Staffing a ship

[Bryan Moore]

Okay, so I understand it's possible for ships to be run (with basic functions) on a skeleton crew, such as the Reliant being comandeered in TWOK or the Enterprise in TSFS. But genetic freaks and miracle works aside, what's the breakdown on what it takes to run the ships. There are estimates in various Star Wars sources about what it takes to run a capital ship, but do we have any indication in Trek?

Here's how I was breaking it down on a Galaxy, thinking very briefly about it. Now there's 1014 on the Enterprise (according to Remember Me) including civilians. Lets say that's 750 crewmembers 250 civilians (which may be a bit high on civilians)

3 shifts of crewmembers, so 250 people per shift.

So, 250 people divided to run all of the ships operations, but of course you have to consider that there are mission specialists, people assigned for this, that, and the other. I would imagine Engineering gets a lot of priority, as well as ops. So let's say you've got a generous 150 of those people sitting at computers doing one job or the other during non-crisis times. Are the other 100 people doing stupid chores like in Lost Sheep? Do security people sit and play cards all day? Does O'Brien just run transporter diagnostics day after day on the same things?

It just seems that if ships CAN be run on skeleton crews, 750 crewmembers on a ship even that size, seems awfully wasteful. With the amount of automation, I'd all but guarantee there are a lot of boring jobs on the Enterprise.

[Teaos]

I imagin it CAN be run on few people but when the shit hits the fan you need more. Also it takes pressure off which is important for long term missions.

[Bryan Moore]

Admittedly, this also doesn't take into account days off, etc. I mean assuming a 40 hour work week still exists, I guess that'd mean you'd have to actually rotate 4 separate. It still just puzzles me what everyone does on the ship.

[FASATrek]

The crew of a modern aircraft carrier is over 5000 people. An example being the USS Ronald Reagan that has about 5500 crew and 2 Captains in her chain of command, 1 is the Captain (Commanding) the other is the ships Executive Officer or second in command.
You can thin this number out by deleting cooks, laundry/support and air crews. The rest would be engineers, command staff, security and technical specialties such as sensors(radar), communications, navigation adn medical. You could further thin out security if you had no need for boarding actions or internal ship defense.

[I Am Spartacus]

Admittedly, this also doesn't take into account days off, etc. I mean assuming a 40 hour work week still exists, I guess that'd mean you'd have to actually rotate 4 separate. It still just puzzles me what everyone does on the ship.

I don't know how they do it in the military, but I'd assume that during deployments you work every single day of the week. That would make 56 hour weeks, assuming each shift is 8 hours.

And this in sci-fi bothers me in general. So far in the future, you wouldn't need even a thousand people to keep a ship running. Advanced automation technologies with endlessly redundant backup systems should mean you could effectively run a Galaxy class starship with a couple hundred, tops.

Civilians on the Enterprise always bothered me as well. I don't care if Starfleet's mission is equal parts exploration and defence, you still should never have civilians on such a ship. Certainly not little kids going to preschool.

[Monroe]

The differnet between Star Trek and Star Wars lore is that books, some games, and a few comics in Star Wars are considered cannon. So we know exact figures for many capital ships in Star Wars. The thing that messes people up is Lucas has said he can change things. That doesn't mean Star Wars books aren't cannon but that they can be hit by retcon changes. Just like Enterprise and the passing of time showned changes in the original series. Such as when the Eugenics War was.


Its been a long time since I read all those Star Wars books and did a lot of research for properly role playing an Imperial officer but a Death Star staffs 800,000 men give or take. An Imperial Class Star Destroyer about 175,000.

Star Trek usually goes for fewer figures for a few reasons. Computers in Star Trek seem to be more advanced (one tactical station controls all weapon implacements, whereas Star Wars has much more weapon inplacements but each one crewed there at the weapon). There are also less redundant systems. And Star Trek doesn't have a population of trillions to pool resources from. Since Star Wars space travel is vastly superior they have more and larger population centers to get troops from and can get minerals to the fronts easier. That's why you see super capital class ships such as the Eclipse Imperial Star Destroyer with a crew of 750,000 and things like the Death Star which holds 5,000 TIE Fighters a cheap and easily mass produced ship used in swarm tactics. Star Wars' fleets are usually much more massive. With 25,000 Imperial Star Destroyers, thousands more Victory Star Destroyers and countless other support ships its easy to group them in a few different fleets and have them respond to problem areas around the Galaxy.

Since Star Trek's travel isn't as fast they go for the smaller approach and have to spread out their forces more so you see smaller fleets in Trek with smaller crews. Where the Empire can bring about a fleet of ten thousand ships to a hot spot in a day the Federation would take weeks (not to mention not being able to field that many or recover from that many losses as easily). But yeah.. starting to get on a Star Wars v Trek debate.. which deserves its own thread

[Captain Seafort]

I believe about half a modern carrier's crew is dedicated to aircraft maintainence, operations, etc, so a Nimitz would have about 3k crew actually operating the ship. While the Enterprise can cruise with a very small crew (or completely automatically according to Angel One), the problem is when things go wrong. When everything's going fine, only the mission specialists would be doing anything - when things break, however, you need people fairly close to the problem to fix it. That's what I suspect a lot of the crew are doing - sitting around drinking tea all day untill there's a malfunction, go and fix it, then go back to drinking tea. In a 600+ metre long, 42 deck ship you'll need a lot of maintainence teamsto be able to get to a problem in a reasonable time, especially with all the crawling through Jefferies tubes the repairs would involve.

[I Am Spartacus]

Not in the future with endlessly redundant backup systems and automation technologies so advanced that we can't even comprehend them. There would be no need whatsoever to have 600 people sitting around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for things to go wrong, when a tiny number of people could solve any problem, assuming the ship couldn't fix itself.

If it's truly serious, go to a Starbase.

Not that there's a need for Jeffries tubes anyways; just beam to the trouble spot, fix it, and beam out.

[Captain Seafort]

Not in the future with endlessly redundant backup systems and automation technologies so advanced that we can't even comprehend them.

Where have we ever seen these magical self-repair systems in Star Trek? Where have we seen any decent redundant backups in Trek?

There would be no need whatsoever to have 600 people sitting around with their thumbs up their asses waiting for things to go wrong, when a tiny number of people could solve any problem, assuming the ship couldn't fix itself.

I was thinking a couple of hundred tops per watch - you'd also need engineering, the bridge, sickbay, at least one shuttlebay, the nacelle control rooms and the brig permanently manned - there are probably other areas we haven't seen. In battle I'd want the ship crawling with medical, security and damage control teams - the more the better as every second counts.

Not that there's a need for Jeffries tubes anyways; just beam to the trouble spot, fix it, and beam out.

Intraship beaming has always been depicted as more difficult than normal transport, but I agree that the Jefferies tubes are a bad idea - the important stuff should be put in rooms with normal corridor access, not at the far end of a pokey little tube.

[Monroe]

That's what I suspect a lot of the crew are doing - sitting around drinking tea all day untill there's a malfunction, go and fix it, then go back to drinking tea.

That's the military motto, "Hurry Up and Wait".

[I Am Spartacus]

Where have we ever seen these magical self-repair systems in Star Trek? Where have we seen any decent redundant backups in Trek?

Good point.

I was thinking a couple of hundred tops per watch - you'd also need engineering, the bridge, sickbay, at least one shuttlebay, the nacelle control rooms and the brig permanently manned - there are probably other areas we haven't seen. In battle I'd want the ship crawling with medical, security and damage control teams - the more the better as every second counts.

No you wouldn't. You'd want as many people as is needed to get the job done. If you have too many people, that makes the ship more crowded than it needs to be which can slow down repairs. Think about it: if the ship takes heavy damage to a particular section, but suffers no deaths, you now have a lot less space to work with, and more people per cubic metre of internal volume. That makes your job a lot more difficult.

Not to mention that an overstaffed ship greatly increases the chances of taking casualties.

"Dear Mrs. Random. Your son was killed today in an accident, despite the fact that he wasn't really doing anything. You see, it's Starfleet policy to overstaff ships in case things go wrong, and but for this policy your son would still be alive today and the ship would probably still have had enough people on hand to fix the problem..."

[Captain Seafort]

No you wouldn't. You'd want as many people as is needed to get the job done. If you have too many people, that makes the ship more crowded than it needs to be which can slow down repairs. Think about it: if the ship takes heavy damage to a particular section, but suffers no deaths, you now have a lot less space to work with, and more people per cubic metre of internal volume. That makes your job a lot more difficult.

Not to mention that an overstaffed ship greatly increases the chances of taking casualties.

Fair enough. It's a balance between having few enough that they're not getting in the way, but not so few that the ship's left vulnerable by damage inflicted, or boarders have inflicted severe damage/casualties, or someone's died because the nearest medical team is too far away.

[Teaos]

I think they may have days off duty. I mean they are in space for long strechs of time away from any possible contact they need a good work enviroment.

[Bryan Moore]

I think they may have days off duty. I mean they are in space for long strechs of time away from any possible contact they need a good work enviroment.

Of course, 7 days a week would suck. But I'm still trying to figure out why we need so many crewmembers.

[Captain Peabody]

Keep in mind that, in Star Trek III, the Enterprise was commandeered by around half a dozen old men, and they managed to run it pretty smoothly, even under combat conditions. My thinking is that a modern starship is so well automated that a ship can be run with only as many personnel as is necessary to man the bridge....but to really run it effectively long term you need much more people; first, enough personnel so that the bridge watches can be split into shifts, then an engineering staff to run the engines, a medical department to handle injuries.....
Another thing to remember is that most of the ships we've seen were engaged in long-term exploratory missions, so they probably had much more people than were actually needed to man the ship....I'm sure a dedicated warship would have a much smaller crew.

Just my thoughts....