Now Colonial Marines is as we all know a game about a "platoon" of marines on board the USS Alamayer generally sent to investigate a distress signal in the Tycho Sector.
However, the in-game "platoon" generally balloons to company size with a close to a 100 or more combat marines being relatively common. This generally means squad sizes balloon to platoon size Delta being a particularly egregious example. I've seen games where Delta manages to top 50 marines nominally in the squad even if half of them are generally dead an hour in.
(For those who don't know squads generally a number between 8-13 men and platoons hovering somewhere between 30-50 for line units)
Is there any particular Watsonian explanation for why platoons have ballooned to company size and why Lieutenants are overwatching "squads" or are we just supposed to roll with it?
Furthermore, the rank system onboard the USS Alamayer and by extension the USCM seems all kinds of messed up. Captain in the modern-day USMC, USAF, and US Army has a paygrade of 0-3 commanding company-sized formations. In the USN and USCG however, the Captain's paygrade is that of 0-6 equivalent to that of a Colonel in the other US service branches.
So it seems that in the late 22nd century either the Marine Corps has decided to switch over to the Navies ranking system for commissioned officers or alternatively the Alamayer's crew and command staff is Navy and are simply carrying a bunch of enlisted marines
But, wait it's not even that simple because in-game the captain's rank boards give him a paygrade of... 0-5 05.png and by extension the XO a commander has a rank of 0-4 which is the actually the 0-5 rank in the USN and the USCG and effectively get rid of the 0-2 Junior Lieutenant which instead goes directly to Lieutenant. The only rank which actually remains the same is that of the ENS which is the same 0-1 paygrade both in actual Navy and in CM.
So what is it CM? The enlisted ranks seem to match up with their RL counterparts in the USMC but the commissioned officer ranks seem to either indicate the Marines have wholly changed how they rank officers or imply that they are a bunch of squids.