Joe Tormolen's Rank

[Jack Photon]

I don't think even Joe knows.  

There are piles of full commanders all over the ship once you look closely.
But there's only one who ever wore a single row of broken stripes.
The infamous Lt. J.G. never spoken of nor otherwise ever seen or written about until FASA. There's no other rank it can be.

[blackbat242]

Yep... Lt. J.G. (Lieutenant Junior Grade, 02)... one step up from an Ensign.

[Falconer]

S&S 1e and WNMHGB have a Lieutenant, j.g. rank/level. “Beyond the Final Frontier” (which I follow) doesn’t.

[Jack Photon]

One might think there would a realtively even distribution of Lt JGs amongst the Lt and Ensign rabble. There are a shipload of Lt's with no one to Lt. over except each other. Roddenberry wanted all officers to exemplify the top-stratus nature of the ship. Problem is rank needs responsibilities and those occur in the form of next lower rank personnel. There are not enough low ranks to support the vast quantity of upper echelons.

So why no Lt. J.G.s?

The costume dept, time and money is most likely. Every single day of the show, especially the 1st season velour costumes were dry-cleaned every night. Turns out, to dry clean sucha costume, one must remove ALL the patches. Think about that. Every single day, every one of Kirk's broken stripes was hand-sewn back in place. This is why you will see deltas floating around the chest.

I expect the notion of broken stripes compared to none for ensigns and full stripe for Lt utterly squeezed out the LT J.G.s for the ease and time requried in sewing. ALSO the Lt./ Commanders such as Scotty and McCoy. Look closely and you will see commanders around 'everywhere'. ben Finney wasn't the only misplaced commander, simply the only one with dialogue. Sorry, Commander Giotto also has speaking lines... There's a navigator commander and communications commander, but I am forgetting the episodes.