How far have they gone??

[Drew]

Use multiple ships, and rotate personnel between them as needed. If it comes to it, rotate personnel into and out of low berths.

Or be Zhodani, who can repair internal friction through periodic personnel maintenance.

The solution to pathfinding is to have Jump-5 scouts running 2 weeks (up to 10 parsecs) ahead of the main fleet's scheduled route. If they hit a dead-end, they can jump back to the fleet's next arrival point and tell them they need to go a different direction. Saves two weeks of wasted travel for each dead-end found. Resetting the vanguard's "lead time" again would take two weeks though (which might be a good time to run the annual overhauls...)

There'll already be a small fleet of the scouts anyhow, as they'll be needed to relay information back home.

Why not use semi-automatous robotic drone ships? Flood them forward, scout the area, computer log it and return to a central collection point? Would eliminate everything but the engines and computerized deck.

 

[mike wightman]

You could build a TL 14 ship and crew it entirely with robots...
or how about you put in a synthetics maker and make biosynthetic/clone bodies for wafer personalities to be activated if necessary or perhaps transport the synthetics in cold berth until they are needed.

On a big ship with several hundred to a thousand personnel on board periodic rotation of crew assignments at first to establish social groups and then after that spending twenty years with the same few hundred people is not different to factory workers interacting with the same few hundred people for the whole of their lives.

I doubt if I have directly interacted with more than a hundred people over the course of my entire adult life. Think about it, how many people have you actually socialised with and how large is your circle of family, friends and colleagues that you have more than a passing acquaintance?

 

[Condottiere]

There probably is some critical mass that allows you to stay within your preferred monkey sphere.

 

[Enoki]

Well, you could just go cheap and end up with a crew like Dark Star...