Big Ship = Big Crew?

[Timo]

The next question then becomes, how many sorties per day can such a ship complete?

In many TNG episodes, it takes less than a full day to go from one inhabited system to another - even though nothing suggests these would be next-door neighbors. If Earth were on the verge of blowing up or something, a starship supposedly indeed could shuttle between Sol and its next-door neighbor, as there is mention of the Alpha Centauri system featuring habitable planets or facilities.

The bottleneck then becomes loading and offloading, but if evacuation via the dozens of transporters available to the ship were as quick as in "11001001", then loading with the same method might be swift as well - a matter of just an hour or so, perhaps, without even a need to queue up or other organize the masses to be beamed up.

So this might be doable, sort of: six Galaxy ships each doing three sorties a day gives 33,000 days, i.e. a century, but Starfleet can mobilize fleets that are hundreds of ships strong (200 was said to be a mere element of a fleet). Summon three such fleets, for thousand-plus ships, and you can do it in a month or three (a time bracket wide enough to account for the summoning, too, and for inevitable maintenance downtime).

And that's only counting combatworthy ships Starfleet can mobilize; civilian assets might easily bring the number of ships to five digits, and some bulk transports might be rigged to carry significantly more people than 15,000-35,000, given a few days of installing off-the-shelf life support systems.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Saturn0660]

I was in contact with Ed Whitefire for a while- he was one of the people who was designing the internal structure of the Enterprise-D (BTW he has some amazing blueprints which show a different version of the interior the studio decided not to build).
Regardless of the internal configuration the Galaxy class has an incredible amount of interior space- a crew of 1000 is way too small for the ship It would be the equivalent of two persons per a football field of space. You could wander the hallways for days and never meet another person.

I always had the idea that the cargo areas where huge.(no matter what we've seen on tv). Or that whole decks have no one or pretty much nothing on them.

 

[Shawnster]

USS Voyager is around the size of an American Super Carrier, yet has a crew of only 150. The old starship USS Enterprise is roughly the same size, a hundred years earlier, had a crew of 430.

Constitution Class: Length 289m (original) 305m (refit)
Decks: 21

Intrepid Class: Length 344
Decks: 15

While an Intrepid is a little longer than an Connie, her deck count is only 2/3 of a Connie.

If you assume the decks are the same size, the Intrepid is smaller than a Connie by 15%. However, this does not account for the lack of volume in the dorsal pylon on the Constitution. That neck is pretty much wasted space.

 

[Timo]

And so is the secondary hull, which is much narrower in the Constitution. This taking into account that both designs apparently have immense shuttle hangars in there!

In the traditional view, Kirk's ship had at most eleven decks in the saucer, at least three of them (bridge, and the top and bottom decks once the bridge is discounted) teeny weeny ones, and perhaps nine decks in the secondary hull. Seventeen vs. fifteen is a rather slight difference.

And since the decks are no different in height internally (if anything, Kirk's are taller than Janeway's), we might deduce that machinery that takes space away from the crew in Kirk's ship is hidden between decks in Janeway's, making the latter significantly roomier.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

Most of Janeway's rooms measured 10 feet to the edge of the lighting mesh, the same height as the 10x4 flats which made up Kirk's ship interiors so I don't think there's any difference in deck height (unless Janeway also had Jefferies Tubes in between the decks, those darn things got everywhere!)

 

[SPCTRE]

It's not about the size of the crew.

 

[Timo]

I don't think there's any difference in deck height (unless Janeway also had Jefferies Tubes in between the decks, those darn things got everywhere!)

And that's the point - if Janeway only puts 15 decks where Kirk has 21'ish, there must be something between Janeway's decks. Especially as we can account for all 15 decks in terms of window rows (and by "deflector grid" count), so it's not as if there would be mysterious large spaces "elsewhere".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Leathco]

Honestly, I would say that certain areas of the ship are empty, for use in emergency or diplomatic situations. I can see one deck being enough to hold all the enlisted crew and officer quarters. I am sure that more realistically they are spread across two or three decks, no more.

I am also guessing redundancy would play a big part of this. We saw a whole deck destroyed on Voyager. On a Galaxy class, losing a deck, while still catastrophic, could be less damaging due to it having so much room, and perhaps multiple rooms of importance on each deck. Lets say there's an Astrophysics on every 4th deck in the saucer section, with only one being staffed. The others can be used in case of a failure in the first one, or can be used by other researchers temporarily stationed on the ship.

 

[Mysterion]

I don't think crew size would necessarily be tied to the size of the ship as much as:

1) Mission - how many people do you need to do what the ship needs to be doing? A large hospital ship will need a lot more staffing than a large bulk freighter the same size.

2) Automation - how much are the ship's systems automated? If the machines are taking up most of the slack, you need fewer crewfolk.

3) How much crew redundancy is needed? How much of the ship needs to be staffed 24/7? On most ships probably just command and control functions and engineering/life-support. On sciences/survey ships labs and such may need continual staffing during active survey or investigation missions.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

USS Voyager, on the other hand, was around the same size at Kirk's Enterprise, yet had a crew of around 150.

USS Defiant, a ship supposedly around the size of a Constitution's saucer section, has a crew of maybe 50, though it is not designed for long voyages.

I'll do you one better: USS Brattain, apparently a Miranda class starship, had a crew of 35. Lantree, also Miranda class, had a crew of 26.

Now, it could be the Mirandas were ALWAYS manageable with a skeleton crew (Khan managed to run the Reliant with just 53 augments and two brainwashed officers) but it's more likely that the older designs are better suited to automation than most other starships which would explain why they're still in service a hundred years later.

 

[SicOne]

All of this brings to mind the question, automation aside, why would Starfleet build such humongous starships and only staff them with barely enough people to run them? A Galaxy-class is twice the size of the old World Trade Center towers and scarcely has a thousand people. There could be entire decks with no one on them, like a ghost town. I'm not saying it needs to be packed like a shopping mall on Black Friday, but criminy, put about 5k sentients into a Galaxy. Then it seems like it would be worth running around the galaxy in (no pun intended), all systems and laboratories getting maximum utility and use. It's even worse on Voyager, with a crew of 150 on 15 decks, for 10 folks per deck on the average, and even then a 1/3rd are asleep at any given time.

 

[OpenMaw]

As others have stated. Resources and such may prohibit ship crew sizes, along with mission specifics, and eventualities concerning the evacuation of colonies and other space disasters a starship may be tasked with dealing with.

Also, one thing on the subject of Kirk's E. On the first and second page there was some talk of the difference in mission/time between pike's 200+ crew and Kirk's 400+ crew. I don't know if that theory holds up, given that every other Constitution we hear about in TOS is carrying roughly the same crew size. Both Intrepid and Constellation are given crew's of about 400 in the dialogue.

 

[Mytran]

Advancements in technology (i.e. shrinkage) between Pike's and Kirk's time led to more space being available on board ship, hence more scientists and mission specialists, more departments etc

 

[T'Girl]

Khan managed to run the Reliant with just 53 augments and two brainwashed officers

Khan at one point referred to the small group of supermen/women around him as "all that's left," so less than a dozen survivors.

The movie novelization said Khan used the brain-worms to take control of an additional 20 of Reliant's crew, marooning the remainder of the crew on the surface. While never seen on screen that sounds like a plausible course of action on Khan's part.

 

[OpenMaw]

Advancements in technology (i.e. shrinkage) between Pike's and Kirk's time led to more space being available on board ship, hence more scientists and mission specialists, more departments etc

I'm referring more specifically to the notion that Kirk had his crew size increased for his particular mission.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Khan managed to run the Reliant with just 53 augments and two brainwashed officers

Khan at one point referred to the small group of supermen/women around him as "all that's left," so less than a dozen survivors.

Wait, what?

Just from what little we see in that one room of the cargo bay there are at least 13 people in the background who AREN'T Khan (same as when Chekov and Terrel see them in the sandstorm). He also says the ceti eel "Killed twenty of my people" including his wife. Incidentally, this is about twice the number of augments we actually saw in "Space Seed" at any one place, and we never saw Joachim in that episode either.

So there could be another forty people hanging out in the next compartment who aren't watching this conversation, or out in the standstorm working on the greenhouses or something.

The movie novelization said Khan used the brain-worms to take control of an additional 20 of Reliant's crew, marooning the remainder of the crew on the surface. While never seen on screen that sounds like a plausible course of action on Khan's part.

Still, that's 40 to 50 augments and 20 brainwashed crew. And Reliant isn't THAT much smaller than Enterprise.

 

[Ithekro]

As others have stated. Resources and such may prohibit ship crew sizes, along with mission specifics, and eventualities concerning the evacuation of colonies and other space disasters a starship may be tasked with dealing with.

Also, one thing on the subject of Kirk's E. On the first and second page there was some talk of the difference in mission/time between pike's 200+ crew and Kirk's 400+ crew. I don't know if that theory holds up, given that every other Constitution we hear about in TOS is carrying roughly the same crew size. Both Intrepid and Constellation are given crew's of about 400 in the dialogue.

Perhaps the Constitutions were on a fleet wide set of Five Year Missions in Kirk's time, while in Pike's they were not.

 

[T'Girl]

Advancements in technology (i.e. shrinkage) between Pike's and Kirk's time led to more space being available on board ship, hence more scientists and mission specialists, more departments etc

Or (as Jadzia Dax would point out later) the crew was simply packed in.

I'm referring more specifically to the notion that Kirk had his crew size increased for his particular mission.

In The Ultimate Computer Kirk says that four starships carry sixteen hundred men and women.

 

[T'Girl]

Just from what little we see in that one room of the cargo bay there are at least 13 people in the background who AREN'T Khan

I stand corrected, a grand total of fourteen and not eleven. But (according to Khan) what you see is all that remains, certainly not "53."

He also says the ceti eel "Killed twenty of my people" including his wife.

Other ways to die.

... and we never saw Joachim in that episode either.

Sure we saw him in Space Seed, he was referred to by name and played by the actor Mark Tobin. Tobin also played a Klingon in Day of the Dove.

 

[OpenMaw]

In The Ultimate Computer Kirk says that four starships carry sixteen hundred men and women.

Exactly. I'm saying the premise that Kirk's ship was special for the "400+" crew is more or less false as all Constitutions of his time are carrying roughly the same amount.