Starship crew

[Uraniun235]

As an example of this, consider the original Enterprise in The Search for Spock. The standard crew was something like 400, right? But Kirk and company were able to fly it, even badly damaged, with only a crew of five.

Didn't the automation freeze the first time they tried to do something more complicated then fly to point B, then completly overload the first time they took damage?

That automation system was also probably improvised in the field by Scotty, who would have designed the system without expectation of it having to cope with anything more challenging than getting from point to point, and which was attempting to run a ship that was never properly repaired after being mangled in combat. It's entirely possible that the automation system was itself relying on backup systems to function, with no redundancies left to switch to after taking damage.

The Enterprise-D, by contrast, is clearly designed to be highly automatic. We've seen Picard and Data fly the ship solo before, with Data even flying it solo while locking out the ship's systems from the rest of the crew. My guess is that you could probably program the Enterprise computer to operate sans crew in friendly space for awhile; fly here, pick up cargo, fly there, do a sensor scan, etc. Of course, you'd eventually need to have someone perform maintenance on the ship, and it wouldn't really be the best use of the then-most advanced starship in Starfleet, but it could be done.

[Stofsk]

Uh where are you getting estimates for the Miranda from? A Miranda should be comparable to a Connie in terms of crew complement because they have similar internal volume. If a ship like the Defiant can have 50 dudes on it then the Miranda, which is a lot bigger, should have just a bit more.

Got them from Memory Alpha.

EDIT: The tech manual states that the crew complement was 220 but in TNG "Unnatural Selection" a U.S.S. Lantree was a Miranda Class supply ship with a crew of 26.

I'd go with the tech manual. The two examples you gave were clearly supply ships and could get by with a small skeleton crew.

Even 220 seems low to me, but that could be why the Miranda became more common than the Connie. The latter in comparison had twice the crew, but not much more increased volume - and the Miranda seemed to be just as combat capable as the Connie was and we might be able to speculate that it was just as capable in other roles like surveys and exploration. But with half the crew complement, you could get more bang for your buck so to speak i.e. two Mirandas for the price of a single Connie. Hence, the reason why we keep seeing Mirandas decades later during TNG and DS9.

[Stofsk]

The Miranda crew couldn't have been too much bigger than Khan's gang. They ran it, and the Reliant's crew apparently was able to trade places with them on Ceti Alpha V too.

That's not conclusive though. Remember Khan's group also took over the Enterprise in 'Space Seed'. And yeah he did want to convert some of the Enterprise's crew, but that's because only Khan personally had read the technical manuals and the rest of his group had just been thawed out. He still needed experts to help run the Enterprise. I don't think it was a case that Khan's group didn't have the numbers needed to run the Enterprise.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd go with the tech manual. The two examples you gave were clearly supply ships and could get by with a small skeleton crew.

Even 220 seems low to me, but that could be why the Miranda became more common than the Connie. The latter in comparison had twice the crew, but not much more increased volume - and the Miranda seemed to be just as combat capable as the Connie was and we might be able to speculate that it was just as capable in other roles like surveys and exploration. But with half the crew complement, you could get more bang for your buck so to speak i.e. two Mirandas for the price of a single Connie. Hence, the reason why we keep seeing Mirandas decades later during TNG and DS9.

220 may be a 'limited crew' option, or maybe... consider this.

Suppose that the Mirandas have a basic crew responsible for maintaining the ship, plus... call them 'modular' groups who do different things. The ship might not actually carry enough people to respond to a medical emergency and do survey missions and land security troops to guard an isolated facility, the way a Constitution would. Instead, you'd load them up with the right selection of personnel at base.

Am I making sense?

[sirocco]

But seriously what would be the more expensive? A fully automated starship or a semi-modular one manned by an expert crew with the sufficient quantity of spare parts or the knowledge necessary to make some?

[Stark]

As something becomes more difficult, it often becomes exponentially more expensive to attempt. What's more expensive - chasing a project goal of 'reduce crew by 100' that may not even be attainable or building ships that work?

Doesn't Prometheus use a crew of holograms when short on crew?

[Prometheus Unbound]

So, what sort of jobs would starship crews have? Why does it take 1,000 people to run the Enterprise, over 30,000 to run an ISD, or 11,000 for a Luna-class cruiser?

Well, it doesn't really require 1000 people to run the Enterprise (presumably Ent-D). For starters, that's the total number of people onboard, on average - including guests and families of officers. Say, 100-200 civilians? This would include things like staff for ten forward, the spa, schools, museum areas, arboretum and barbers.

Then you've got the families of the crew - if we say - and this is arbitrary - that out of the 1,000, perhaps 150-200 are civvies.

Then out of that 800-850 actual crew, there's a three-shift rotation - meaning there's about ~280 crew at any one time to work the ship. For something 43 decks high and over half a kilometre long, that seems... undermanned if anything.

[aussiemuscle308]

And we're perfectly capable of building deep space probes that run with no crew at all.

Doesn't Spirit/Opportunity Rovers have a crew of about 30, although they stay on earth. if we had some people on mars, they could have went out and cleaned off the solar panels hehe

[Simon_Jester]

One big reason we do that is that it's WAY cheaper to have three people watching the rover's every move all the time than it is to risk losing the rover. Telepresence and "mission control" make for big crews.

[Number Theoretic]

True, although light-speed lag creates a strong incentive to increase the autonomy of space probes. For example, NASA has a software project which gives it's Opportunity rover the ability to photograph and upload interesting rock formations on its own, without the need for scientists to tell it which rocks it should go.

[Simon_Jester]

That's true- but I doubt NASA will reduce the size of the staff monitoring the rover. Autonomy is good, light speed lag for interplanetary telepresence is bad, yes. But having enough people on hand to comprehend the rover's data and monitor its condition in case something goes wrong is worse. And compared to the cost of launching the probe at all, the cost of maintaining a decent-sized staff to watch it all the time is pocket change.

[Starglider]

Doesn't Prometheus use a crew of holograms when short on crew?

We only saw the medical hologram, but that idea is not unreasonable for Trek; we saw a ship crewed solely by holograms in Voyager. For some reason, presumably cultural, the Federation has very few mobile robots and their ship computers usually demonstrate relatively limited AI. We know they have free-motile nanoassemblers of some sort, but we haven't seen Federation ones since early TNG and they don't seem to be widely available. However the Federation has put a lot of effort into refining their realistic holodeck simulations, to the point where even the junky old 'holosuites' on Deep Space Nine can support the sentient Vic Fontaine character. So when the R&D team for Prometheus were trying to pack as much whizz-bang into their SpaceZumwalt as the budget allowed for, repurposing the holodeck technology may actually have been the cheapest way to include comprehensive automation.

[Number Theoretic]

That's true- but I doubt NASA will reduce the size of the staff monitoring the rover.

Maybe not on this mission, but on the next one. Or the one after that. I think it shows a certain long-term development towards more autonomy. Not sure, however, how far this eventually will go.

[Simon_Jester]

Remember, the staff serves a function other than directly controlling the systems- they're the ones interpreting the data as it comes in, identifying what the most interesting things to look at are, and making sure the coders who wrote the automation in the first place got it right. There are a lot of instruments on the rover, and a lot of components, and having a large staff means that in the even of an unexpected event, there are plenty of people on hand to avoid information overload.

And, again, the staff is cheap relative to the rest of the rover's costs. So I don't see it going away until we build AIs fancy enough to do their own science for us.

[Number Theoretic]

Well, i guess that science and troubleshooting are indeed staff functions that are here to stay unless AI gets really fancy. Maybe the staff shrinks a little as if software becomes better at error diagnosis or other information processing tasks. If and how much it shrinks depends on what is cheaper, i agree on that.

[someone_else]

My question to you is, what do all these spacers DO as part of their jobs? Space is a very empty enviroment, barring the occasional micro-meteor, or a very stressful form of FTL, you should hardly need much matinence which historically is most of what sailors DO.

I'll second destructionator. 99.99% of sci-fi is basically US NAVY IN SPAAAACE!!!! (at various ages of its history).
The best ones just copy-paste anything happening on seagoing vessels regardless of its plausibility, while in the shobby ones authors go without even looking at how seagoing vessels work and plain make up stuff.


Half-realistic combat spacecraft are basically interplanetary ICBMs. And that makes "combat" as dramatic as playing Ogame (for those that don't understand, it's like looking for a target, crunching numbers to be reasonably sure of outcome, waiting travel times, cherishing at a good plan well executed).

Crew is basically wasted payload since when your fixed installations spot the enemy (and "patrolling" space is idiotic given how orbits and spacecraft sensor range work, unless you have magic drives) you can keep the fucker tracked with them and the "warship" only needs weapon targeting.

Again given that there is no stealth in space at weapon ranges, the shooting lasts very little and lethality is fucking high. The usefullness of human creativity is lowered (try to evade this fucking laser, Punk!).
Also damage control becomes irrelevant (kamikaze craft) or too fucking slow/complex to be worthwile doing on these timescales so you either do nothing or you put redundancy to take over functionality without losing time.


The only things you really feel the need for a crew are science and passenger crafts. And even then it's mostly there to do their job (science or doing stuff for passengers, respectively), not to babysit the ship.

If you really wanted to place people onboard a vessel, you can use the
Mission Control model.