Even in early Legends, we had the Victory Star Destroyer Corruptor, commanded by Commander Convarion, who then got demoted to Captain Convarion (though Wookieepedia has an argument that this was a promotion): http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Commander/Legends I think it was WEG very early on (Imperial Handbook?) that set the concept, with most other works following it.
Then Choices of One added (or reinforced) the rank of Senior Captain (which Thrawn was in that novel).
Apparently it's roughly synonymous with WEG's "Captain of the Line": http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Senior_Captain In the context of TEGTW's system: I would suggest that @jasonfry & @Thrawn McEwok intended that Isard's action be interpreted as Convarion being demoted from the position of Commander (able to command small squadrons of ships) to Captain (of just the Corruptor) by her taking away one cylinder. With his "line rank" initially being Senior Captain, but Senior Commander after the cylinder removal.
Thrawn gave us several - other works gave us a few more - and the result so far is: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Military_rank The Imperial Navy's officer corps had several ranks. From lowest to highest, they were: Ensign,[15] Junior Lieutenant,[16] Senior Lieutenant, Captain, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, Commodore,[15] Rear Admiral, Vice Admiral, Admiral, Fleet Admiral, and Grand Admiral.[17] Commissioned officers were trained at the Royal Imperial Academy on Coruscant and other similar Imperial Academies.[15] Some known ranks in the Imperial Army included Corporal, Sergeant, Sergeant Senior, Lieutenant[18], Commandant, Commander, Major[18], Colonel, General[19], and Grand General[20]
I just hoped they revised the ranks before the Empire Strikes Back, because there's no way that someone just above a Sr. Lieutenant would be second-in-command to Admiral Ozzel on the Executor.
It's possible that his position is "Captain of the Executor" - commanding the ship itself - with Admiral Ozzel commanding Death Squadron as a whole. His badge may be specific to the position - with him putting aside his "line rank badge", whatever it is, for the duration. (Same with the address - even if Piett was "really" Commodore Piett or Rear Admiral Piett, until he ceases in his position, he is addressed as Captain Piett).
But then someone comes along and throws in something else...Senior Captain for instance which I assume comes between Captain and Lt Commander....and we realize that some men just want to watch the world burn.
Keep in mind that Senior Captain is a Legends-ism - and the above link was to the Newcanon rank chart. In the Newcanon, after leaving the Academy, Thrawn is: Lieutenant (position, second weapons officer on a Gozanti-class armed transport) Captain (position, first officer on an Arquitens-class light cruiser) Commander (position, captain of that Arquitens-class light cruiser) Commodore (position, captain of Star Destroyer) Admiral Grand Admiral He may have passed through the ranks of Rear Admiral and Vice Admiral, but it's not shown. He may instead have skipped those ranks entirely - just as he skipped straight from Admiral to Grand Admiral without passing through Fleet Admiral first. He possibly skipped the rank of Lieutenant Commander entirely, too.
Ehh, I find very little point to create a rank chart for military ranks. The movies always trump anything else. There's little point in my opinion at least. The movies will never use such specific and confusing (to the average viewer) ranks besides general, admiral, commander, captain. And as such the canon loves to break from their own rules with ranks. We are lucky to get to see ranks like Grand Admiral or Vice Admiral in a tv show. People are used to those terms adding more military terms like commodore or 2nd Lieutenant confuses the average viewer. I kinda use my own rankings to, For example, on star destroyers in Rebels I considered everyone besides the captain or admiral to be the rank of a Ensign or lieutenant from their rank plaques. Also, stormtrooper rank cauldrons in rebels had constant in universe rule breaks. Paying too much attention to in universe military ranks like myself will get us very upset and triggered... cause star wars isn't Westpoint.
In Season 4 we see quite a few "2x4" plaques which aren't as wide as Veers's General plaque. This might suggest that those were Colonels or Majors. Quite a lot of people took the plethora of Captain/Commander placks in ROTJ as an error rather than "an in-universe fact" - Piett is addressed as Admiral at least once in ROTJ as I recall. Star Wars: On The Front Lines, has a "Battle of Endor Piett" pic of him with the 2x6 Admiral black (and 4 cylinders) with the implication that this is what he really looked like there.
And this "quite a lot of people" includes officials like Pablo Hidalgo. The Star Wars Insider article "25 Years of Return of the Jedi!" also very explicitely says it's a costuming error. There is absolutely no room for doubt.
I'd have to agree with you that this specifically is the logical progression. You're right, on Earth. Can we assume the same in the GFFA? I'm not sure, and I actually don't mind a little variety in this area. If it were up to me, flag officers would be Navy = Admiral, SFC = General, and Army = Marshall.
The whole Convarion Captain/Commander “discrepancy”- it isn't one and never was! It's always simply been assumed that Ait Convarion was a Naval Captain, given his command of the VSD-II Corrupter. He's not- he's actually something much more elite. Convarion is one of the Black Shirts, and also very likely a Stormtrooper Officer. The Black Shirts have never been explicitly classified as a separate group of Officers, though several sources over the years have indicated them to be in some way. This was noted by Curtis Saxton over on the Technical Commentaries site: http://www.theforce.net/swtc/insignia/uniforms.html We've long known that some, though not all, Stormtrooper Officers are Black Shirts. We've also known that, courtesy of the Warfare Guide, that elite TIE Pilots are also “honored with black-uniforms”. Others appear to have functions involving Security and have operational command over elite Naval Troopers, such as Shann Childsen commaning several Death Star Troopers. They can also be members of Imperial Intelligence, per the examples of Lt. Zuud and her older superior from the Empire comics. In essence, a Black Shirt Officer is much elite than a normal gray-uniform officer. As an aside, this also serves to explain the presence of so many aboard the Death Star, as so many sources have explicitly said that many of the Empire's best were stationed aboard it. Now, how this relates to Convarion, and by extension his Rank of Commander (rather than his Position as Captain of the Corrupter) is that the only thing emphasized within The Bacta War more than his Rank is his Black uniform. Several times, in fact: Later, he personally leads a Stromtrooper detachment down to surface of Halanit as part of an attack, linking up with an allied pilot who specifically takes note of his uniform color: Shortly later, a vengeance-minded Gavin Darklighter attempts to strafe them, and specifically tries to kill the Black Shirt: (Gavin's own thoughts) (He didn't) Darklighter doesn't know who the Black Shirt is, only that it's a priority target, and he certainly puts the effort in to trying to kill it. The real point is that Convarion's uniform color is emphasized multiple times, but why? The only answer can be that it must be a signifcant detail. Is it the only one? No- the other thing emphasized is Convarion's association with Stormtroopers, again for multiple times: Firstly, the display of Stormtroopers that greeted Isard and Vorru aboard the Corrupter: That passage also confirms that there were at least a thousand such troopers not immediately attending to crewing the ship that were available for such a display, and an indication of the number of Stormtroopers under Convarion's direct command. A more direct indication of his being a Stormtrooper Officer is found in Erisi Dlarits own assumptions later on: Why would Convarion even care about demonstrating Stormtrooper superiority to a Pilot unless he himself was one? Would a normal Naval Officer be concerned with demonstrating the superiority of ground-forces to a Pilot? No, not at all. The rivalry between ground and space forces is well established. Convarion's disdain for Pilots in favor of Stormtroopers makes no sense unless he himself is not actually a Naval Officer. Later on, Vorru also mentions Convarion's disregard for Pilots: ...and both Isard and Dlarit consider that analysis to be perfectly credible. The related question also exists as to why would he even bother leading a Stormtrooper ground attack unless he was a Stormtrooper Officer who knew what he was doing from past experience? That past experience is mentioned in passing earlier in the book: From the Russ Manning newspaper strips, we also have another example of a Black Shirt leading similar “government sanctioned campaigns of terror against populated worlds on the Outer Rim” in the form of Captain Bzorn and the ships under his command, so Convarion's own situation is not unprecedented: Besides Convarion's Black Shirt status and association with Stormtroopers, a further extrapolation can be made, per the infamous and badly misleading passage: ...emphasis on the Insignia and cylinders, this time. Do we know of any other Black Shirt probable Stormtrooper Commanders that match that description exactly? We sure do: ...and if you notice, the arrangement of the Rank Insignia tabs is not specified- it could just as easily be a single-row 6x1 as it could be a 2x3 double-row Insignia! (Though in Convarion's case, he could just as easily use a normal 2x3 Insignia). Now, all that remains is to search for other evidence that higher-Ranking Stormtrooper Officers can indeed hold Positions of command on Star Destroyers, which exists in the following from Combat Moon in Adventure Journal 9: So in short, it is mistaken assumption that Convarion is a Naval Officer, when he is really a Stormtrooper Officer and Black Shirt that just also happens to have the Position of Captain of a VSD-II. Regarding his demotion to the Rank (he already held, and continued to hold, the Position) of Captain, this is easily explained when it is remembered that Stormtrooper Officers, Black Shirt or not, utilize Army Ranks. Within these Ranks, a Commander actually does outrank a Captain. In the Empire comics, we visually see Janek Sunber, having already received a field promotion to Captain along with the corresponding Insignia, receive an additional promotion to Commander. The Insignia are the same, it is only the additional cylinder that distinguishes the two Ranks: ...this accords perfectly with the removal of a cylinder by Isard to demote a Commander to a Captain, but only if Convarion is a Stormtrooper Officer! He is not a regular Naval Officer! There never really was a discrepancy- only fans (and an author or few) who didn't read the whole story carefully enough, and synthesize it with the rest of the EU. On a mostly unrelated note, there are some Naval Commanders, as with many specialist and/or support Officers, most prominently TIE Pilots, that also evidence the use Army-style Ranks. That whole situation mostly explains itself thanks to the Warfare Guide. There is an additional way the use of Army-style Ranks by specialists and Pilots can be further harmonized. More than a few WEG books indicate that the Navy was transformed in purpose following the end of the Clone Wars, to include an increased emphasis on cooperation with and support for ground operations. It is also mentioned that ground forces (more exactly, Garrisons) could also now have their own attached Fighter forces, where they previously had none. The use of Army-style Ranks by the Pilot and other specialist forces of the Navy can logically be assumed to have stemmed from this post-Clone Wars change.
In the newcanon (Rebels), Admiral Brom Titus is also a "blackshirt" (with single-row 6 colour tabs and 4 cylinders). When he is demoted to Commander, he keeps all 4 cylinders, but his colour tabs are reduced from 6 to 2. Maybe he's a Specialist Officer of this kind?
I have no idea about any of the new stuff. The one even slightly good thing about the EU having ended is that with nothing more being added to it, the entirety of it can be harmonized into a single, cohesive whole. Longstanding "discrepancies' and even outright mistaken assumptions can finally stop spreading. I really hope that the Convarion misunderstanding didn't impact the Naval Officer chart in the Warfare Guide too heavily.
Replying quickly to stuff on the previous two pages... @tampering I get the sense that white-tunic uniforms have been generically retconned as intelligence-officer uniforms irrespective of service branch - that dates back as far as Agent of the Empire, where the James Bond white tuxedo reference was too good to pass up... https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/2/2c/Cross_&_Isard.jpg @Commander_Andersen @SheaHublin @Iron_lord (and everbody else) As the Ewok-sidekick co-author of WARFARE, let me explain some of the thinking in that book (and a few bits of trivia)... I'm doing this from memory, so I hope I get everything right... In the real world, the Anglo-American rank system is actually quite niche - the Dutch, Polish and Danish navies all have a Commander-above-Captain naval hierarchy even today (our "Commodore" is just a seventeenth-century variant of the same "commander" title). The French use capitaine as a rank, and commandant as a title. The French used to have a hierarchy of flag ranks that went Squadron Leader, Lieutenant General, Vice-Admiral, with no full-admiral rank. In Spain, the Capitán was for a long time the commander-in-chief of a squadron or fleet, and the Almirante was the second-in-command (this confused the heck out of the English for several hundred years). And in the GFFA, the idea of Commander-over-Captain ranks dates back to ESB and the Marvel comics, where Commander Skywalker outranked Captain Antilles and Captain Brie. And then in RotJ, we encountered Moff Jerjerrod, with his captain-plus-one-cylinder insignia and his title of "commander". I probably ought to point out that Piett is wearing a captain's badge in RotJ, exactly the same badge he wore at the start of ESB, and not the same commander's badge as Commander Jerjerrod. I certainly think that's the appropriate insignia for the captain of the Executor, even if he's actually some sort of flag officer (which could be why he puts on a senior admiral's badge when Ozzel gets throttled). Considering the irregularity of his promotion (which seems to invite a Monty Python riff), I wouldn't be surprised if he's reverted to captain of the command ship during Endor. All this was then extrapolated out early on in the development of the non-movie canon - someone who posts here as @Lt. Hija has claimed credit for originating the idea and mailing a rank table of sorts to WEG back in the day; they incorporated this in The Imperial Sourcebook, from where pretty much everyone ran with the idea. I see no "misunderstanding" with Convarion - he's being stripped of his position as Commander; he clearly acts as captain of the ship by position and I personally think he may have always been senior captain by substantive rank... but that's not something that WARFARE needed to define - what matters, IMHO, was making the scene intelligible... The aim of the rank table in WARFARE was to integrate all the previous canon (which could be done easily enough) so that everything lined up as clearly as possible... not imposing any retcons, but making sense of what was already in the canon... As to what the situation is these days, I have no idea. There are lots of ways to make everything work, but there's a lot of new material - Rogue One is full of rank insignia, and there's a lot more Lieutenant-Commanders, too... - The Imperial Ewok
Something crossed my mind today and I'm not sure I've ever seen this equation before. Is the Empire's Stormtrooper Corps analogous to the Marine Corps of the US Military? The Marines are: -A self-contained branch of the military, by this I mean they possess land, air, and sea elements that operate together. -They are geared towards beach assaults but can take on other missions. -Every Marine is trained as a foot soldier no matter what rank, specialization, or function they perform. -I consider Marines soldiers to be somewhere in between Army solders and special operation soldiers like SEAL, Dealtas, or Rangers (this may just be a perception). Does the Stormtrooper Corps not serve a similar function? They are all trained as soldiers, they can operate their own ships and vehicles, they specialize in shock attacks but can perform other missions. Is this a valid analogy?
From what is seen in actual stories, it looks like COMPNOR agents (e.g. Kallus) just have Stormtroopers under their command, though it's unclear whether or not these troops permanently serve them or are just assigned specific missions. Bit off-topic but somewhat related: Where does the term "ubiqtorate" come from? I remember first coming across it in the Tarkin novel but never figured out what it's suposed to mean (not in-universe, but the word itself)?
I always figured the name was built from the same Latin (ubique, everywhere) as the word ubiquitous (being everywhere at once; omnipresent). Just from the deliberately ominous-sounding name you get the uneasy sense that the organization is mysterious, powerful, and all-seeing.
