we can explore other options still.