Lieutenant, Junior Grade Puns

Reading a recent story about a player ‘playing an angel’ reminded me of my first time running an online game.

In the ‘90s I played in Play By E-Mail Star Trek roleplaying games. These were hybrid RPGs / community creative writing email servers, with everyone writing from the perspective of a member of the ship’s crew, with the person running the server playing the Captain and guiding the main plot. There were maybe 10-12 of these games running under a shared group banner, each game focused on a different ship or space station and had around twenty players each.

I had expressed an interest to my ‘Captain’ that I would like to run a game, and he suggested to the head of the group that I take over a game whose captain had gone AWOL several months ago. I arrived on the email server to find several active players, running their own stories together without him. They weren’t happy about some new guy showing up and saying he was Captain, but after a couple of weeks they all seemed happy to see a game going again. Unfortunately, since all their characters were pre-made under the guidance of the AWOL Captain, I hadn’t approved any of their character concepts.

Most of the characters were great, but one – a lieutenant and chief engineer - was extremely …. off. Prior to me taking over, he hadn’t been included in the other player’s stories; instead he’d write his own side stories that involved the other players without their permission, often in ways that would contradict those player’s own stories. The character was supposedly half-Prophet – which meant the character was Jesus, but for the Bajoran people. The character was very young, like a teenager, and had gone through Starfleet Academy at a fraction of the time. He also – naturally – was friends with every single senior member of staff of Deep Space Nine (which we had nothing to do with, but every post he made had him communicating with them even when we were in serious action mode). He also had a myriad of magic super powers, because of course he did.

After about a month or so of observing this guy, and getting quite a few complaints about his character and his posts using characters in ways that contradicted other posts, I had to send him an email saying his character wasn’t really appropriate for the game. He didn’t seem to get it, but said he had a different character idea - the direct descendent of Martin Luther King Jr. From another player, that could have been an interesting perspective… but from this

The guy just wanted to know what happened to a senior officer and instead basically got fired.

Example

Not only does he skip the Lieutenant rank, he becomes a department head of a new department. Is there any canon explanation for this? In real life navies and merchant vessels, changing departments is something that doesn't usually take place. If you go to school and learn to be a navigator, you never ever end up working as an engineer.

I'm currently revamping the default flair selection. The tribbles will remain in the set, but other the selections will be representatives of different alien species, rather than recognizable characters. There will be a Klingon, a Vulcan, an Andorian, a Borg Drone, etc. The defaults will also include 4 humans - 2 males black and white, and 2 females black and white.

What I need right now is a screencap of a nameless/lesser known black female crewmember. Mae Jemison's character wasn't particularly famous, but she's famous herself for being the first African-American woman to travel in space. I'd like to use an extra with less or no notoriety. Can anyone help?

Also please note that this update will not affect custom flair, or the default flair you may have already selected. And feel free to suggest an alien race that should be in the defaults.

Part 1 is on BBC America right now. This is something I noticed 20 years ago and every time I see these two episodes I can't figure it out.

Picard is shifting between the past, present, and future. The past occurs just before the "Encounter at Farpoint" pilot episode. Data has been a Lieutenant Commander since the start of the series but in "All Good Things..." he only has one and a half pips on his uniform, which would be Lieutenant junior grade. Is this just a glaring costume mistake that no one noticed?