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The crew of an Impstar is, to the best of my knowledge, 37 000 strong. Now I've tried to come up with a reason for why there are so many aboard, yet I get nothing that truly makes sense.

A friend of mine and I have come up with a reasoning that the big crew is so it carries a lot of back up personnel, but I'm wondering if anyone else had any ideas.

Edit: Shit! I screwed up the title. And it's a really common mistake I make. Mod help me!

It carries a massive reserve crew complement, for many redundancies.

Lets not forget how it also carries a large force for the invasion and occupation of planets.

Also there would be 1-2 gunner and a service crew for nearly every ship "cannon", plus the service crew (Measured in the many thousands on something like the Executor)

Does that 37 000 include the 9 000 stormies carried aboard?

And it is for reduncies, cool cool.

Ford Prefect wrote:Does that 37 000 include the 9 000 stormies carried aboard?

And it is for reduncies, cool cool.

No, they're separate.

Look at the numbers.
You have a comparable flight group to a CVN, more troop capacity than any one reasonable transport built on Earth, and a hell of a lot of ship to ship firepower. All of which need full complements to service and utilise.

Warships in RL are often overmanned. Hence they can be put to sea if they have to with less than their full complement. Makes sense of course in battle when the crews take casualties, the ship can still fight or do D/C.

Danny Bhoy wrote:Warships in RL are often overmanned. Hence they can be put to sea if they have to with less than their full complement. Makes sense of course in battle when the crews take casualties, the ship can still fight or do D/C.

Within the USN at least they are overmanned because we have way more sailors then we have ships, not because its some big plan.

If I remember right, comparing that figure to realistic men/ton ratios has the ISD undermanned by over an order of magnitude. I guess droids make up the difference.

Ender wrote:Within the USN at least they are overmanned because we have way more sailors then we have ships, not because its some big plan.

If I remember right, comparing that figure to realistic men/ton ratios has the ISD undermanned by over an order of magnitude. I guess droids make up the difference.

Is that right? Next time before I believe even shoptalk from a squid, I must get the bassa to begin and end his story with This Is No Shit. Now I know why you lot are called squids. Forever blowing ink clouds and muddying up the waters...

I wonder if anyone has a list of the exact amount of jobs on an ISD. I mean, if you had a crew of just robots who never sleep or eat, What is the exact number of people to jobs? As in, are there 10,000 things to do? 25,000? Is there a 3 to 1 ratio of people to jobs? Or are there jobs that one person could do 5 of?

The ISD has 12 HTLs each with it's own reactor for powering the thing and a small mainframe to aim it. That means a gun crew, reactor techs, comp techs, a petty officer to oversee it all and some stormies who stand around guarding the thing from boarders. Times 3 shifts. So about 60-80 bods per main gun.

It also has 60 MTLs and a host of PD guns which have similar though smaller crewing requirements. Say 30 each.

It carries 72 starfighters which need round the clock crews, engineers, technicians, munitions loaders, guys making sure the concussion missles aren't dropped on toes and more officers and guards.

It has a big ass sensor rig to be able to fire all those guns and coordinate the fighters.

It has a fucking huge drive section which requires a equally fucking huge number of boys to make sure it goes.

Then there's the hyper matter reactor. And you'll be wanting 3 shifts for that thing.

And then you have cooks and legal officers and the guys who keep the corridors clean and the chicken soup dispensers filled.

At triple/quadruple shifts so that a fesh crew is always on so the ship can fight 24/7 it doesn't become unimaginable.

ALL FEAR THE MIGHTY CREWS OF THE MEPIRE!

weemadando wrote:Lets not forget how it also carries a large force for the invasion and occupation of planets.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have seperate troop transports for that?

Junghalli wrote:

weemadando wrote:Lets not forget how it also carries a large force for the invasion and occupation of planets.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have seperate troop transports for that?

Actually, one of the ISDs main functions is to conquer and hold a planet by itself. Thus, it is only reasonable it carries a fairly large contingent of troops, heavy armor, and some prefab bases. BUt the occupation force would most likely supplemented by dedicated transports after the world is secured.

Junghalli wrote:

weemadando wrote:Lets not forget how it also carries a large force for the invasion and occupation of planets.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have seperate troop transports for that?

They do. The Imperator, like the earlier Venator, is more a kind of quick response ship - whenever things start to get hot, one of them has sufficient capability to stop it, or at least hold it down until more of the fleet arrives. The New republic mimiced this strategy with its Nebula and Endurance class designs

Noble Ire wrote:

Junghalli wrote:

weemadando wrote:Lets not forget how it also carries a large force for the invasion and occupation of planets.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have seperate troop transports for that?

Actually, one of the ISDs main functions is to conquer and hold a planet by itself. Thus, it is only reasonable it carries a fairly large contingent of troops, heavy armor, and some prefab bases. BUt the occupation force would most likely supplemented by dedicated transports after the world is secured.

I wouldn't say its its main function, 9700 troops is nowhere near enough to hold a planet. But yeah, it is suppossed to be able to go in and enforce the peace until they could mobilize the main fleets from the core, or just suppress thigns so they wouldn't need to. Hence the small number of Imperator class ships and their commonness in the movies.

Given its size, as others have said, the ImpStar really seems to be undercrewed. On a related subject, I drew a Nimitz class CVN to scale next to the EGVV Dreadnaught drawing. The CVN can possess a crew of up to 6,000, while the Dreadnaught is supposed to carry 16,000 or more. From the drawing, I could easily see three times the CVN's compliment in the larger ship.

And the Dreadnaught is only 600m long, a kilometer shy of the ISD.

Firefox wrote:Given its size, as others have said, the ImpStar really seems to be undercrewed. On a related subject, I drew a Nimitz class CVN to scale next to the EGVV Dreadnaught drawing. The CVN can possess a crew of up to 6,000, while the Dreadnaught is supposed to carry 16,000 or more. From the drawing, I could easily see three times the CVN's compliment in the larger ship.

And the Dreadnaught is only 600m long, a kilometer shy of the ISD.

Diffrent building scheme. Heck 20%(?) of the damn ship is made up of nothing but the reactor, plus the armor is mesured in METERS not in feet like the Nimitz.

Furthermore the Nimitz does not carry things like shuttles in their own independant bays nor does it have any 6inch guns aboard(Earth equivlant of TL)

Just to toss things up a little more, according to the ICS, the crew of each heavy gun is fifty men.

And the Dreadnought is a badly desgined antique, automaton leapt ahead, also I remmember something in the "Dark forces rising- Zahn" trilogy about Dreadnoughts requiring very large crew complements no?

Mr Bean wrote:Diffrent building scheme. Heck 20%(?) of the damn ship is made up of nothing but the reactor, plus the armor is mesured in METERS not in feet like the Nimitz.

Furthermore the Nimitz does not carry things like shuttles in their own independant bays nor does it have any 6inch guns aboard(Earth equivlant of TL)

Things I already thought about. Clearly more internal space would be devoted to power generation, weapons and a more expansive hangar facility (though the ship can carry no more than two squadrons in addition to support craft). Here's the drawing. What concerned me more than habitable volume in general was the space required for berthing the crew, which doesn't take up as much space on a Nimitz compared to, say, hangar or propulsion spaces.

Out of curiosity where did the 60 MTL figure come from? Last figure I saw was around 17 in 3 triple mounts and 4 double mounts with 120-150 light turbos.

That's probably the ISD-I figure.

Well, the Empire has a very useful strategy for that ship.

You have a world that is having disturbances on it. Send an ISD to it, and it drops half its troops all over the planet.

A squad per city, and they effectively run the government. Supplies are ordered, laws are passed, arrests made, etc.

If anyone chooses to disobey or attack the squad, the ISD uses a HTL on the city.

Heck of a force multiplier.

Mr Bean wrote:

Firefox wrote:Given its size, as others have said, the ImpStar really seems to be undercrewed. On a related subject, I drew a Nimitz class CVN to scale next to the EGVV Dreadnaught drawing. The CVN can possess a crew of up to 6,000, while the Dreadnaught is supposed to carry 16,000 or more. From the drawing, I could easily see three times the CVN's compliment in the larger ship.

And the Dreadnaught is only 600m long, a kilometer shy of the ISD.

Diffrent building scheme. Heck 20%(?) of the damn ship is made up of nothing but the reactor, plus the armor is mesured in METERS not in feet like the Nimitz.

Furthermore the Nimitz does not carry things like shuttles in their own independant bays nor does it have any 6inch guns aboard(Earth equivlant of TL)

Of course, the Dreadnaught is almost as tall and wide as the Nimitz class is long.

People, in terms of volume the bridge tower itself of an ISD is about as big (in volume) as a CVN.