Medals & Other Awards

These are the many kinds of official recognition ‘devices’ you’ll see on most of the service-members featured here.

 

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Table of Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Types of Military Awards
  3. Medals in Inisfree
  4. Additional Notes
  5. Example Medals and Ribbons

 

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Introduction:

Awards for military excellence have been given for many generations, and for a great variety of personal and unit-wide accomplishments.  You’ll see the rectangular ones called ‘ribbons’ on the uniform shirts of many service members, while they typically wear their medals on the uniform dress-coats for more formal occasions such as parades.  Those who wear awards they did not earn are said to be guilty of Stolen Valor, and can be prosecuted.

 

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Types of Military Awards:

  • Badges (such as for marksmanship; not like police badges)
  • Bars (such as those hung below marksmanship badges)
  • Certificates (such as for graduations, or as letters of commendation)
  • Letters (such as “V”, pinned to a ribbon like a successive-award ‘star’ would be)
  • Medals (with ribbon counterparts for less-formal occasions)
  • Pins (such as the Jump Wings or SCUBA ‘Bubbles’; silver for training, gold for combat)
  • Ribbons (a rectangular cloth over a metal backing, in the shape of a strip of ribbon, usually with medal counterparts)
  • Seals (worn on the uniform, such as the ones for Presidential Details)
  • Shoulder Cords (often as unit identifiers, or in reverence to exemplary unit actions)
  • Stars (pinned through ribbons, indicating multiple awards of the same type)
  • Streamers (ribbons for guide-ons; the small flags on flag-poles that an individual jogs or marches with)
  • Tabs (such as the Ranger Tab; for completion of elite training programs)

 

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Medals in Inisfree:

Inisfreeans (ICVs) have dozens of ribbons and only six medals.  They have no other awards, and no ‘uniform/award devices’ attached to any of their ribbons or medals.  For details about all the awards they earn, see their uniforms webpage.

 

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Additional Notes:

There are many medals and other awards in addition to those shown here; some are secret (such as those given to agents in the CIA and equivalent organizations in other countries), so they cannot be worn or otherwise shown outside of controlled environments, and some are only given to people in the Secret Space Programs (SSPs), meaning they are only given and worn or otherwise displayed in starships and on other worlds.

When humanity migrated from Earth (starting with the work of the different SSPs in the 1900s, but predominantly in the 2300s), there was no reason to keep the names and meanings of the awards shown on this webpage; the following awards had become hundreds of years old, thus nobody was earning or even wearing them anymore.  New meanings were assigned to them; some were given for battles or campaigns or exemplary peaceful work out beyond the Earth, and those that were still given for the same reason as before (such as the Purple Heart, or the United Nations Service medal) simply had any images of long-forgotten Earth-maps/nations on them changed to be the outlines/shapes familiar to the current earners/wearers out in Space.

 

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Examples Medals and Ribbons:

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