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Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha
If you're modeling the Imperial Navy on any current military Navy you're going to need Warrants, in the British and US ships I've served on Warrants are an intrinsic necessity,
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Royal Navy warrant officers are senior NCOs ranking directly above chief petty officers at E-7 and E-8. I'll put them back in in place of the upper NCO ranks I have now.
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if you remove them you'd have to substitute in professional civilian contract engineers and tradesmen to take their place.
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Essentially Imperial Navy ratings do what warrant officers do in the current US services, and machines do what current enlisted do. Like Imperial marines, Imperial naval ratings are highly-skilled long-service professionals. At TL 10 there is nothing much for a semi-skilled hand to do on a spaceship that a machine can't do better.
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I would suggest adding Commendation, Achievement, Campaign and Service awards/ribbons. Nothing like being able to look at someone's chest and know how many years of space time they have, how many planetary deployments, which actions they've seen, what combat they've seen, etc.
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I have always imagined (and, for that matter written) that there must be general service medals and campaign decorations for, for instance, major interventions and for tours in different sectors. I've just never given any thought to what they looked like. There are about 21 interventions per year, two dozen sectors to serve in, a thousand planets to do Public Duties on. Given my limited artistic ability illustrating all the different ribbons would be quite impractical. And I doubt anyone would learn the full set of three thousand odd, much less keep up with continual additions. I have a wall chart here showing all the medals issued to Australian servicemen and servicewomen. It was printed in 1988 and the latest service medal on it is for operations in Egypt in 1975. Even missing 30% of Australia's history it has 94 different medals on it. The Imperial equivalent is daunting even to think about.
A marine who serves to retirement will do Fleet Protection in four of five sectors and garrison duty on at least four planets, and take part in about five interventions. People's chests are going to fill up with ribbons that no-one can read.
Commendation decorations are a good thought, though. Essentially the DSC, DSM, and ISM on that chart are high-level commendations. I ought to think about some more modest ones.