posted
I like to bring this up every once in a while, just to be contrary.
I recently got yelled at by a USN guy for telling him something I was told was true on these forums. We'd occasionally discussed the case for the reduction of crews on starships in the TNG era due to advancements in technology. I for one support this theory, and I really don't think that any Excelsior or Miranda during the Dominion War (or at peacetime, for that matter) was carrying more than a few hundred or a few dozen crew, respectively, therefore being contemporary with more modern ships on the battlefield. However, some of us believe that in wartime REAL ships take on lots more crew to amplify the ship's fighting strength and ability to repair damage - therefore, having 750 or 220 people on an Excelsior or Miranda during the war was perfectly justifiable. When I told this to the USN guy, he berated me at length that this was simply not true. That is, he said that the crew complement on any ship he's ever served on was PRECISELY the amount necessary for optimum combat efficiency; no more, no less.
Now, while skimming through the increasingly popular warships1.com website, I finally found something I'd been looking for, for a while now; namely, the crew complements of certain warships in different eras. Take the Iowa class battleship, for example: crew sizes during WWII were almost 3000, and during their final tours modernization and other things had knocked the count down to about half that. On another website that I seem to have lost the link to, I came across a couple diagrams of a missile cruiser in the 70s and then in the 90s, showing how few people there are actually stationed on the bridge or in the engine room compared to a couple decades ago. Point being, that even in the space of the last fifty years we've seen cases of significant reductions of crew complements on Navy ships.
So, tying this back in with observed Trek crew complements, I really don't think that older ships in the TNG era would still be carrying so many people; we see complements of 26 and 34 on a Miranda-class, which conflicts with 220 mentioned in the DS9TM. Some people argue that this is because the episodes we see these ships in are in transport or scientific roles, which is possible but which I find unlikely. 220 seems much more reasonable for the TOS movie era Reliant, contemporary with the known crew aboard a Constitution class ship. There's a further example of this in the TOS movies, where TMP background chatter establishes the crew complement of the Enterprise to be 431, whereas the TUC E-A has Valeris quoting the complement at 300.
Where am I going with this? Well, we have seen relatively small crew complements on newish ships of the TNG era; 140 for the Intrepid, which is bigger than a Connie; 1000 for the Galaxy, which is much larger than the Excelsior, and so forth. Combining that with the crew we've heard on Mirandas and Oberths (as few as five in one case of the latter), and in light of what the brash USN guy yelled at me about and the reduction of crews on today's ships we've seen, I think I've strengthened the case that older TNG-era ships should have much fewer people than what's being quoted in the DS9TM and elsewhere.
Finally, all this boils down for me to one VFX shot in DS9 "The Sacrifice of Angels". We see the Defiant fighting away, flanked by the Miranda class ships Sitak and Majestic. Both of them are blown up in a spectacular display. Personally, believing that there are 440 people on those ships, while the (arguably) similarly-sized Defiant is just a few hundred meters away with 50 aboard, just doesn't seem RIGHT somehow.
I ultimately want to use this discussion to come to a consensus for a lower, more REASONABLE crew count on some of the older ships in the TNG era. As I mentioned above, I don't think the Excelsior or Miranda should have more than a few hundred or a few dozen aboard each, respectively. Thoughts?
Mark
[ May 13, 2002, 21:26: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
posted
The lowest number of crew we've seen on a on-runabout-esque vessel would be the 2 (Possibly 3, if you count Annika) onboard the Raven, and they were all like going to find the Borg and stuff, which means they probably would have been out in space for a while, and would need to be self-sufficient. So, if 3 people can operate a vessel like the Raven, it surely seems that a Miranda or such could operate with 40 crew or so.
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Actually, contrary to what the USN insider said, I'd claim that the crew complement of a ship does vary according to more than just the status of upgrades.
Modern ships he'd be familiar with would not have had any actual wartime deployments - i.e. deployments where the ships have actually come under serious fire. So the current ships have aboard the number of personnel the designers THINK is right for them. The belief will be challenged as soon as the ships themselves are.
In WWI or WWII, ship complements changed a lot between missions - partially because of constant equipment changes, which would have been more frequent aboard an actively fighting ship back when all equipment was cheap and simple, relatively speaking. Partially the fluctuation in figures would come from the fact that a crew of 3000 is necessarily less exactly calculated to fit the ship than a crew of 300. And partially it would be a difference in philosophies, with crews being trained in less specialized roles.
A peacetime military often lives under the illusion that its organization is the ideal one. Moreover, a modern high-tech military suffers from the handicap that *any* change is hideously expensive, and that when change does happen, it's synonymous with cutbacks.
Starfleet would be the synthesis of these two: it would be a more exacting organization than a WWII navy, and a more high-tech one, but it would be operationally tested often enough. And up-and downgrades and mission profile alterations would be very frequent, and flexibility in training as well as in equipment much greater. I'd see the balance swinging towards less stable crew sizes.
In any case, Wolf 359 casualty figures give an average peacetime crew size of about 250 per ship, assuming a ship lost meant a crew lost, with just a few survivors. If we assume survivors and assume that the spectrum of ship sizes is well represented by what we saw there, it begins to seem that there has been perhaps a 30-40% reduction in crew sizes from Kirk's "430 per a Constitution-sized ship" benchmark.
posted
I think you may have been dealing with one of my less than friendly co-workers there.
Timo is right - nothing is "ideal" in a chaotic situation like a Naval battle. Luckily the USN has not had to face anything like a real Naval battle in a long time - force projection ashore is the thing today, as seen on CNN. QED all of the USN ideas of what is "ideal" for Naval battles are a best guess.
However - crew complements is going to be based on how many folks does it take to run the gizmos + # of people to support the people. Granted support folks are going to be less in SF - but even in war time they are going to need somebody to cut their hair. OK, maybe not Picard's.
I could live with the 100-200 per ship for "frigate" to "cruiser" size - it seems to make sense for the DW battle casualty numbers IIRC.
*note my use of ship classification terms in no way indicates a desire to have this thread turn into a discussion of marines. *
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Registered: Oct 2000
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posted
Of course, quoted figures for the Galaxy Class crew complement can lead one astray. There were usually a little over 1,010 people aboard the Enterprise-D, but we know that families were a part of this figure. How many of these were "non-combatant" husbands, wives, and children we don't know.
I'd hazard a guess, though, that the actual *crew* complement of a GCS would've been somewhere in the neighborhood of 600-800.
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posted
The most labour intensive operation on warships is damage control. If we assume that the same is true of Trek ships (and TWOK at least would strongly suggest that it is) then it is logical that a Miranda on military duty would expect to have to undergo damage control and thus would carry the crew to do so. But a Miranda on resupply duty would not and thus would not.
Note that in the USN there is no class of ship that is used both for front line combat and for resupply or science missions. Hence no ship in the USN would have such a change of crew complement.
-------------------- "My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor
Registered: Mar 1999
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I agree with you. And if you were to remove the dedicated science personnel whose only job was analyzing, researching, subtracting, etc., the number would quite possibly drop by another two or three hundred people.
posted
You guys forgot to mention the destruction of the USS Grissom from "Field of Fire." The Grissom was originally established as an Excelsior-class ship by the Encyclopedia, and the episode stated that there were about 1200 crew aboard -- and almost all were lost.
Now, this Excelsior could have been transporting Marine troops, or something like that -- but having such an extreme number of crew really upsets the balance of having smaller complements in recent years.
And as for the ratio of 250 crew per ship at Wolf 359, don't forget that there were some survivors, as indicated by "Emissary." So considering that some people survived, that means that there was probably a higher ration per ship.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Well, specifically to the Dominion War, we know that non-hero ships really don't last that long. In that sense, putting hundreds of people aboard for damage control against the expected kind of pounding they're going to take probably would not be effective.
Plus, we're discounting the advancements in damage control technology they've had: structural integrity fields, inertial dampeners, internal force fields... I'm guessing just about every damage effect short of physical hull damage can be attended to automatically and to a large extent by the ship itself. This would surely reduce the amount of crew needed for this purpose. Voyager's forced ability to be pristine every week is an unintended testament to this.
And the parallel with reduced crews is helped by the Alpha Quadrant's relative peacetime prior to the start of TNG, too. But my point is still the same: if Trek ships can take almost weekly poundings and still look intact, at least on the outside by the next epsiode (even with starbases), then the crew already on the ship should be sufficient to the task. Assuming Trek technology can be applied in good measure to its older designs, then older ships in the TNG era should be able to function properly at crew counts much lower than what the DS9 TM is quoting.
posted
You also have to take into account the fact that you have to have at least 3 times the number of people you actaully need on duty at any one time to allow for watches. So, if you say that the CREW of a Galaxy-class ship is 750 people, then that is only 250 on duty per watch (assuming a three watch rotation). An Intrepid-class ship would have only 46 people on duty at any one time. That's compared to 143 per watch for a Kirk-era Constitution-class. To my mind, that represents an IMMENSE improvement in systems automation.
Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Good point. One wonders, though, if some of the posts are supposed to only be manned as needed, perhaps once every twenty or every hundred duty cycles? As in, "Go wake up the linguist, we've got a visitor the UT can't make heads or tails of", or "We will deploy to that planet aboard shuttlecraft since the transporters won't work there, so ask the pilots to clear their schedules for next Tuesday".
A starship might afford to keep these specialists on "standby" for most of the duty cruise, since it cannot afford to do otherwise! These personnel can't be taken aboard only when they are needed, not if a cruise is going to take three years. And they can't have secondary jobs to fill their "off hours": an important job would be left undone when the specialsts are called to perform their primary job, and a less important menial task would lead to fatigue when the specialists need to be at their sharpest.
posted
I would think the "limited use" specialties would be backup skills in addition to your regular job, rather than the other way around. Otherwise a captain would be stuck with a sizeable portion of his or her crew being essentially useless, and, worse, taking up space and resources which could be better used by "regular" crewmembers. It seems more likely that you'd have, say, a chemist with piloting skills rather than a full-time pilot who spends 99 percent of his time playing poker in Ten Forward.
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Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
But, you will have some folks with a high degree of wasted time. The Doc for instance is unlikely to really have all that much to do on a day to day basis treating patients. Even on a Galaxy there is what 1 Doc for 500 people?
If you also want to have a lawyer, first contact specialist...then there will be some supercargo folks about that may not have had time to develop other skills.
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