Scifi Tropes Versus Crew

[Spacescifi]

 

Most often in media scifi space opera, crews are large.

For example on the original Star Trek think they had a crew of 125 or so.

If reality and scifi were mixed with a bit more reality, I really do not think any scifi vessel needs a large crew.

At most I would make the vessel like a luxury airliner in microgravity with sleeping pod rooms.... and that is only if I had passenger spaceliner.

 

Ha! Instead of a command crew all you really need for a space passenger liner of 125 passengers is a small flight crew and a pilot and co-pilot!

So Pilot Kirk and Co-pilot Spock. That's it!

In fact, the faster a scifi vessel is the more logical turning it into a space passenger liner becomes.

The way I see it, there is no need to go all out with luxury, since even in scifi, vessels seem to to be subject to TWR, meaning small vessels are zippy but big huge snd scary ones lumber around like the whales they are.

If there is one thing space sims taught me that even applies to IRL space flight it's this... optimization is BETTER than jack of all trades... especially with spaceships.

A manned vessel needs to be fast enough to get where it is going before life support supplies run out or break. So unnecessary stuff that cuts into TWR can and should be cut out if it lowers TWR significantly.

Space is one of the most hostile places for life as we know it. So if you are going to live in space for months or years..... optimize!

No not on your ship, but a massive space habitat.

I imagine a successful one could be added onto and evolve larger and larger until it is like a city in space... a rotating city that is.

 

I mean seriously... living in an automobile is a great deal more feasible and safer than living on a spaceship.... especially the more realism is mixed into scifi.

Only a sufficiently well constructed spacestation beats living out of an automobile.

Edited October 24, 2021 by Spacescifi

[Shpaget]

Since you specifically mention it, in Star Trek the ships aroud which the plot revolves are not liners with a goal of transporting people to and from. They are more like a cruise ship with all paying customers being left in some port and crew going on a joy ride without a plan.

They are also not bothered by TWR. There is no need to worry about that, not with their tech.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

Since you specifically mention it, in Star Trek the ships aroud which the plot revolves are not liners with a goal of transporting people to and from. They are more like a cruise ship with all paying customers being left in some port and crew going on a joy ride without a plan.

They are also not bothered by TWR. There is no need to worry about that, not with their tech.

 

 

Oh I know... it is very much like this with Star Trek...

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XD66suMp3J4

 

Still... I was basically saying that no matter how luxurious you wish to make a manned vessel.... a manned station could do that job better since it does not have to worry about moving around... it can be more optimized for luxury.

 

When you think about the mass of the life support and food supplies per person required for a mission, especially for longer ones... you either need a fast 1g constant acceleration vessel or something more exotic still... and especially when TWR is added into scifi.

[magnemoe]

In part you are correct, but you would not run an warship with two crew. 

Even something like an tank want an driver, an gunner and an commander for efficiency, people has tried with one or two man tanks and they are less efficient. 
With an warship with multiple weapon systems you need more crew. 
You also have maintenance so cargo ships has more crew than needing to man the bride. 
Add damage control who also civilian ships has but is more relevant on warships and an reason why warships tend to have an pretty large crew, you want an large crew for damage control so you don't bother automating too much. 

For science missions, well you need scientist of all sort of types, and they are typically not the crew who operate the ship. 

But I agree the interior of the ships will looks more like the interior of an an working ship or warship than an cruise ship outside its the crew compartments. 
 

[Spacescifi]

27 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

In part you are correct, but you would not run an warship with two crew. 

Even something like an tank want an driver, an gunner and an commander for efficiency, people has tried with one or two man tanks and they are less efficient. 
With an warship with multiple weapon systems you need more crew. 
You also have maintenance so cargo ships has more crew than needing to man the bride. 
Add damage control who also civilian ships has but is more relevant on warships and an reason why warships tend to have an pretty large crew, you want an large crew for damage control so you don't bother automating too much. 

For science missions, well you need scientist of all sort of types, and they are typically not the crew who operate the ship. 

But I agree the interior of the ships will looks more like the interior of an an working ship or warship than an cruise ship outside its the crew compartments. 
 

 

 

The problem with reality mixed with scifi is that the most optimized space battleship won't have a crew.

 

A crewed ship doing a battle should be not armed at all and be there merely to give orders to drone battleships whose job it is to protect it.

If things get dicey the manned ship runs away faster than if it were a warship since it is optimized for manned high speed.

 

Meawhile the drone vessels sacrifice themselves as they screen attacks aimed at the manned command runner ship.

[DDE]

The greates complication is that most of a warship's crew is there for maintenance, and on a spacecraft maintenance access is greatly impeded even compared with a submarine. This may slash the crew requirement as a result.

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

The greates complication is that most of a warship's crew is there for maintenance, and on a spacecraft maintenance access is greatly impeded even compared with a submarine. This may slash the crew requirement as a result.

 

Very true... in space if you are damaged, maintenance is best served by machines or drone bots if external damage.

To be sure, any damage will likely be a hull breach anyway, so if you have a large crew you will be spending time doing maintenance on damaged extranous life support when you could have been stocked with more weapons.

 

I guess given how hostile to life space is, the only time a large amount of people on vessel makes logical sense is when they are passengers.

Small crews enable extra optimization, since I presume a non-passenger vessel's main business is either speed, attack, or hauling, all of which favor optimization over large crews.

Edited October 24, 2021 by Spacescifi

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

I haven't read everything - but a couple of observations: Star Wars style 'one guy gets into a car/truck sized craft, hyper flies all over the galaxy and some bum in a dump with 3 robots can combat repair the whole thing in a couple of days' seems glib. 

Having sailed with the Navy - they have large crews doing lots of necessary tasks with a variety mechanical and complex systems - along with massive support infrastructure both on the ship (tool shop, medical, food service, laundry) and on land.  Star Trek mimics this. 

How realistic and vibrant is your fictional space economy?

Even our current 'manned space efforts' is little more than a diving bell: complex set up designed to take a very few people into certain death with a slim chance that if everything goes well they will be able to survive and return. 

Exploration - not exploitation - of the environments. 

[kerbiloid]

8 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

they have large crews doing lots of necessary tasks with a variety mechanical and complex systems - along with massive support infrastructure both on the ship (tool shop, medical, food service, laundry)

Spoiler

 

 

[wumpus]

8 hours ago, DDE said:

The greates complication is that most of a warship's crew is there for maintenance, and on a spacecraft maintenance access is greatly impeded even compared with a submarine. This may slash the crew requirement as a result.

Isn't it something like 3/4ths (or worse) of the crews' time on the ISS is taken up by maintenance of the ISS?  I seem to remember it was not that many years ago that they were finally able to put enough astronauts on board to do better than break even.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I haven't read everything - but a couple of observations: Star Wars style 'one guy gets into a car/truck sized craft, hyper flies all over the galaxy and some bum in a dump with 3 robots can combat repair the whole thing in a couple of days' seems glib. 

Having sailed with the Navy - they have large crews doing lots of necessary tasks with a variety mechanical and complex systems - along with massive support infrastructure both on the ship (tool shop, medical, food service, laundry) and on land.  Star Trek mimics this. 

SW ends up going both extremes. Single-seat ships are the size of modern single-seat aircraft or smaller; they don't require much maintenance, but modern fiction understates this for IRL aircraft as well. The big ships, on the other hand, seem to have WWII levels of crew per tonnage.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

Isn't it something like 3/4ths (or worse) of the crews' time on the ISS is taken up by maintenance of the ISS?  I seem to remember it was not that many years ago that they were finally able to put enough astronauts on board to do better than break even.

 

I imagine that is mostly because of.... life support maintenence.

Manned spaceflight creates unique maintenence issues that multiply the more you multiply the crew.

The reason the ISS needs so much maintenence is that it is in LEO, which requires occasional reboosts, debris mitigation on occasion, and the fact that it is made of modues assembled in orbit.

A more robust space station could be built larger, more sturdy and less delicate, and be boosted up by spaceX with super heavy boosters and assembled in high orbit.

The statiojn may end up looking like a few huge cylinder modules stuck together instead of the smaller ones we have now.

 

Indeed it may have to be, since the higher up you go the less Earth's magnetic field will shield you from cosmic radioactive particles moving at high sublight speeds.

Edited October 24, 2021 by Spacescifi

[magnemoe]

13 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

The problem with reality mixed with scifi is that the most optimized space battleship won't have a crew.

A crewed ship doing a battle should be not armed at all and be there merely to give orders to drone battleships whose job it is to protect it.

If things get dicey the manned ship runs away faster than if it were a warship since it is optimized for manned high speed.

Meawhile the drone vessels sacrifice themselves as they screen attacks aimed at the manned command runner ship.

I agree with you manned capital warships will kind of be like aircraft carriers staying well back from the real engagement. Far harder to ambush you in space than at sea. 
Now I could imagine having an smaller manned ship, think an MTB trailing the AI powered ships and missiles and acting as an fleet command ship for the assault. 

In scifi they add shields to make spaceship battleship level tanky even against nuclear bomb level weapons. 
Now one twist on this is that most of an WW 2 battleship is not armored. The area forward of the 1 main turret, most of the area behind the rear main turret are not. 
The superstructure are also not armored outside the conning tower although it was armored cable pipes up to radars and optical rangefinders. 
None of the AAA guns except the dual purpose 5" guns was armored and their armor was pretty thin for an battleship. 

So doing strafing runs against an battleship with .5" machine guns to suppress the light AAA for the torpedo planes made perfect sense. 

Plenty of battleships and cruises during WW 2 lost their fire control systems and become siting ducks or you took minor crippling damage like the damage to the rudder on Bismark. Reality tend to be more interesting than fiction. 

[Nuke]

i think a lot of that came from the fact that pre-automation oceangoing vessels were very labor intensive to operate. did you know the largest group of titanic survivors were actually crew? 192 male crew members all survived and its the biggest group of survivors. female crew members actually had better odds than first class children. the total crew was well over 900. space opera spacefaring often mirrors naval tradition. so by the time star trek aired, ships had gotten a lot more automated. now you can operate a massive cargo vessel with only a handful of crew. actual spacefaring is going to take that to the extreme. rather than more crew you just use better crew, extensively trained in more than one relevant field. you cross train your crew so if you lose a member you aren't dead in the water space (i confuse myself sometimes).  i also dont consider anything we have done so far to be actual spacefaring, as everything has always been tethered to mission control. what we have done so far is more akin to taking your dinghy a few yards off the beach to go fishing while a guy on the shore tells me what bait to use. 

Edited October 24, 2021 by Nuke

[Spacescifi]

11 minutes ago, Nuke said:

i think a lot of that came from the fact that pre-automation oceangoing vessels were very labor intensive to operate. did you know the largest group of titanic survivors were actually crew? 192 male crew members all survived and its the biggest group of survivors. female crew members actually had better odds than first class children. the total crew was well over 900. space opera spacefaring often mirrors naval tradition. so by the time star trek aired, ships had gotten a lot more automated. now you can operate a massive cargo vessel with only a handful of crew. actual spacefaring is going to take that to the extreme. rather than more crew you just use better crew, extensively trained in more than one relevant field. you cross train your crew so if you lose a member you aren't dead in the water space (i confuse myself sometimes).  i also dont consider anything we have done so far to be actual spacefaring, as everything has always been tethered to mission control. 

 

True that, Astronaut Chris Hadfield (if I got his name right) mocked a movie where astronauts in trouble because of incoming space debris were yeling at mission control describing the problem in detail saying stuff like, "Houston, we have this problem!"

Chris was like, "Really? What's mission control gonna do? They are millions of miles away. In space you fix it yourself. All of us are like jacks of all trades up there."

 

I think it was Bruce Willis Armageddon movie that he was the most harsh with of all, shaking his head and chuckling scornfully.

Edited October 24, 2021 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

The scientifically realistic interstellar ships will be one-way generation colonist ships with active crew of hundred.
But you wouldn't be wanting to be among them.

Unlikely a real tech can survive more than 100..200  years (currently ~50 years for Voyagers and 20+ for habitats).
No known physics allows greater than 5..10% c velocity, and that's good, because otherwise the ship would become a radiation hot chamber.

This limits the progress with 10 ly long colonist trips, separated by new planet industrialization to build next ship. 

***

This means 100..200 years of flight duration. 

As the cryonics is a kind of magic to the known future, no cryonics.

And yes, it's a military mission with the aim of the humanity backup creation.
So it's a war time and war laws onboard, and everyone onboard is willingly or unwillingly sacrificing himself, it's not a ST/SW comedy, it's deadly serious.
The fleet costs so much that hundreds of thousands on the Earth would not die if spend that money on medicare and other.
It's a beachhead capture, with numerous victims onboard and on the Earth. It's to let the humanity survive a supernova burst or an alien attack in unknown future.
It's an assault fleet to deliver the descent of unborns, plant the Earth flag, fortify the land and turn it into an expanding military outpost of the humanity, turning it then into a civil colony.
No romantics, only ministry and hardship. Not a thing a young space fan is dreaming about.

***

As the space radiation is still there, the crew gonades would be irradiated and mutate, giving birth only to ill, weak, and ugly mutants, unable to perform their duties. And finally failing the Mission.
So, all crew should be sterilized to prevent this.

The colonist fleet should consist of ships with industrial equipment and ships of frozen fertilized ova from physically and mentally perfect donors.
Millions of them. They should be grown to quickly raise the planet population from zero to millions who can effectively develop the industry and make the planet inhabited.

So, the main and precious cargo of a colonist transport will be the refridgerator with ova and an the incubator to grow the beings from them,

And the main duty of the crew is the maternity home operation and its technical support.
Other systems of the ship will be so massive, complicated, and radioactive, that no humans could service them.

The new crew members onboard should be grown same way, from the frozen ova, to keep the crew count constant, and by default later sterilized, too.
Because the radiation will be mutating them, too, so their descendants would be same unviable.

But the things are not that grim due to some circumstance.

A totally-female crew can't reproduce without male crew members, so no need to sterilize them.
At the same time every female crew member is a backup option in case if the incubator fails.
They just have a backup cryostate of male donor material from the Earth as an emergency option.

Of course, they will be producing mutants in this case, but:

1) female gonades are several times fore resistent to radiation;
2) the male donor material is compact, protected, and not mutated;
3) the obviously unviable infants could be sorted out;
4) it's a last chance to not fail the mission completely.

In any case, it's better to keep the incubator intact.

***

The crew size of 100 is not just random. It's a typical size of a tribe able tor survive.
Another backup option in case if the fridge gets broken, too. They will be able to reproduce naturally (as the females aren't sterilized, while the newborn males will stay unsterilized).

***

On the other hand, the actual crew is ~50.
They are on watch in four shifts (three actual shifts, one backup). A dozen per shift, three on every post: incubator and fridge, incubator support, common systems, enforcement team.

So, they need 50 to watch.

But the newborn person intellect and skills are unpredictable. Some will be too low-skilled to become engineers or biomedics.
So, the other 50 places are reserved for them, as a team of janitors, 12 per shift.
The crew habitat is large, it needs a lot of janitors.

***

Obviously, the ship should have an artificial gravitation.
Say, two counter-rotating ring of parallel cylinders, constantly adjusting the CoM, with electromagnetic clutches.
Single-use, like the ship itself, but able to survive 200 years before fail.
300..400 meter in diameter, but that's not a problem because the magnetic nozzle and radprotective shield will anyway be 500.
It's a kilometer-long ship of half-kilometer diameter.
After expanding the magnetic sail, several kilometers in diameter.

***

So, in the middle of the flight they should be unfreezing and growing only female ova.
And not sterilize the grown. Vice versa, care about the crewwomen fertility, as they are backup incubator.

The women are known to fulfil long monotonous duties better than men, so the female crew is an advantage in the midflight.

But the men are better in non-standard and quickly changing circumstances. Like the departure and the arrival phases of the flight.

So, they should have a 50 f /50 m crew on launch (all men sterilized, women - not).
Then, as the crewmen getting gone from age, the ratio will be changing to 100 f / 0 m, and keeping so most part of the flight.
About 40 years before the arrival they should start growing male ova to change the ratio back to the 50 /50 the the moment of arrival.

On arrival, the crew, consisting of 50 fertile women and 50 sterilized men, founds the colony, unboxes the industrial equipment from dedicated uncrewed ships of the fleet.
Then they start unfreezing and growing the colonist ova of both sexes, populating the colony with fertile people.
After getting ensured that the process runs normally, and no backup incubator option is required, the female crew members should be sterilized as well to prevent the mutant birth.

***

Thirty years after arrival thosands of locally born colonists (from the Earth donors) keep expanding, reproducing themselves, and growing other ova from the fridge.

A century later the planet is populated by many millions of humans, which are turning the planet into New Earth #438.
(Most probably living in orbital habitats, but with agriculture and industry on the planet surface).

They are communicating to the Earth and other colonized planets, exchanging with scientific data and running scientific experiments.

Once they can, they build similar colonisation fleet and send it to the next habitable star system, so the expansion continues.

***

At some moment they discover long-range physical phenomena allowing them to exploit the precious gems of the universe, the neutron stars, and collect the monstrous elementary junk, thrown by the neutronium geysers, and orbiting in the terrible magnetic field.

Using that stuff they will build portals which can be delivered by 5..10% c slow ships to other places to perform the material exchange between the colonies.

***

The crew obviously  should be motivated, as most of humans of board will not just see a planet, they will never see any motion otside of the ship at all.
Because the drifting ship is hanging far from any visible object but stars. It's absolutely motionless.
They aren't flying, they are just existing in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the new world coming in its time to their replacement, who is even not their child
And they weren't asked if they want such fate.
So, a female monastery is the closest equivalent of the interstellar crew. And they should be fanatically loyal to the aim of the mission.

***

But on the bright side, to the moment when the interstellar ship gets possible (probably, 200 years later or so), the computerization and DNA engineering will make people equally perfect physically, mentally, and living 24/7 in virtually augmented reality.
This will mitigate any kind of personal attractiveness, as it will be a society of uniformly perfect persons with no personal preferences, which will be organized in local social teams groupped around their local community hardware, including the server containing a cast of their average personality and reproducing this personality in every new child of the commune.
So, they will have a collective personality, cloned in their cloned perfect bodies due to thei education.
They will have a collective personality instead of individual ones, treating other members of commune as other instances of their "me".

So, the interstellar ship will be actually a commune spore, with 50 male and 50 female clones, then with 100 female ones.
Maybe not exactly clones, but 100 of closely looking perfect women with same personality in head.
And the board computer will be a clone of their terrestrial commune data center. In terms of "Alien", Mother, and in this case almost literally.

So, it will be not that dramatic for them to spend their lives onboard, because it will be same personalities of theirs who will arrive to the new world.

***

At the limit, the expansion speed of the human will get close to 5..10% c, as new colonies will be permanently supported with supplies from their parental worlds, so new fleets will be being built almost immediately after arrival, compared to the travel time.

This will allow to fill the 1 000 ly local possible endemic life zone in ~20 ky from this moment.
Then cross the Galaxy in two million years. Then reach and colonize Andromeda galaxy in 60 mln years.

At that moment the Earth will be hardly habitable by high animals like humans, but this will play no role already.

The human shape and biological nature will be customized long ago, so probably to the date the former humans will be biocybernetic high-protected clusters, forming temporary bodies of required shape and utilizing them after usage. The hive psychology will have nothing common to the ancested from monkeys.
They will be interstellar nomads due to the technology which doesn't require a planet to live and no actual population onboard.
Only a flight datacenter with hive personality and an incubator to form custom biobodies and learn them in hours to use as temporary sapient bots for dediacted purposes.

***

Obviously, the interstellar ship described above is at once a backup copy of the humanity to restore the terrestrial life if the Earth falls.
Packs of them will be hidden at various celestial bodies and in deep space.

Edited October 24, 2021 by kerbiloid

[TheSaint]

Realistically, at the rate the fields of robotics and AI are advancing, by the time we're sending serious spacecraft to serious destinations, the only reason we'll be putting people on them is because they want to go.

[Spacescifi]

36 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

Realistically, at the rate the fields of robotics and AI are advancing, by the time we're sending serious spacecraft to serious destinations, the only reason we'll be putting people on them is because they want to go.

 

Space tourism or actual colonization... but I think tourism is more likely to happen first since it's far easier.

 

Any sustainable colonization involves not mere years, but centuries of terraforming to pull off.

 

Terraforming is something that requires patience period.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

7 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Terraforming is... 

...handwavium, you do realize that, right? 

We have 7+ billion people currently working on terraforming this planet and we can't even raise the temperature 5 degrees or change the atmospheric makeup by 5% in 100 years... 

How much 'patience' and effort do your future scifiguys have? 

We find the planets that suit our needs or we bypass them 

[kerbiloid]

Terraforming is... 

making them as bad as here.

[Terwin]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Terraforming is... 

making them as bad as here.

I don't know about you, but I could survive indefinitely with very little equipment over large swaths of this planet.

If we found that somewhere that does not take a generation ship, we would already be colonizing it.

 

If we could terraform any part of another planet to be as good as the least desirable parts of earth(like the Arctic or Antarctic), that would be amazingly good.

 

Regardless of what anyone is saying about 'destroying the environment', Earth is still amazingly supportive and nurturing compared to anything else we have been able to verify.

[kerbiloid]

6 minutes ago, Terwin said:

If we could terraform any part of another planet to be as good as the least desirable parts of earth(like the Arctic or Antarctic), that would be amazingly good.

 

Good fo you, but not for them.

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, Terwin said:

I don't know about you, but I could survive indefinitely with very little equipment over large swaths of this planet.

If we found that somewhere that does not take a generation ship, we would already be colonizing it.

 

If we could terraform any part of another planet to be as good as the least desirable parts of earth(like the Arctic or Antarctic), that would be amazingly good.

 

Regardless of what anyone is saying about 'destroying the environment', Earth is still amazingly supportive and nurturing compared to anything else we have been able to verify.

 

Hmmm.... wanna hear my pitch?

 

Do not even make this harder than it needs to be!

Set up industry on Europa and make a bunch of of massive inflatable habitats underwater.

Done!

 

 

Yeah... humans would live like mole rats anywhere without Earth's protective barriers.

 

It would be awesome if thinner, lighter materials could just deflect radiation and cosmic particles.

 

But we may need room temperature superconducting materials or metals to do that... since magnetic fields and lots of mass is how earth protects us.

 

All we need would be magnetic fields and either a material that blocks or deflects, or reflects bad space radiation.

Edited October 26, 2021 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Set up industry on Europa and make a bunch of of massive inflatable habitats underwater.

ON Europa there is deadly radiation.

Underwater is under 100 km thick ice, in salty water, with no light. Not that it's what is required for industry.

[magnemoe]

On 10/24/2021 at 9:39 PM, Nuke said:

i think a lot of that came from the fact that pre-automation oceangoing vessels were very labor intensive to operate. did you know the largest group of titanic survivors were actually crew? 192 male crew members all survived and its the biggest group of survivors. female crew members actually had better odds than first class children. the total crew was well over 900. space opera spacefaring often mirrors naval tradition. so by the time star trek aired, ships had gotten a lot more automated. now you can operate a massive cargo vessel with only a handful of crew. actual spacefaring is going to take that to the extreme. rather than more crew you just use better crew, extensively trained in more than one relevant field. you cross train your crew so if you lose a member you aren't dead in the water space (i confuse myself sometimes).  i also dont consider anything we have done so far to be actual spacefaring, as everything has always been tethered to mission control. what we have done so far is more akin to taking your dinghy a few yards off the beach to go fishing while a guy on the shore tells me what bait to use. 

I agree, now Titanic had an extra large crew because the passengers, cruise ships today has an large crew for the same reasons.
The same will be true for an spaceship unless you had the passengers hibernating who is plausible, plenty of mammals does this. 
An science mission or an warship will also have an larger crew than an freighter as their purpose is not only to go from A to B.

Obviously spaceships will be much more automated than ships but airplanes are not an good example as aircraft's require lots of maintenance but its done between flights. This is not an option for an long duration torch ship but yes it will be standard for an orbital shuttle.