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-Z- (Z@Gundam.Com)
Sat, 09 Oct 1999 15:02:56 -0700
At 01:40 10/9/1999 -0700, you wrote:
>At 8:25 PM -0700 1999.10.8, -Z- wrote:
>>This would make a great set of tables on a Web page....
>
>Yep, and a huge one too ... ^^; I've been working on one such in my spare
>time, but even unfinished, it has almost twenty service columns. @_@; (US
>Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force; UK's British Army, Royal Navy, RAF;
>Imperial Japanese Army, Navy; JGSDF, JMSDF, JASDF; Gundam's Federal,
>Zeon/Neo-Zeon; Macross's UN Spacy; Legend of the Galactic Heroes's
>Alliance, Empire). What really makes it hairy is that there are many
>redundancies and that each column is further divided into English, JIS
>Japanese, and Romanized Japanese renditions where applicable .When it's
>remotely close to being reviewable ^^;, I'll let people know. In the
>meantime, you can check out:
>http://www.socio.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Ejun/sim/rank.html
>http://plaza9.mbn.or.jp/~zenibo/mcl01.htm
You might consider breaking this down into several different tables, each
of which shows two military services side-by-side, listed by paygrade.
Ideally, the page would have a set of list boxes and a Submit button so
that the visitor could select any two military services. Worst case, you
give them a table of links to every possible comparative table.
ALternatively, you could have a smaller set of comparative tables, showing
the military services for any two milieus. Selecting "American military"
and "Gundam" would return the four American services (Army, Navy, Marines
and Air Force) side-by-side with the two Gundam services (Army and Navy),
again listed by paygrade.
In any case, there's no need to throw the Grand Unified Table at anyone.
This is, after all, a database and they key to database management is
turning raw data into meaningful information, usually by restricting the
view to a desired subset. With the proper filtering and presentation
mechanism, this could be really sweet....
>>There's a third class of military ranks, little seen in the American
>>military since WW2, called Warrant Officer.
>The Japanese translations of the American warrant officer ranks are jun-i
>and joukyuu jun-i ($B>e5i=`0S(J, chief warrant officer) -- except it can
also
>be translated as heisouchou ($BJ<AbD9(J), which happens to be one way to
>translate chief petty officer. ^^;
Oh, so? Then all those CPOs we see it Z-Gundam could actually have been
CWOs, but for a small problem in translation? CWO definitely makes more
sense, as the Warrant Officer position has traditionally been used to make
a place in the Table of Organization (T.O.) for auxiliaries and
non-military personnel.
>For better or worse, there isn't
>necessarily a one-to-one correlation between two rank systems of different
>countries, much less different langauges and different eras.
Sometimes there's a problem even in the same country. The Air Force is the
only American service that awards NCO status to the E-4 paygrade, which it
separates into two ranks, Senior Airman (enlisted) and Sergeant (NCO).
Anyone who can't make the jump from SrA to Sgt is inelegible for
re-enlistment, which is a good way to separate the sheep from the goats
without investing any more money. The problem arises when Air Force
personnel must work with other services. I had a first-hand experience of
this went I attended the Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin
Harrison, Indiana. The Army refused to recognize Air Force E-4s as NCOs,
housing us in EMQ (Enlisted Men's Quarters) and requiring us to perform
detail duty. Military law forbids NCOs and officers from performing duties
beneath their rank, even (perhaps especially) as POWs -- it's tantamount to
conduct unbecoming of an NCO or officer, a court-martial offense -- so we
had to refuse a direct order from a superior officer, which is also a
court-martial offense. The Powers That Be put their heads together and
agreed that all Air Force E-4s with the rank of Sergeant would be exempt
from detail duty, but the Army drew the line at according us full NCO
honors. The NCO Club was for E-5 and above and they weren't going to allow
mere E-4s to cross the threshold....
-Z-
-
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