Realistic Number of Crew?

[Piatzin]

6 hours ago, YNM said:

I'd estimate the skeleton crew who needs to run around and ensure stuff happens can be as low as... 10 ? 20 ?

The skeleton crew is actually 3 people - 6 if you include soldiers. But this is only when the ship is hanging around in orbit waiting to recharge or resupply, etc, and the rest of the crew temporarily goes down to the planet.

6 hours ago, Thor Wotansen said:

Having enough people is important psychologically, and as you will invariably need to bring some people, you have to make sure they don't go crazy at some point in the deployment.

I may need to give this more thought Artificially induced sleep is a thing, and it's often used to skip out on the larger voyages. This tends to leave only twenty to thirty people awake though, which is quite little....

[YNM]

12 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:

The skeleton crew is actually 3 people - 6 if you include soldiers. But this is only when the ship is hanging around in orbit waiting to recharge or resupply, etc, and the rest of the crew temporarily goes down to the planet.

What I meant was ferry-flight crew. Like, when sending it somewhere without sending troops on it.

Ofc if it's pretty safe you only need so few.

[Piatzin]

1 hour ago, YNM said:

What I meant was ferry-flight crew. Like, when sending it somewhere without sending troops on it.

Oh okay. In that case, it's about 10-20-30, yeah

Edited January 26, 2018 by Earthlinger

[PB666]

14 hours ago, Earthlinger said:

Oh okay. In that case, it's about 10-20-30, yeah

too many.

[Piatzin]

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

too many.

Um, okay. Explain your logic then...

[YNM]

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

too many.

I'm not sending a sentient ship alone, mate. Not going to make them a new colony.

Edited January 27, 2018 by YNM

[PB666]

16 hours ago, YNM said:

I'm not sending a sentient ship alone, mate. Not going to make them a new colony.

Oh, so you are writing the story now?  You are going to colonize some place that you attacked thinking that you are going to wipe out all their (spacefaring) kind with 30 to 50 men. lol.

Mostly, if you are going to attack a distance star, pretty much the men you have will be tragic heroes, send as few as possible.

I remember the Movie Avatar where they sent all these men on sleeper ships to fight some alien race on a far off planet, one that was not apparently space fairing. It struck me as kind of funny that if you just wanted to annihilate a race, just use the same amount of money spent on getting the men there (using near-light speed ships) and just put a thin diffraction shield at their L1 and freeze them out. You'de leave most of the ecosystem, and take out the top of the food chain. Do this for about a 5 days and it would suffice to have any population pretty much begging for a resolution. (Although incredibly expensive is still much cheaper than sending 10,000s of men across space time, each man requiring 20 tons or so of equipment and drives)

In my opinion, colonizing systems that have already colonized is very bad karma, particularly when you consider the unseen risk involved in doing that, the only reason you would plan an attack on a exosystemic civilization is if they were an existential threat, in which case it might be cheaper to just colonize new systems (its not like there are aliens everywhere jumping over each other to colonize systems). How could they know you left, you put up a massive defense as a pretense.

The pretext to the argument is this, you are an interplanetary species, you have colonies in space, you have already some sort of facilities for photo transfer (for getting that last bit of solar energy before you leave the system, you would not want to leave that behind) and you pretty much can fry anything that enters the interior of the system or make it  extremely difficult to approach your targets. And also difficult for you to approach them. Consequently if you had a 'realistic' warp drive  your best weapon is to drop out of warp at their position and create tragic heroes. Why would you waste 10 men when 3 would do. I mean you could even do it by de-warping at the core of a planet, with a steep enough warping of space time you should, with all the collected mass in the bow shock be able to create a black hole, not only a black hole but one with spurious momentum. You would never even realize what you created the rxn would be so fast. Since the black hole does not have enough momentum to leave the planet, the planets  core would eventually begin collapsing into the hole and eventually the planet would blink.

 

[YNM]

3 hours ago, PB666 said:

Oh, so you are writing the story now?  You are going to colonize some place that you attacked thinking that you are going to wipe out all their (spacefaring) kind with 30 to 50 men. lol.

Imagine sending your PoW to a deathcamp. They're sentient - they should be able to go there on their own. Would you just tell them "go to there" ?

Replace PoW with Sentient Ship and deathcamp to an outpost - not much difference ? The possibility is there.

Edited January 28, 2018 by YNM

[PB666]

1 minute ago, YNM said:

Imagine sending your PoW to a deathcamp. They're sentient - they should be able to go there on their own. Would you just tell them "go to there" ?

Replace PoW with Sentient Ship and deathcamp to an outpost - not much difference ? The possibility is there.

OH sure, I would pick crew that had some kind of cancerous disease. You don't want to send your best forces, and the only thing you need are engineers so basically you don't need to tell them what the mission is, just say we want you to test this ship. [Ducking and running for cover] "Scotty"" I want to test your precisions warping" "Warp in this direction our stealth drone will relay you the coordinates in route, see if you can stop on a dime". {Again this assumes the drone ship can estimate intercept trajectories of the warp ship with the target}.

But I do agree, if you had a AI ship, one hopes it wont get teed of at the person who is sending them to their death. Cultures have ways of wrapping these things up, drink  a cup of holy water, war a holy shroud . . . . .And in general someone will be willing to go through with it. You can tell them that when a warp ship stops they will get a huge intoxicating buzz.

 

[Piatzin]

15 hours ago, PB666 said:

But I do agree, if you had a AI ship, one hopes it wont get teed of at the person who is sending them to their death.

Funny you guys mention this, because in the novel I'm writing, advanced AI is banned. So no sentient ships.

18 hours ago, PB666 said:

Mostly, if you are going to attack a distance star, pretty much the men you have will be tragic heroes, send as few as possible.

Or send enough to ensure victory. Why aim for the in-between? Sure, there are a lot of things that could get the job done, but what if you don't want to destroy the planet? If you want to preserve the population and merely wish to decapitate the government? In that case, lobbing giant rocks at the planet (or doing something similarly grand-scale) aren't going to do much for the state of public relations. If you want to occupy a city or colony or whatever, but also want to preserve it's culture and earn the favor of the civilians, you're going to need soldiers on the ground.

[PB666]

2 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:

Funny you guys mention this, because in the novel I'm writing, advanced AI is banned. So no sentient ships.

Or send enough to ensure victory. Why aim for the in-between? Sure, there are a lot of things that could get the job done, but what if you don't want to destroy the planet? If you want to preserve the population and merely wish to decapitate the government? In that case, lobbing giant rocks at the planet (or doing something similarly grand-scale) aren't going to do much for the state of public relations. If you want to occupy a city or colony or whatever, but also want to preserve it's culture and earn the favor of the civilians, you're going to need soldiers on the ground.

You said attack one ship, if you say attack 1000 ships, thats a different story.

Lets go back to the arguement

Premise: FTL travel
Premise; No AI Ships
Premise: Need to attach and destroy one ship.

We need a spaceship with a man, capable of FTL and capable of destroying one ship (other than its own).

We are going to apply that  single man crew is untenable>
We are going to add the minimum number, 3 (1 man 2 women should be more than enough, ROFL, you can make sure all three are cryptically sterile so that solves 'I'm pregnant lets go back' argument).
So our describable FTL drive is one that you have to very carefully come out of warp from or its explodes (IOW you have to cross light speed slow enough that all the photons escape and don't kill you).

But if we don't do this then the ship just explodes, and everything close to the ship also explodes.

You don't need men to destroy space ships, your docking ports and theirs will not match, and your soldiers are not going to be standing in space with a shield and a sword trying to attack a ship. Space vikings are not a thing. 
So then what are you attacking with, either weapons on your ship or your ship. I mean at warp X you could actually warp inside of the ship (his shields will not stop you) and blow yourself up, 3 people, 1 ship.

This is more or less like submarine warfare, submarines were cheap, carried only a few men, but sank about 60% of the Japanaese fleet, but the occupation, particularly at beginning of WWII was very high risk. Because you actually need to be in a cluster of enemy ships to be effective. The risk of loss of life for individuals on a submarine was great, but the risk of loss of life all other individuals in a submarine rich society is alot less, because you are deprecating large numbers of enemy forces with relatively few soldiers.

[Piatzin]

28 minutes ago, PB666 said:

You don't need men to destroy space ships

Right....I never said that. I said that soldiers of some sort would be necessary for something like an occupation, be it of a station or city. Not ship-on-ship combat.

The crews are large in respect to how little a ship could operate with because they're usually not going out to battle. A lot of the times they're just traveling back and forth across systems. If, however, there needs to be a security check of a station or whatever, soldiers will be needed. You can't inspect rooms and hallways with a warship.

Edited January 28, 2018 by Earthlinger

[MaxwellsDemon]

Late to the party... but it does depend on how "hard-science" you're planning to get, and how much verisimilitude you want.

The way *I'd* approach it is to look at the functions that need to be handled on board, and decide how many of those functions will need to be manual (=crew) or automatic, and let the decisions flow from there.  Putting a crew on board comes with all sorts of overhead like life-support systems and quality-of-life factors, so they need to be fully optimized; there's no spare resources for slackers and fitting-polishers.  By the same token, though, you have to make sure you have enough.  To take an unrelated example, when an automatic loading system replaced the loader position on a tank and the crew was therefore reduced from five to four, it was found that this increased the amount of routine maintenance work that needed to be done by the remaining four because of the lack of another person to do it.  Unintended consequences...  (Of course, that itself could be a story point-- perhaps your crew is overworked all the time; or perhaps they have too much time on their hands and are getting a bit space-happy...)

To my mind, the most recent SF series that has handled this best is David Drake's RCN (Leary/Mundy) series, which makes a reasonable case for having a relatively large crew, based on the technology in use.  (And it's a darn good series as well...)

[PB666]

7 hours ago, Earthlinger said:

Right....I never said that. I said that soldiers of some sort would be necessary for something like an occupation, be it of a station or city. Not ship-on-ship combat.

The crews are large in respect to how little a ship could operate with because they're usually not going out to battle. A lot of the times they're just traveling back and forth across systems. If, however, there needs to be a security check of a station or whatever, soldiers will be needed. You can't inspect rooms and hallways with a warship.

I didn't read that above, maybe I missed in the followups. In that case I would say FTL for a 600 meter long ship, sci-fantasy, not fiction. So you can ignore anything having to do with actual physics (just like Star wars does). Since you can ignore actual physics you don't really need engineers and technicians. You can make half of your crew green Orion women.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

12 hours ago, PB666 said:

You can make half of your crew green Orion women.

That's what we are doing here.

 

[YNM]

On 28/01/2018 at 11:09 PM, PB666 said:

We are going to apply that  single man crew is untenable>
We are going to add the minimum number, 3 (1 man 2 women should be more than enough, ROFL, you can make sure all three are cryptically sterile so that solves 'I'm pregnant lets go back' argument).
So our describable FTL drive is one that you have to very carefully come out of warp from or its explodes (IOW you have to cross light speed slow enough that all the photons escape and don't kill you).

Sometimes, humans just work better than machines. Especially when repairing them.