Star Trek statistics: The Red-Shirt Phenomenon

File this under: Never underestimate the power of a Trekkie to write yet another treatise on an aspect of Star Trek (TOS) that you never really thought about. This guy has analyzed the statistics on the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.

The basic stats:
The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.

Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

  • Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
  • Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
  • Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
  • Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.

Please do follow the link. It’s funny, entertaining, and informative.

Hat tip: Janet P.

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One Response to Star Trek statistics: The Red-Shirt Phenomenon

  1. Do those statistics include incidents in which a crewmember is killed and brought back to life? This happened to Scotty once, Kirk twice, and Spock a couple of times. I also note that he seems to have neglected the episode “By Any Other Name”, in which a woman is first reduced to a cubeoctahedron of soap powder and then crushed to death. She was wearing a red shirt.

    This calls his entire analysis into question.

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