i like the sound of lieutenant first grade as well, you could add a second grade as well if there was space for it, so officers who dont want to work to command still have a couple ranks to work towards,
captain lieutenant just dosnt sound right to be tbh.
making battle group commander a rank rather than a title i dont think feels right, tbh fleet captain sounds more like a title than a rank but we wont get into that lol.
we could make it so being promoted to lt commander is not such a big jump in terms of the group, up until now it was the start of the senior officers and were you are expected to do more in the organizing of the fleet, but what if we stopped that and it was more to do with the departments heads and ship captains that went to the senior officers meetings etc more or less bringing back a command staff, once apon a time the department head were picked from non command officers this had to change due to officer numbers but it would not be a push to go back to that, i would not mind handing the training department over to the right person, a records division i think is needed to maintain our records etc and keep the ship rosters etc upto date
lastly van leigh brought up seniority i liked his idea in essence
we typically have 2 types of ship commanding officers captains and commanders, why dont we assign seniority pins to these to groups, gold silver and bronze captains and gold silver and bronze commanders, officer can be promoted up or down the pins depending on there performance and or blowing up ships etc, inactive officers dont have a pin so are bottom of the list of seniority of there rank