//Well… yeah.
//The problem is, they’re so vague that there’s subjectivity even among the senior staff. Part of that’s fairly useful: we can move around pretty comfortably and let the entire division nominate people based on what they see, making adjustements as necessary. Then again, there’s always the question for clear cut criteria.
//Generally speaking, my method is to divide inmediate fact, average performance, and expectation by rank and post. This last one is big especially for senior officers: if a lieutenant commander that’s a science specialist reads a message that says “oh, no, the transport’s gonna blow up!” and orders to move away, I’m not backing up anything higher than a ribbon, because that commander should damn well do it anyways, and I’d be more tempted to hang said commander should he fail. What a nomination means is, then, to declare that an officer is going above and beyond his duty as we understand it, and that officer is doing an excellent job.
//There’s an order of eminence for every medal (and medals are higher than ribbons, always): Medal of Valor, Naval Cross, Distinguished Service, Silver Star, Bronze Star. The Stars are relatively low awards that are given for either a single instance of gallantry (the inmediate fact) or, more rarely (as ribbons tend to work better, excellent average performance with a relatively less important inmediate fact.
//We hand out the other three medals much more rarely, as they’re expected to be rare events. The DSM is given for an excellent work all around. Having an inmediate fact to support it works, but when we award one, even if we need to cite the inmediate, we look through most of the recipient’s recent history.
//NC and MoV absolutely require an inmediate fact. That is, no matter how good you are, we’re only giving them if you did something remarkable lately. And that must happen in combat. In Artemis, to be precise, so forum RP antics don’t count for these (at least to me: I always vote against for anything big if the cause is RP). There’s also a limit on how many we hand out: two NCs, one MoV per year. We can decide not to give any, if there’s no suitable candidate. Having an excellent track record helps to make us less cranky about your inmediate fact.
//The MoV is special, though. We only ever awarded one in almost four years of TSN existance. It requires you to do something extraordinary that trascends your duty (that is, a ship captain saving his ship is to be expected; doing it while also being especially awesome and killing many enemy ships… much better; there are extra points for people who save other ships at that), in combat, and under peril. That is, fighting in a real mission is enough to warrant a combat award; the MoV requires you to fight a real threat. Not a Kralien fleet. I’m talking capital or command ships. AAAAND we demand a history of flawless excellence from a nominee. For example, Fleet Captain Xavier was nominated twice for a MoV during the Spies Amongst Us campaign, and the nomination was rejected because the threat level wasn’t deemed high enough, the “during combat” condition wasn’t really met for that specific instance. Also, we agreed that, at the time, there was nobody among us who held the standards of the MoV. We just aren’t up to the same level as that TSN captain who earned it before, so we aren’t giving any yet.
//When a nomination doesn’t look good, unless there’s something fundamentally wrong for it, we try to recathegorize it to something we can agree upon.
John van Leigh 4 days, 3 hours ago.