Statistics Concerning Red Shirts

[Lucky]

OF THE 43 TOTAL CREW MEMBERS KILLED ON SCREEN IN THE ORIGINAL SERIES, 25 WORE RED SHIRTS
RED 25
YELLOW/GOLD 10
BLUE 8

*sixteen crewperson deaths also occurred off-screen. While we have no way of knowing for sure, it's a safe bet they were redshirts.

59 deaths under Kirk in 5 years

What is the size of Kirk's crew?

42.5% of redshirts meet their end in an on-board incident

57.5% of them die either while beaming down to a planet or in hostilities on the planet.

An entire away team of redshirts was beamed into space do to hostile aliens on the ship, is that counted as an on-board incident or beaming down to a planet incident?

CAUSES OF DEATH

130 fights take place over 80 episodes.

18 of the 130 fights resulted in a fatality.

13 of the 18 fatal fights resulted in a redshirt fatality.

The graph confirms the conclusions drawn by comparing the actual to expected values: blue has the lowest percent, gold the highest, and red is right at the overall percentage.

The Chi-square analysis and hypothesis test support Barsalou’s theory that red-shirts do not die at a higher rate. Instead, there is simply a larger population of red-shirts who die at the average rate. However, there is more to the story. As we'll see, a moral to this story is that it's crucial to pick the truly important explanatory variable.

Both hypothesis tests show that specific duty areas have a significantly higher fatality rate than other duty areas. If you're a doctor, scientist, engineer, or in ship operations on board the Enterprise, you're relatively safe, with a risk of dying of about 5% over the timeframe of the series.

On the other hand, if you're in the command hierarchy or security, you're at a significantly higher level of risk, one that exceeds 15%!

Q: what was the rate of red-shirt casualties?
• 18 red-shirt fatality episodes:
• 8 multiple fatality occurrences; involving 34 red-shirted crewmen.
• 9 single re-shirt fatality situations.


It was found that red-shirted crewmembers tended to die in groups. In 17 red-shirt fatality episodes, 8 were multiple incidents, 9 were single incidents. In a little less than 50% of the fatal red-shirt situations, multiple crewmen were vaporized.

Q: What factors could increase/decrease the survival rate of red-shirted crewmen?
Besides not getting involved in fights, which usually proved fatal, the crewmen could avoid beaming down to the planet’s surface, which is inherent to their end. However, that could result in a court-martial for failure to obey orders.


Besides not beaming down, another factor that showed to increase the survival rate of the red-shirts was the nature of the relationship between the alien life and captain Kirk. When Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and “makes contact” the survival rate of the red-shirted crewmen increases by 84%. In fact, out of Captain Kirks’ 24 “relationships” there were only three instances of red-shirt vaporization.


The caveat to this is when Captain Kirk not only meets the local alien women, but also starts a fight among alien locals. The combination of these events has led to the elimination of 4 crewmembers (3 red-shirts).


Here are the statistics:
Red Shirt Death episodes = 18
Episodes with fights = 55
Probability of a fight breaking out = 70%
Kirk “conquest” episodes = 24
Kirk “conquest” + fights = 16
Kirk “conquest” + red shirt casualty= 4
Red shirt death + fight + Kirk “conquest” = 3


Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).