Starship Crew Positions.

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AlexMcpherson79
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Starship Crew Positions.

Post by AlexMcpherson79 »

Okay, so for my fanfic idea, I kind of need an idea of how many positions there could be aboard Voyager, aka where the job name is self-explanatory, like helmsman, or security officer.

I guess I should also mention that in this fanfic, I'm postulating that the Intrepid Class is built in such that when used in a Deep Space Exploration mission, it is actually crewed by as many as 500, with the 150 of the USS Voyager being a 30% crew capacity of: 6 Senior Officers, 42 Junior Officers and 102 Crewmen. (151 with the captain)
Bear in mind, these positions fill up those Senior Officer positions:
Executive Officer (Lt Cmdr Cavit)
Operations Officer (Ens. Kim)
Chief of Security/Tactical Officer (The absent Lt [cmdr?] Tuvok)
Helmsman (Lt Stadi)
Chief Engineer (Unnamed guy)
Chief Medical Officer (Unnamed Guy)

Those roles were subsequently filled by Chakotay (his provisional rank pip indicates LT CMDR just like Cavit's, yet consistently referred solely as commander, even when formally should be referred by the full rank title of lieutenant commander), Harry who should have gotten a promotion before Tom's, Tuvok who the producers realised the rank goof and just gave him an onscreen promotion, Tom, B'Elannna and the EMH... and strange how there's no other onscreen character that could be a 'senior officer'...
Except, well... Science doesn't have a representative. Sam Wildman could have been it, but then theres no 'chief science officer' on the Ent-D or Ent-E either, since Data, as operations officer there, and Harry on voyager basically takes the role. a role that, on the original enterprise, was SPOCKS' job. And on DS9, was JADZIA DAX, who is likely the favourite female character for oh so many fans, including myself.

Anyway we know that Voyager was on a mission to recover tuvok and capture chakotay's cell, but was there anything about after that? No? Well, not being fully crewed with the science contingent therefore kind of makes sense, right? and the crew count post-merger was still like, 160 or so. after the death of quite a few of the crew.

Anyway, this is my crew-count roadmap:
Single Mission: 20% Crew Level
Multi-Mission (Short-range, aka within starfleet borders): 30%
Chartered Exploration up to 2 years in length: 60%
Light Exploration 2-4 years: 80%
Deep Space Exploration 5+ years: 100%

Chartered is basically the 'in depth' part that ships like the Reliant was doing in TWOK, except with the eye of the genesis device - investigating places already been too, but in much greater depth that a ship on light/deep space exploration wouldn't.

to me, its the level of scrutiny on the local level that differs in those three - so... During Kirks' five year mission, the ship was on Deep Space Exploration - find a place, mark it, move on, not much scrutiny, if any. "a system with three planets, one class M. Done. Name it, database it, next stop, Sulu set course-"

Light Exploration is like a follow up, no expectation of first contacts, but the sort of thing that, say, the USS Excelsior was doing just before The Undiscovered Country - doing a proper mapping project of things like planetary orbital paths, actual boundaries of nebula, and such.... and Chartered Exploration is the next step, a ship goes in to fully map out, say, a planet, full orbital sweep, multiple away missions of xenobiological and botanical purpose.

For, asteroid belts, it'll be like Kirk on the Enterprise going: "Okay, there's a Belt of asteroids here". Then Sulu on the excelsior following up with "Oh hey, we just realised that the belt gets x closer to y planet every few years, which we only found out by mapping the gravitational eddies of the system" and then in the follow up, Chekov on the Reliant going, "This asteroid is big enough with various deposits of valuable resources that we should name it, and no, We're not calling it Ceti Alpha VI."

hey, those suit the levels.

Anyway yeah. Despite that more work is expected of the smaller crew, its also expected to be more specialised, whereas the deep space explorers could come across anything and need any number of specialties to get out of the latest problem, so they'd need more crew to cover those, as well as to cover any losses in the crew count over the five year period - so the security division is larger than it should be so they'll still be 'full capacity' after loosing all those poor poor red shirts.

So yeah. aside from the head of department roles and specific jobs that would also be covered by the head of department, I was wondering if any of you guys could come up with specific job roles. I thought STO would be good for it, but last time I looked, it was all about the DOFFs rolls in who gives what player a boost.
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Graham Kennedy
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Re: Starship Crew Positions.

Post by Graham Kennedy »

The obvious one is the one you mentioned, the ship would have a Chief Science Officer. Under him/her/it there would be a bunch of science team heads - Chief Geologist, Chief Botanist, Chief Astrochemist, etc. As many as you can think up from looking at a list of the sciences and deciding which ones would be useful for exploring strange new worlds. Remember, Kirk even had a Historian aboard, and complained that she generally had nothing to do with her time.

Each of those Chief types would lead a team, which may run anything from "You are the team" through to teams of dozens. I can easily see wanting say 50 geologists aboard, for instance, if you're thinking of doing all sorts of planetary surveys.

Oh, one thing to bear in mind - we never saw a Science Officer on Voyager, but we did see science types sometimes. Remember Harren from Good Shepherd? He was a Cosmologist. So you'd best figure in that Voyager did have some science crew along with her. Maybe they were scheduled to arrive on DS9 by next Tuesday (Generations reference!), but Voyager went to get Tuvok in the meantime, and took whatever few science crew had already arrived along?
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AlexMcpherson79
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Re: Starship Crew Positions.

Post by AlexMcpherson79 »

yes that's kind of what I figure. In my fanfic idea, Voyager was scheduled for a "Light Exploration" mission of about 4 years in the Gamma Quadrant, simply for the sheer irony.
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