How many people were there on DS9 in the early seasons?

[Shamrock Holmes]

Certainly, dialogue from the "Circle Triology" implies that there weren't a huge amount of Starfleet personnel.

A quick headcount of the officers present at Sisko's briefing suggests no more than twenty people present (those these could be the senior and division officers rather the entire complement ofStarfleet personnel). Conversely, Bashir (one of at least three group leaders) later claims to have access to twenty personnel (plus Quark), so if Sisko's group (including Li Nalas and O'Brien) is similar in size and there's at least one other group (Sisko comms "all units" suggesting two or more plus his own) then at least fifty or sixty Starfleet (and Militia?) personnel remained on the station.

"Over two hundred people" were hoping to get spots on the runabouts (counting only non-Bajorans), but the highest figure we've ever seen for the capacity of a runabout is 40 passengers, which accounts for the seat issues that they had?

 

[kkt]

Sounds like a reasonable guess, which is as good as we're going to get.

 

[Timo]

In "Captive Pursuit", O'Brien says that "three hundred, more or less" currently "live" on the station. The context and wording implies both permanence and generality: 300 is the sum total of all sorts of people doing long term residing, including both Starfleet, Bajoran militia and other government workers, and assorted civilians, but excluding transients, of whom there might be fewer early on than in the later years. This works very well with 200+ wanting to leave, a bunch of Starfleet and Militia workers helping them with that, and about sixty covertly staying behind in all the confusion.

Obviously, this will grow in the later seasons, with 5,000 quoted just before the Dominion War starts in earnest IIRC. The ratio of Starfleet to civilians is likely to drop drastically, considering the command structure doesn't grow much. I think we're still better off trying to figure out the makeup of Starfleet forces in the early seasons than in the late ones, there being fewer officers around who could be assumed to command significant numbers of underlings. But it's going to be hopeless in the end anyway: DS9 is not bottled up like NCC-74656 was, and the station no doubt started out even more officer-heavy than the usual assignment, there being a Bajoran-run infrastructure in place with Starfleet only bossing around and contributing scientists and medics and the like.

Tino Saloniemi

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

It may also be suggestive in "Circle Trilogy" that the proportion of non-Federation and non-Bajoran evacuees appears to constitute around a third (minus a minimal flight crew) of the personnel evacuated as one of the runabouts (Nog and Rom's, Rio Grande) is going to a different place than the one specially identified as carrying mainly Federation evacuees (Jake, Keiko and Molly's, Ganges), the destination of the third runabout, Orinoco, was never stated.

After watching the whole episode, I think based Sisko's group visibly only having five or six people in it (and Bashir's initially seems to be the same size), the reference to "twenty" by Bashir may refer a combination of all the initial groups other than Sisko's, rather than the size of his group from the outset (which is more consistent with the twenty or so people at the initial briefing.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

Hope this isn't necroing the thread too much, but I've located what purports to be the DSN Writers Guide online, which indicates that "... About two-hundred people, mostly Bajorans, still live there. By episode three, there will be about fifty Starfleet officers and crewmen stationed there."

Clearly the civilian complement expanded relatively quickly from that point (in fact the Guide notes later than up three hundred vistors on any given day isn't unheard of), but I think we can take that as indicative for the Starfleet contingent?

NB. The Guide also indicates that a flight crew + passengers total of 1-6 is standard for runabouts, but that up to forty can be crowded in if necessary (presumably by fitting a "coach" pod amidships).

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Didn’t they mention in Civil Defense a count of people in the Habitat Ring?

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

Kira indicates that there are "hundreds of people trapped in their quarters out there", whereas Gul Dukat gives a total figure for the station population of two thousand.