So just how big is a starbase?

[Penta]

Okay.

Over in my thread on the Fed Governmental Structure, we're trying to figure out the size of Starfleet.

So I figured - one of those Mushroom-y starbases from TNG and later.

How big are those supposed to be?

I don't mean in physical size, but in terms of crew complement, officer and enlisted?

 

[The Wormhole]

Considering the size of the TNG ones, possibly a couple of thousand.

 

[Deks]

Considering the size of the TNG ones, possibly a couple of thousand.

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if the overall population on one of those bases would be close to a million.

It is after all the closest thing to a city in space, with all the necessary ship production/repair facilities available.

A couple of thousand, or even up to 10 000 could be the number of SF personnel (if we are talking about filling it up to the capacity), with everything else being civilian population.

What I wouldn't be surprised over if the starbases in TNG are actually the same size as the ones seen in Kirk era movies ... only modified with sufficiently large doors to accommodate the Galaxy class ships.

What I wonder though, if SF will create even larger ships than the Galaxy class (internal volume wise) in the future.

The Mushroom-Starbase design seems quite durable and it would be a shame they remain in service for only about a century.

I would personally prefer for those to be around for at least 250 to 300 years before being phased out.
Certainly though, SF could likely use the existing starbases to simply modify them into new ones.

Their matter conversion technology is at a level where this could be applied anyway.

 

[Arpy]

FWIW, I think Jackill's estimate was somewhere around 100,000.

I do want to know how big they are physically. How many stories high, and overall displacement compared to real world constructs.

 

[C.E. Evans]

The Starship Spotter book gave an estimate of Spacedock One--as depicted in Star Trek III--being 4600 meters in diameter and around 6950 meters in height, with an average population of around 77,000 (including civilians and temporary residents). It also noted that there were a few larger versions by the time of the 24th-Century.

 

[Admiral Shran]

I would guess around 100,000 people total, both Starfleet and civilians.

 

[SpyOne]

There are many different kinds of Starbase and station, and often the same model is used in a way that shows it to be a different scale. The most obvious example of this is Spacedock: a Constitution Class nearly filled the doorway, although an Excelsior Class fit as well. When this model was used for a Starbase on TNG, the Galaxy Class Enterprise fit through the doors, despite being more than twice as wide as the Excelsior. This means the station was bigger.

There is almost no canon information on these stations, but lets see what we can rope in from non-canon.
Vanguard: Harbinger has a centerfold of the station: Vanguard, Starbase 47, is a Watchtower class station, with drydock facilities and stuff. It is 921 meters high and has 3 shifts of 800 each for a total crew of 2400, plus room for 1200 guests or 61500 in emergencies.
TOS-R used a version of this model scaled down to about 560 meters (according to Ex-Astris Scientia).

Ex-Astris Scientia also says that Starbase 375 isn't just a re-use of the Regula I lab, it has been scaled up to about 15 times original size (100m with the tanks becomes 750m without the tanks).

FASA, back when they did a roleplaying game for Star Trek, wrote up some stats for Regula I and K-7 and Spacedock. They said Regula I had a crew of 530, with room for 120 guests.(I think: my copy is fuzzy) That's whacked: no way that thing has more crew than the Enterprise.
Deep Space K-7 had a crew of 1130, plus 400 guests.
Spacedock had a crew of 101,145 plus 12,000 guests.

One other thing worth noting: between TOS and TNG, the number of crew per unit of volume went down dramatically. This is due partly, no doubt, to everybody getting bigger quarters, and probably the new systems need fewer crew to keep them running too. The result is that a TNG ship with the same volume as a TOS ship will have about 1/10 the crew. (Put another way, Voyager has about 3 1/2 times the volume of a Constitution Class, while the Galaxy Class is more like 25 times the volume.) So to get the crews of those stations in the TNG era, I'd start by dividing by 10 and start tinkering from there.
So, Starbase 84 looks just like Spacedock but is 2 1/2 times bigger. That means it has more than 15 times as much volume. Take the crew listed above, multiply by 15, divide by 10 for the improved tech, and I get about 158,000.

A Watchtower Class station in the TNG era would have a crew around 240, in three shifts of 80.

IMO,YMMV.

 

[Penta]

Okay, most people are saying 100k, including civs. Anybody want to try to break that down? Officers? Enlisted? Civilians?

 

[barnaclelapse]

I just assumed it was the size of North Dakota.

 

[USS Excelsior]

The Spacedocks look like they're at least 20 km long.

 

[Timo]

I'd wager those mushrooms are indeed cities in space - with only a relatively small Starfleet garrison situated on a few decks out of the hundreds, and with some of the interior piers reserved for Starfleet operations. Sometimes there are starbases on planets, sometimes there are starbases on mushroom stations. Doesn't mean that the planets or the stations would be starbases.

So, quite possibly hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. And then a few thousand Starfleet personnel...

OTOH, we've seen much smaller TOS space stations commanded by Commodores, so probably all of the TNG ones have an Admiral of some sort in charge (Commander Sisko of the former Terok Nor being an exception - his station never really was a proper starbase). One might then expect there to be at least a division of Starfleet personnel present, probably somewhere between five and ten thousand people.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Penta]

That idea actually makes a fair bit of sense. It also neatly explains why there might be multiple mushrooms in orbit of Earth....And yet no population laws.

(Does it strike anybody else as odd that we've not seen real 'spacers' in Star Trek?)

 

[Timo]

I'd think that for "spacers" to evolve, travel to and from space would have to be difficult. In Star Trek, it's easy. Plus, they have artificial gravity from the get-go. So there's no good reason for anybody to "evolve into a zero-gee beast". People can commute to and from space, move between stations and planets at ease, and probably will want to. They'd consider it too limiting if they changed their lifestyle so that certain options were closed to them...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SpyOne]

Well, the exact crew distribution depends on what the Starbase does. A station like Vanguard, with drydock facilities, is going to have a lot of engineers to help with repair work on ships. A station near some cool cosmic anomaly will have a lot of science people. A station near a politically sensitive border might be heavy with diplomats, and so on.

FASA tended towards an idea of Starfleet with the military angle dialed up.
FASA gave Regula I 12 officers and 61 Ensigns. It gave the Epsilon communications station, which had the same crew according to them, 6 officers and 31 Ensigns. The commo station had 2 doctors and 5 nurses, Regula I had 3 doctors and 8 nurses.
I wouldn't put a lot of stock in those numbers.

FASA gave DS-K7 192 officers and 938 Ensigns, so no enlisted personnel at all. 8 doctors, 42 nurses.
And FASA gave Spacedock 17,144 officers, 83,781 Ensigns, no enlisted again, what looks like 600 doctors, and 3150 nurses with 400 ORs and 3150 hospital beds.

More canon, DS9 had about 300 permanent residents back when Sisko was a Commander, but that would include people like Quark who don't count as crew. DS9 could house 7000 people.
According to the DS9 Technical Manual, there are 10 Doctors, 9 Medical Technicians, and 20 Nurses on DS9, and a duty shift in the Infirmary calls for 1 Doctor, 2 Nurses, and 3 Technicians.
The Habitat Ring has 452 large quarters and 231 small ones, although some of those have been converted to other uses. 343 more quarters are in the mid-core for engineering, security, and transient personnel or refugees.

None of that really helps us here.

A station like Spacedock is a city in space. It will have a lot of civilians, and will probably also have a lot of offices for Starfleet operations and such. The drydock itself would have a crew just a fraction of the total.

So, flying by the seat of my pants here:
A small Starbase will have a crew of a couple of hundred. The CO will be a Commander, his XO a LtCmdr, and the other Department Heads will probably be Lieutenants: One Chief Medical Officer, one Councelor, one Head of Security, one OPS, one Chief of Engineering, one Science Officer. Technically, the Counselor answers to the CMO and of Security, OPS, and Engineering one will be in charge of the other two.
The CMO will have one or 2 other Doctors, and a handful of nurses (6)(Ensigns with one Lieutenant), and say 9 enlisted level technicians. The Councelor might have an assistant, or an intern.
Science will have 3 Ensigns, each of whom manages one shift of 8 sensor operators (enlisted).
Security will also have 3 Ensigns to manage 3 shifts, each of which will have 12 enlisted guys.
OPS will have 2 Ensigns, with the Chief of OPS also standing a watch, and a dozen or so Systems Operators (enlisted) on each shift.
Engineering would have maybe 5 Ensigns, and at least 15 enlisted technicians per shift.
Command would have an Ensign to serve as assistant to the XO, then a handful of shuttle pilots (5?).
What does that get us?
1 Commander, 2 Lieutenant Commanders (1 is the CMO), 8 Lieutenants, 20 Ensigns, 145 enlisted, and a total crew of 176.
For larger stations, scale that up.

 

[Withers]

Wasn't the capacity for Deep Space Nine something like 7,000 people? (I'm remembering the episode where Kira was abducted and made to think she was Cardassian... but I could easily be wrong.) If that's the case, while a Federation Starbase is obviously bigger, I have a hard time believing it is bigger to the tune of 93,000 inhabitants. I think the population of a Starbase like the one seen in TOS era movies would be something like 25,000, with a relatively small number of those people being Starfleet Officers.

-Withers-​

 

[Penta]

I'll expand on what you wrote a tad, SpyOne, for a medium starbase.

Commanded by a Captain, XO is a Cdr, DHs are LCdrs.

Expand the crew by 75 to 100 percent from what you wrote for the small starbase. It's proportionate, mostly, except for the fact that the medical and counseling and engineering staffs will be larger than usual - medium starbases I figure as being key points for personnel replacement and "rear area services" during crisis - they provide a lot of "surge" capacity to ships that homeport from the starbase, whether that be in repairs, psych assistance (oh, yes, also: Someone has to counsel the counselor!), medical assistance, etc.

If you're absolutely heretical, like I am, and figure Starfleet might have such things as chaplains, they live under the counseling dept at starbases. If starfleet uses things like carriers and fighters, there are probably a number of fighter squadrons at any starbase for defensive purposes, the commander of the air group basically being another dept head.

Probably no Marines - they'd live on the nearest planet.

Largest Starbases probably have a Commodore/RAdm(LH) (Whatever you might call a one-star admiral in Starfleet) as CO, Capt as XO (I ignore the Fleet Captain rank, because I don't think we've seen it used since TOS, have we?). Dept Heads are Commanders, *one or two* possibly Captains.

Crew sizes are 100 to 200 percent above medium starbases as a minimum, and the reality is that they can be much larger. These starbases host the largest ships, such as the Galaxy or Sovereign, and are key command posts for large areas of the Federation.

Note that any of these starbases might host transient personnel, the families of Fleet personnel aboard deployed starships, or "tenant commands" which might send their numbers up much higher, but these are the "host crews" for each starbase type. Certain starbases (SB 1 above Earth, etc) might be positively packed to the gills with personnel, including personnel who outrank the base commander.

 

[T'Girl]

U.S. Navy's largest naval base is Norfolk in Virginia. Norfork is commanded by a Captain
4,600 acres of area.
82,900 active duty military.
29,100 civilian employees
112,000 families.
3,100 ship movements per year.
Quarter of a mega-ton of cargo per year.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Wasn't the capacity for Deep Space Nine something like 7,000 people?

Yeah, but it normally only carried about 300 on a permanant basis. The actual number of people visiting the station at any given time depended on how many ships were docked there and how many of their crews disembarked.

Starbases like Spacedock One may be command bases and shipyards for Starfleet vessels, but I tend to think there may actually be more non-Starfleet vessels docked there in most cases and their civilian populations way outnumber Starfleet personnel.

 

[Penta]

That's possible but seems unlikely. It takes one ship with nefarious intentions to blow itself up and thereby blow up the whole starbase, for an extreme example. Maybe it happens on the frontier, but I doubt it at Earth's Big Starbase.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I think it is very likely that starbases are mostly civilian-populated facilities, especially those Spacedock type stations. They have Starfleet offices and other facilities for the fleet vessels being moored there, but I would gather civilians outnumber them by a pretty big margin. Spacedock One in particular would seem to fit the role of being an open port of call/tourist destination for ships in the Sol System, especially with Starfleet Headquarters itself being "just down the street" on Earth.

If anything, putting a lot of Starfleet ships inside of a spacedock isn't that particularly wise if the station could be taken out by an enemy attack. Starfleet's actual presence on the station may be more administrative than anything else, with the spacedock itself considered more of a temporary repair/service/mission staging facility than a battle fortress, IMO.