Imperial Warship Crew

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Just a followup to this one- there's a relatively recent update to Atomic Rockets that makes an interesting point. The crew of a modern spaceship is not best described by the number of people you can cram into an unstable, noisy, smelly tin can in the void; the number of people it needs to make it work is the number of people you need monitoring telemetry in Mission Control.

In other words, far more people than you could actually physically fit on the thing. The people who are there, their job is largely preventative maintenance- making sure that nothing very exciting happens, because it gets far too exiting (and probably nonsurvivable) when it does.


Actually, to take the turret example; HTL-A turret, eight 32's- standard for an Imperial II, main crew of fifteen; gunlayer/ turret commander, local fire control/ battery comms, weapon power and configuration;
each of the two four- gun subassemblies, six men- chief gun maintenancebeing, power feed maintain and control, one gun pointer and mechanical systems, one recoil control, one turret training systems- training in this case being the military term for pointing the damn' thing at the target- one data and local tracking systems op and maint.

Systemology- I actually prefer the older term that a sci fi writer, Kornbluth?, tried to hang on it- Ariadnology. The study of webs. Almost everything is going to be composed of webs, of systems of systems, and the level at which you need a human head- a mind, anyway- in the loop is not going to be at base.

Watchman, you misunderstood; probably closer to six figures than three. All of which have enough power running through them and are under enough strain controlling and directing it that failures and malfunctions are a matter of hopefully, predictable time- that's what maintenance schedules are about. Certainly not each individual system- there are far too many, you wouldn't be able to fit enough bodies on board. That's a cartoonish exaggeration you came out with there.

An interesting thing happens when you look at real world barrel lives, too; guns are stressed machines, they do suffer fatigue and failure. Rifles have lifespans of absurd length, hundreds of thousands of rounds and rust and bad maintenance is likely to get them first, light cannon almost the same, heavy artillery in the thousdands of rounds, and the real monsters- 15" mk 1 could be expected to have an effective full charge lifespan of 270- 330 rounds, USN 16"50 mk 8- longer chromed barrels and less erosive propellant chemistry (the devil is always, always in the details) making 400-420.

About the lifespan and wear patterns of research particle accelerators, I am relatively poorly informed.

There are two interesting catches; one being that if this is the imperial fleet we're talking about, training is likely to be very much by the manual. (I don't know if you've noticed, but given the politics of it, I reckon the bulk of the Imperial Starfleet is in the same league of competence as the Soviet Navy was.) This would be the same manual that expert systems- like droids- would be working from anyway, and the penalties for living crew deviating from the manual are likely to be real and severe, the Imperial Starfleet probably is overmanned, or at least has creative and troubleshooting talent sitting around that it is actively working to suppress.

[Simon_Jester]

An interesting thing happens when you look at real world barrel lives, too; guns are stressed machines, they do suffer fatigue and failure. Rifles have lifespans of absurd length, hundreds of thousands of rounds and rust and bad maintenance is likely to get them first, light cannon almost the same, heavy artillery in the thousdands of rounds, and the real monsters- 15" mk 1 could be expected to have an effective full charge lifespan of 270- 330 rounds, USN 16"50 mk 8- longer chromed barrels and less erosive propellant chemistry (the devil is always, always in the details) making 400-420.

About the lifespan and wear patterns of research particle accelerators, I am relatively poorly informed.

One wonders how your informant compared the stresses on a research accelerator to those of a gun. A gun is stressed (literally) explosively for extremely short, sharp shocks. Most particle accelerators maintain a continuous beam, which is contained and made to do loop-de-loops by passing through magnetic fields of force. The main sources of 'barrel wear' are:

1) Any particles not confined within the beam by the magnets will eventually lose the plot and smack into the walls, irradiating them. Radiation is not only hazardous, it can alter the chemical properties of the materials involved, which is especially inconvenient for sensitive electronics.

2) Voltages involved are high, and must periodically be switched on and off, so the switches have a life expectancy.

3) Systems must be refrigerated continuously and violently cease to function if not refrigerated, because you're using superconducting magnets to confine a beam roughly as energetic as an express train (for the LHC, roughly equivalent to the kinetic energy of the Train Grande Vitesse). Refrigerators have a service life in continuous operation.

You'd get very different wear patterns from a 'gun' accelerator which fired extremely large bolts of particles. The stress due to switching electrical loads and mechanical forces during firing would be much higher, but on the other hand, any component that can survive the beating will probably last indefinitely.

[Anacronian]

Should also be noted that unless the particle accelerator somehow has a 100% energy conversion (voltage to magnetism) it should produce quite a bit of waste heat that will probably also contribute to the wear and tear.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I'd actually meant to get back to this- what does that mean for the crew? We're looking at (I may be making up my own jargon here, don't take this too seriously) a digital failure mode, rather than analogue wear and tear- performance doesn't degrade unless there is a lot of redundancy and bypass capability in the system, and then the performance of the overall system degrades; but individual components fail digitally, either fine or Kaboom.

Much maintenance is probably conducted to a schedule then, swapping out modules before they have a chance to accumulate enough stress to fail, and Galactic Spirit help you if your fault prediction metrics are wrong. Very little crisis management, and much pre- emptive crisis prevention.

[Patroklos]

In the modern USN this is known as the 3M program, or preventative maintenance. Its basically the maitenance program that was set up by the designers to test/replace/clean/etc. various components of the system an a schedule to extend the life of the system and have it operate at pique performance or at the very least discover problems before they become catastrophic even if they can't be fixed by the ships crew.

In fact this is what the bulk of an engineering rates duty is taken up with. You might spend four hours a day in five section actually operating equipment, the rest of it is performing 3M. Same goes for some of the combat systems rates regarding radars and radios and whatnot.

[Anacronian]

Is there any number anywhere stating how many maintenance droids there are on a ISD?

[Crayz9000]

It's kind of funny that I just noticed this discussion, since I was musing on the topic yesterday. Here's a brief essay I put together on a possible explanation for the discrepancy in crew between the Imperator and both earlier and later designs.

The official crew requirements of ships used during the time of the post-Clone Wars Old Republic and Empire appear very high when compared to the pre-Clone Wars vessels and those of the New Republic. This discrepancy is somewhat difficult to explain, but like many modern discrepancies, becomes far easier to explain when political motivations are factored in.

During the Clone Wars, the Separatists relied heavily upon droid intelligences to crew their ships, fly their fighters, and engage in ground combat. Without going into a complete exploration of the politics of the Clone Wars, this is likely because most of the groups that wanted to split from the Republic were corporate interests, rich in resources but poor in levies. In order for a small group of Separatists to be a viable threat to the vast Republic, they would have to leverage their resources to the fullest. This is particularly visible in the Munificient-class frigate, at 800 meters long (almost 3 times the length of the USS Nimitz). The listed crew of the Munificient is only 200, versus 3,200 for the Nimitz.

Given the often reactionary nature of politics, it would be unsurprising if fear of the Separatists' use of droid intelligences crept into decision-making processes in the Republic Senate. One possible explanation for the high crew requirements of the Imperial era ships, therefore, is language slipped into a defense appropriations bill near the end of the Clone Wars that requires all new ships or retrofits from that point forward to eliminate reliance on droids for the operation or maintenance of critical systems due to the threat of Separatist sabotage.

Secondly, due to the way in which the Republic evolved into the Empire and the gradual changes to its bureaucratic structure, it is extremely likely that any such language would remain unchanged during the brief duration of the Empire.

The effects of such legislation on the major shipbuilders of the galaxy is profound. Walex Blissex's Clone Wars design, the Victory-class Star Destroyer, had a crew requirement of slightly over 5,000 (on a 900m ship). When his daughter Lira Wessex designed the Imperator-class Star Destroyer, its required crew was over 37,000, an increase of 7x versus an increase in volume of only 2-3x. Clearly something happened in between the two ships.

In addition, the commonly listed manpower requirements of the 600m Dreadnaught cruiser are 16,000 (with a minimum staff of almost 9,000), which was the reason for the construction of the Katana fleet. Since 9,000 is still a large number for a ship of that size -- almost twice that of the newer Victory-class--it would be reasonable to assume that the required crew with droid automation for most of the ship's use in the Republic was between 8-9000. When the hypothetical legislation went into effect, it almost doubled the crew requirements of the old ships instantly, a practice that continued well into the Empire for no good reason.

Following the defeat of the Empire and with it the last vestiges of the original Republic Senate, the New Republic likely saw no need to carry over all of the bureaucratic baggage of twenty-five millennia, instead choosing to start over (or at least revert to a pre-Clone Wars copy of the Republic Code).

Adding to this was the fact that the notoriously manpower-short Alliance relied heavily on automation, although not to the extent of the Separatists. This can be seen in the dramatically lower crew requirements of the Dreadnaughts converted by the Bothans into Assault Cruisers, and later seen in the designs of the New Class program.