If you’re on Star Trek and you’re wearing a red shirt…

Red-shirt-down…You aren’t gonna be there long.

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.

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8 thoughts on “If you’re on Star Trek and you’re wearing a red shirt…”

  1. Of course what you’re missing is the underlying distribution of the various color shirts.

    If there are only 10 yellow shirts, 6 deaths is a phenomenal 60% death rate.

    And if there are 350 red shirts, 43 deaths is a below-average death rate of only 12%.

    You’re welcome.

    –Waz

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  2. Of course this makes sense. The red shirts were security crew members. They were the most likely to face hostilities and danger. They were the starship equivalent of the soldiers or policemen so their position necessarily put them in greater danger.
    Is this sad or what?! Why do I know these things about Star Trek? I am such a loser! ComiCon here I come!

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