Starfleet uses traditional Naval ranks. Originally, STF only offered officer ranks. Now, the choice has expanded to include Civilian posts and Cadet placements. As of this writing, a new enlisted rank has been created. Crewmen joined the ranks in Garfield Edict #13.

Since officers make up the vast majority of STF characters, we'll start with those:

Ensign is the lowest officer rank. If you join STF without going the training ship route, you'll start out as an ensign. When creating your character, be sure to consider backstory and age. Nine times out of ten, an ensign is someone fresh from the Academy. For humans, that will make him in his early 20s. Try to avoid playing geniuses or other super characters. One 17-year-old Ensign Wesley Crusher is enough for a century.

Lieutenant Junior Grade is the next rank. According to Data in the TNG episode Datalore, a Starfleet officer spends eight to 12 years in the lieutenant ranks. Getting to Ltjg is easier than getting full lieutenant. In STF, it's pretty standard practice to promote ensigns to Ltjg at the end of their first sim. Outstanding roleplaying brings about earlier promotions. Bad roleplaying, a lot of LOAs and/or AWOLs means you could be an ensign for a very long time.

Next up is Lieutenant. Most DHs are ranked full Lieutenant, although that is not a rule. This is another area where realism tends to fall by the wayside. In STF, an active player can go from Ensign to Lieutenant in a year. So your 22-year-old human engineer, who was a recent Academy grad when you started playing him, is now a 22-year-old full lieutenant. If at all possible, adjust his age to better represent the eight to 12 years it's supposed to take to get to that rank.

Lieutenant Commander is a threshhold rank. Since the minimum rank for the XO is Lt. Commander, this is where you cross the line into command territory.

If you're a Commander, you could be an XO or even a base CO. Although I have seen a science junior officer of this rank. You'll find some captains in STF are over generous with promotions. They're given out like candy and you end up with some oddball situations, like a command level junior officer. Ideally, the higher the rank, the harder and longer it takes to attain it.

Captain is the biggie for most STFers. You are only promoted to captain when you're given the command of your own ship. That rule has been bent a couple of times, but 99% of the time it holds. To be a captain, you have to be selected by a fleet commander and approved by the president.

The other mentioned ranks are designed for players who want to create unusual characters to roleplay. Civilians can be anyone from an ambassadorial aide to a research scientist to a politician to a doctor. You're limited only by your imagination, and the ship's captain. The Cadet rank was originally created for the first training ship, but became popular with veteran STFers who wanted a change of pace. If you see a Cadet on one of the main fleet ships, it's not a newbie but an experienced roleplayer. The same thing applies for the new Crewman enlisted rank. Although second only to civilians from the bottom of the rank ladder, Crewman will be more for experienced roleplayers seeking new avenues of character work.

As you start out in STF, your personal rank in the organization is equal to the highest character rank you hold. If you run just one character and he's an ensign, then you're an Ensign. If you run three characters; one ensign and two lieutenant jgs, then you're a Lieutenant Junior Grade. This works all the way up to Captain. It also works in reverse. Meaning that if you are the captain of the USS Onion, you can start a new character on another ship and be ranked up to and including captain on that ship.

But member ranks go beyond Captain. As in every organization, some players stand out. They either devote a lot of time to the club, have given a lot of good service, or are friends with the right people. As with promotion to Captain, it takes a presidential edict to be promoted beyond that level. These ranks include Fleet Captain, Commodore, and Admiral.

To the best of the author's knowledge, no Fleet Captain rank exists in the modern military. It's frequently utilized in yachting circles and Starfleet the International Fan Club uses the rank. Also former Enterprise CO Christopher Pike was a Fleet Captain in the TOS episode involving flashbacks to Trek's original pilot, The Cage. Fleet Captain is one rung above Captain on the rank ladder. Although this is a Member Rank, many people also promote their captain characters to the rank.

Commodore is a rank typically used in wartime. The original Star Trek used that rank. It was Commodore Decker who flew the shuttle into the planet-eating machine (that the author still think looked like a giant ice cream cone). Commodore is the first of the so-called flag or admiralty ranks. It's possible you'll encounter a Commodore in command of a ship.

Admiral is the highest rank in STF and it is purely a member rank. Unlike the real Navy, we don't divide our admiralty into stages. You're just Admiral Whomever. The only exceptions are the club president and vice president, who are granted the ranks of Fleet Admiral and Vice Fleet Admiral, respectively, during their term of office.

There are four main departments on each ship: Engineering, Medical, Science, and Security. These departments are broken into Chief and Assistant positions. The Chief is the department head and the assistants are the junior officers. Although the DH either outranks or is the same rank as his suboridinates, there is the occassional captain who likes to be weird and promotes an assistant above a chief.

As mentioned before, there are also swing positions which typically consist of just a chief and no assistants. These positions aren't on every ship, and their inclusion depends on both the captain's descretion and the ship's specs. Some ship designs specifically call for a CTO, for instance.

All chief and swing positions are abbreviated using capitals. For instance CE for Chief Engineer and CSO for Chief Science Officer. Assistants are upper and lower (Eng for engineering and Sci for science).

Some ships have unique positions. For instance the USS Ogawa is a medical ship, so one of her characters was a Xenobiologist. You'll find a lot of specialized positions on the few starbases and stations in STF. It used to be that the bases had different positions altogether, but that's been changed. A notable exception is COO (Chief Operations Officer), which is the base's version of the CE.