So which is it?
Are the 'deck weenies' scrubbing freshers, replacing ducting and chipping paint, or are they handling damage control and Jump drive maintenance?
The first suggests a ship needs lots of minimum skill 'non officers' that could easily be replaced by minimum skill 'robots'. The second suggests that every member of the crew is a highly trained professional - all NCOs and Officers.
Both really. As I said earlier, I tend to favor the submarine/destroyer/PT Boat model for spacegoing ship manning tables. I live in the NW where we have a lot of bubbleheads (submariners... I myself originally came up in tanks then went SF), so I've got a bit of a brain-trust to bounce ideas off of. What these guys say is that everyone has a primary duty skill (say, Electrician.. that one ought to exist according to Book 5), and has a ship maintenance task (unlucky you, it's fresher duty this week) that must be done every day. In addition, each has a battle station (most often his duty station, sometimes not) and a damage control assignment. Just like a submarine, starships are highly technical, complex machines that require constant fiddling and fixing. Essentially, if you're on a ship and you're awake, something needs doing.
So, if Electrician's Mate/2 Enerii Doe is having a really bad day aboard the
E.E. Evans, a
P.F. Sloan-class Fleet Escort, he could wake up, eat a meal, do his maintenance task in the freshers (that's this week, next week it might be paint), report to his duy station in the ship's computer room (where he's been running down a short for the last watch-and-a-half) and have to fight a fire in the mess spaces under the Computer Officer (who is the DC officer for those bulkhead spaces) when that short causes a fire in the lighting. And since the new maintenance roster comes out by his next watch, he'll likely find himself cleaning the scorch marks off the overhead and painting it the next day...
The point is that everyone aboard a starship is a well-trained, often times highly-trained, technician. Officers leading these technicians need to be both leadership material and technically competent themselves. These officers are expected to be able to do any task in their department better than the enlisted man who does it daily. This is a high, rarely reached standard, but it IS the standard nevertheless. When you have a problem with your missile bay guidance software, you want the Gunnery and Computer Officers working on that, not changing task program packages in a Rashush [a popular OTU Naasirka household and valet-bot].
Because of the simple enormity of the tasks aboard a modern warship, I just don't see where robots could do all of it. Yes, starships would have to be very automated or the cost/benefit ratio of the energy of life support needed per man vs the number of men needed to operate the ship would not pay off, but as the book says about battle dress: It ain't the suit, it's the soldier in it that makes the difference. Besides, and I repeat, if you could automate a
Tigress the Hivers would have done it already.
But of course it's YOUR TU. Just because I don't agree doesn't make it
wrong.
