As a Trekkie, I can say that you'd rather be in a red shirt from ST:TNG, over a gold shirt. Thw original series, it was dangerous to be in a red shirt, and safe to be any other color shirt. Also, both Picard and Riker have red uniforms.
The colors indicate specialization. In TOS, gold was the color of command officers, red was for operations officers (which included engineering officers), and blue indicated science or medical officers. In TNG, they flip-flopped the colors for command and ops, and that carried forward in the timeline.
Comments