StarDestroyer.Net BBS

first what would be a good crew/troop count for ship that's about 5-6 times the length of Venator with roughtly the same hull type, but with more emphasis in ship to ship battle then carrier/transport roles (thought some emphasis on those too)?

second what would be a decent "skeleton crew" for a SW (so that it could funtion reasonbly well in it's primary task for a short period (hours max))?

Some numbers from ICS; 1,137m long, Wingspan (?? Shouldn't that be 'beam'?) 548m, height (draft?)268m, crew 7,400.

If the thing gets longer by a factor of six and keeps it's shape, the wingspan and draft multiply up too- so the whole thing multiplies by the cube of 6, two hundred and sixteen times the volume, nearly 1.6 million crew as a first approximation.

Five times as long, 125x the volume, 925,000 as a first approximation.

These numbers are almost certainly going to be different in practise, because there are going to be some crew tasks that don't scale up with the size of the ship.

Functions like routine maintenance, the number of crew is dependent on how much of the ship there is to maintain; that will scale. Functions like medical and administrative, they scale with the size of the rest of the crew.
Command, senior officer positions, sensors, not so much. Gunnery crewing is related to the number of guns- although not linearly, because of battery command, fire directors, local sensor control, the more guns there are the more organisational overhead there's going to be organising them all.

A large part of that number will be so the crew can stand watches, and for a short run, a sort of 'last flight of the-' type scenario, one watch of sensors, gunnery, engineering control, and command should do- definitely less than a quarter of the crew. If you leave maintenance, medical, admin and all like functions beached, that could be down to less than a tenth, but those people are there for a reason.


Two factors that might push the total up; the Venator seems to be on the low end of the manning scale. An Imperator, about three times the volume (I think), has about five times the crew. Multiplying up from the low marker might mean there should be more than that number indicates, possibly up to 66% more.

Second, as far as I recall, big ships often make useful school ships. A capital ship may get it's crew roster padded out with apprentices, there to learn from the experienced members of the crew in an environment where their mistakes can be easily intercepted- so,again, more than a simple scaling up.

Troops? You're looking at cubic kilometres of bay space. I'd reckon something this size-which I'd call a heavy cruiser or battlecruiser, depending on whether you go with x5 or x6- could fit a sixteen- division Army with space to spare, two Armies possible, a full sixty-four division Army Group not out of the question.

Lord Revan wrote:first what would be a good crew/troop count for ship that's about 5-6 times the length of Venator with roughtly the same hull type, but with more emphasis in ship to ship battle then carrier/transport roles (thought some emphasis on those too)?

second what would be a decent "skeleton crew" for a SW (so that it could funtion reasonbly well in it's primary task for a short period (hours max))?

A ship 5 times larger with identical dimensions would have 125 times the volume.
A ship 6 times larger with identical dimensions would have 216 times the volume.

I'd say pick a number between those two, multiply it by the base crew size of a Venator (i.e. don't include the fighter/troop personnel), and use that as a yardstick for the base crew. From there, maybe divide it by 10, to reflect base crew running the engine, sensors, weapons, etc (basically no damage control or backup crew). If you really want to stretch it, divide it by 100, and tell about how they can only concentrate on a few targets at a time, plus reduced effect of their targeting/ECM/ECCM systems, plus slower power systems response in case of problems.

crew requirements will depend entirely on a myraid of factors including how much manual redundancy you want (if you lose crewmembers do youw ant to have extras to replace them) and operational duration (How many ships you want to operate) and how much automation you want to rely on. THe last is a big factor, since if you don't mind you can in theory run a ship with alot of automation (either directly by computers or slave rig, or by using droids the way the separatists did) and have a small crew requirement. ITs all a matter of trade-offs, but a larger crew will entail more life support, acocmodations for crew (Faciltiies and whatnot) and the need to carry more consumables (how much and what kinds of facilities though will also depend on duration.)

Skeleton crew will depend on automation as well.