Ship's Crew Numbers

[Badenov]

There are 168 hours in a week.

Assuming a 40 hour "on-duty" work week, that equates to 4.2 "shifts" per work week. So each JOB on a ship has 4 people on duty 42 hours per week or 5 people on duty 34 hours per week (plus the overlap at shift change in either case).

That will account for a large percentage of those crew numbers and provide surplus crew for "damage control" or to cover mass casualties in combat.

THEREFORE:
"94,000T carrier ... with 128 officers for 795 crew using the Book 5 formulas" = 26-32 Officers and 159-199 Crew on duty at any given moment.

Wow, this would have been a luxury cruise.
I would probably have re-enlisted if this was our schedule.

I notice there is one answer that is being ignored here, the author/designer did not know and thus just picked a ratio that sounded good to them. No real basis for fact or reality. Then years later, some poor souls on a forum try and rationalize their choice when, in fact, there is no reality linked to their choice.

This is probably closest to the right answer.

My problem is that I am not sufficiently confident in my figures to simply overwrite the game rules, which is why I asked if anyone could offer other solutions that used the given numbers. Maybe there is some way to justify them. I currently have the excess officer numbers marked as training cadre.

 

[kilemall]

I notice there is one answer that is being ignored here, the author/designer did not know and thus just picked a ratio that sounded good to them. No real basis for fact or reality. Then years later, some poor souls on a forum try and rationalize their choice when, in fact, there is no reality linked to their choice.

LBB5 is dedicated to Marc’s dad, a naval officer, so we can reasonably assume some consultation occurred.

 

[Timerover51]

I while back I was looking at purchasing a ship for salvage work on the Great Lakes and possibly a trip to the Solomon Islands for wreck location. As such, I became acquainted with the following U.S. Coast Guard manual:
Marine Safety Manual Volume III: Marine Industry Personnel

Part A covers the various licenses and tests required for U.S. maritime personnel, from Captain to Deckhand. Part B is the more interesting part, as that covers mandatory, for U.S owned and flagged vessels, manning requirements. For those interested in how many men you need to man a ship, be it water-born or space ship, this clearly spells things out. Using this, I have come up with the crew needed to man a Free Trader of say 600 tons. I am not using the published Traveller rules for this, as they have far too small a crew for a commercial ship. My ideas are as follows.

Captain or Owner-on-Board, First Officer (handles the non-engineering crew and backs up the Captain), three Pilots who stand 4 hours on and 8 hours off watches (supported if needed by the Captain or First Officer). One Navigation Officer and one Comm Officer. One Chief Engineer, and three Assistant Engineers who stand watches, along with three Engineer Ratings who help monitor the engineering section. One Purser (who handles the ship consumable stores, like food and cleaning supplies), assisted by one Steward per 4 cabins occupied. One Ship's cook, and two Assistant cooks (who may also be Stewards for the Cabins). One Cargo Master and one Assistant Cargo Master, along with at least 2 Cargo ratings. One Ship's Doctor or for smaller ships, either a Nurse Practitioner or a Physician's Assistant. The crew sleeps two per stateroom, except for the Captain, Chief Engineer, Cargo Master, Purser, and Ship's Medic. That gives as a basic crew 25 on up. I would view that as adequate for a Free Trader up to 1000 Traveller dTons. The crew are responsible for their own staterooms.

 

[Condottiere]

It's a warship, so gunners, which aren't needed till they are.

Damage control.

Boarding parties, landing parties, repelling boarders - the fun never stops.

The starwarship is basically on it's own, so attrition has to be accounted for.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

See above about automating paperwork. I'm not sure what '4 reports per manager' even means, but HG says for 10 engineers, you need an officer. That works out for me. It's the 50-officer command section I'm asking about.

I mean four people reporting to the same manager, one manager managing four underlings. 'Manager' would include POs, or at least CPOs, in addition to officers.

The 50 crew member command section isn't necessarily 50 officers:

Command Section: The ship should have a commanding officer, an executive officer, a computer officer, two navigation officers, a medical officer, and a communications officer. The section should also have some support personnel, ratings equal to 50% of the total officers in the section. On large ships (over 20,000 tons), the number of personnel in the command section should amount to 5 per 10,000 tons of ship.

At a guess they would do basic C3I: Man the bridge, CIC, flight ops, and aux/flag bridge. Handle communications and sensors. Keep track of all objects nearby. Relay orders to the other sections and keep track of status. Handle sensor ops, EW, flight control for a few hundred fighters.

Is ~30 officers and some enlisted all that much to handle a carrier group with a few hundred fighters?

For a good comparison with the OP's carrier, the Nimitz-class carriers have 203 officers and 3329 enlisted as crew, plus 366 officers and 2114 enlisted in the air wing, plus 20-30 officers and enlisted in the flag group. All that in a ship which works out as a little over 22000 dTons.

So about ~500 officers (apart from the pilots) to handle a smaller ship with a much smaller flight group. Even if we replace a lot of the enlisted with robots and automation, the functions still needs to be supervised and managed?

No one's doing any of that (sleeping, eating, washing, any other sort of maintenance) in combat. In combat, you're 100% in combat. I deployed on a FFG and a DD and both were in 2 watch sections underway.

HG combat can be very slow. At least at lower TLs where missiles and armour rule, battles can take weeks. Even at TL-15 it can take average 30 rounds (10 h) to achieve a single successful hit and penetration with a spinal, battles can take days.

We were told if a drill went on for more than 6-8 hours, they would send us a bag lunch from the galley, though it never happened, but regardless, we just toughed it out. Even bathroom breaks require special coordination because you have to break the sealed structural integrity of the ship to get from your battle station to the head.

Sure, humans can tough it out for 8 h, but not a few days. If you want your 100 billion credit machine to work reasonably effectively for a week in combat you need several shifts.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I notice there is one answer that is being ignored here, the author/designer did not know and thus just picked a ratio that sounded good to them. No real basis for fact or reality. Then years later, some poor souls on a forum try and rationalize their choice when, in fact, there is no reality linked to their choice.

Well, of course. It's a game set thousands of years into the future...

Imagine a bunch of ancient Greeks discussing "flying ships" on the basis of galleys. How many rowers would a flying ship need?

 

[Badenov]

I mean four people reporting to the same manager, one manager managing four underlings. 'Manager' would include POs, or at least CPOs, in addition to officers.

The 50 crew member command section isn't necessarily 50 officers:

At a guess they would do basic C3I: Man the bridge, CIC, flight ops, and aux/flag bridge. Handle communications and sensors. Keep track of all objects nearby. Relay orders to the other sections and keep track of status. Handle sensor ops, EW, flight control for a few hundred fighters.

So, the Command section for a ~94,000 dT ship is 48 Officers plus 24 enlisted. There is no aux con installed because any hit likely to take out the bridge will be catastrophic and take out all of the crew, leaving no one to crew the ship from the bridge or aux conn.

Is ~30 officers and some enlisted all that much to handle a carrier group with a few hundred fighters?

So my example ship was not a carrier per se, but a single-ship ferry. I agree a carrier would require different crew numbers.

So about ~500 officers (apart from the pilots) to handle a smaller ship with a much smaller flight group. Even if we replace a lot of the enlisted with robots and automation, the functions still needs to be supervised and managed?

HG combat can be very slow. At least at lower TLs where missiles and armour rule, battles can take weeks. Even at TL-15 it can take average 30 rounds (10 h) to achieve a single successful hit and penetration with a spinal, battles can take days.

This ^ is surprising to me. I've never had the chance to play it out, but I've run a few mock battles by crunching the numbers, and none took nearly this long. Most were effectively over in 3-6 rounds, but were fleet actions using trillion-credit-sized fleets.

So for a single, smaller ship, like my 19,000-ton light battleship (sheet attatched, possible at TL15, and you get 47 in a trillion-credit fleet), the base to hit of 4, -6 for agility is 10, pilot 3 (surely there's one pilot 3 in the subsector - this is where you want them) pushes that to 11, size +0, that's 3/36 or 1 in 12 chance to hit, and cut roughly in half with screens, I can see that going for a long while if it's one-on-one. So, giving 2 negations with dampers before the third hit connects, that does work out to 36 turns or 12 hours. If the dampers do hold a third time, it's 4 more hours, so 16 hours total. Still not a days-long battle, and only 1 in 8 (closer to 42% each time, so more like 1 in 13.5) should make that meson screen roll three times and go to 16 hours.

Not that I expect to fight one-on-one ever, because it's not a good plan. A Lurenti can drop fourteen 10,000dT SDBs (basically the SDB version of the attached battleship) with thrust 6, armor 15, and a spinal meson N in any system I like. I might get 2-3 damaged against something like a Tigress-class, but that fat target is getting hit on a 9 or better, not an 11, so with 14 ships, that's 3 hits a turn to try against the meson screens. The Tigress lucky to last one or two rounds, it'd be a very long shot to last even an hour. None of the other dreadnaughts in the wiki on travellerRPG.com are as butch as the Tigress, many by a large margin, and my tiny fleet is far more cost-effective.

Sure, humans can tough it out for 8 h, but not a few days. If you want your 100 billion credit machine to work reasonably effectively for a week in combat you need several shifts.

So, this is not a thing I had planned on. I agree that if a fight lasts longer than 8-12 hours, it would need to be done in shifts, but to stretch a fight out that long requires desperately under-equipping star systems, which I cannot understand and which is wildly irresponsible (which of course does not stop greedy nobles from doing it). A Lurenti can carry 140,000 tons of SDBs. If you fill them up with TL15 SDBs, under 10,000dT each , you can plant a solid defense throughout whatever region you care about as fast as the shipyards can churn out ships (which admittedly is not very fast).

So this tactics interlude is all tangential to the original discussion of crew bloat. I can accept that if combat goes past 8 hours, you would need to send part of your crew to rest and fight on at partial-strength, but only in MgT1, in CT that does not work. For CT, at any strength less than full strength,the ship can no longer fire weapons. This implies deliberately over-crewing even more so you're at 100% of required crew with some of your crew sleeping. This may be a good use for frozen watch, to wake up if the skipper needs to send half his GQ crew to sleep in shifts. With half-crew worth of frozen watch, you could wake them, send half the main crew to sleep, then wake the sleepers and send the other half of the main crew to sleep, and run in shifts until the crisis was over.

 

[Spinward Flow]

If anyone wants to know what massed fleet on massed fleet action would "look like" with 2000 starships firing away, Time on Target to overwhelm defenses and achieve mission kills, at an opposing 2000 starships ... it would look kind of like this:

Yes, the LBB5.80 parallels are STRONG in this video, including the age old notion of "two lines of musketeers forming up to use volley fire at each other" in order to determine who "wins" the battle.

Except, in space, the scale is completely different.
Each of those starships going will have crews onboard, very likely to the tune of hundreds (if not thousands) per starship.
A fleet of 2000 starships lining up for battle like this could involve in excess of 1 million crew per side.

If you think in terms of 50% casualties per side, that's easily 1 million lives lost between both sides of the battle.
Even for an interstellar polity which has worlds with populations in the tens of billions ... that's a LOT of trained people to lose in an afternoon. There will be limits on how many such battles can be won/lost before the logistics of reinforcements reaches its breakpoint against such rapid attrition and losses in combat.

HG combat can be very slow. At least at lower TLs where missiles and armour rule, battles can take weeks. Even at TL-15 it can take average 30 rounds (10 h) to achieve a single successful hit and penetration with a spinal, battles can take days.

I sincerely doubt that.
POORLY LED fleet battles might have that problem, but if the fight is something of a battle of attrition between 2 sides ... the "tide" of battle will tend to assert itself relatively early (within the first hour of engagement). Depending on the details, the battle of attrition can be "over" relatively quickly, moving the engagement into a question of retreat and mop up to complete a victory.

 

[atpollard]

Wow, this would have been a luxury cruise.
I would probably have re-enlisted if this was our schedule.

YOU were not an ASTRONAUT ... just saying, Traveller is closer to NASA (or Google) than the modern NAVY that also cannot retain crew for 3 Terms.

 

[Badenov]

YOU were not an ASTRONAUT ... just saying, Traveller is closer to NASA (or Google) than the modern NAVY that also cannot retain crew for 3 Terms.

.....

Except, in space, the scale is completely different.
Each of those starships going will have crews onboard, very likely to the tune of hundreds (if not thousands) per starship.
A fleet of 2000 starships lining up for battle like this could involve in excess of 1 million crew per side.
.....

At 1 million crew per side, or even 1000, you're not fielding astronaut-level people. Traveller is closer to Looney Tunes than anything reasonable, from what I've seen. I rolled this idiot and he got a commission in his first term. This is not astronaut-level. This is might be Looney Tunes-level, if Elmer Fudd got a commission in the Imperial Navy.

 

[atpollard]

At 1 million crew per side, or even 1000, you're not fielding astronaut-level people.

I didn't say you were fielding astronaut level people ... I said TRAVELLER had NASA or GOOGLE level of employee retention and not US NAVY level of non-retention across 3 Terms (12 years). Therefore, a Traveller Starship probably treats its people more like NASA and GOOGLE treat their employees (to retain them) rather than how the NAVY treats its people (to lose them).

Traveller is closer to Looney Tunes than anything reasonable, from what I've seen. I rolled this idiot and he got a commission in his first term. This is not astronaut-level. This is might be Looney Tunes-level, if Elmer Fudd got a commission in the Imperial Navy.
View attachment 5780

Thanks ... You just provided me with my next NPC for my 30 day challenge!
[I pick up the gauntlet.]

 

[Condottiere]

Battles can be a series of engagements, until one or both sides disengages or is destroyed.

So if the plan is to extend that time, you'll want to set up reserves, and resupplies.

 

[Badenov]

I didn't say you were fielding astronaut level people ... I said TRAVELLER had NASA or GOOGLE level of employee retention and not US NAVY level of non-retention across 3 Terms (12 years). Therefore, a Traveller Starship probably treats its people more like NASA and GOOGLE treat their employees (to retain them) rather than how the NAVY treats its people (to lose them).

Well, if reenlistment for the Navy is 6+, that's 72% of the people that want to re-enlist are allowed to do so. That doesn't mean 72% do reenlist, because of the 17% chance of horrible death that I'm sure is not on any recruiting posters. I would not reenlist in a service where the odds were like Russian Roulette.

Thanks ... You just provided me with my next NPC for my 30 day challenge!
[I pick up the gauntlet.]

Go for it, I am now eager to see the write up.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Traveller is closer to Looney Tunes than anything reasonable, from what I've seen. I rolled this idiot and he got a commission in his first term. This is not astronaut-level. This is might be Looney Tunes-level, if Elmer Fudd got a commission in the Imperial Navy.

Peter Principle: People tend to rise to their "level of respective incompetence."

Your "loony tunes" ensign got promoted to O1 ... and then "promptly" washed out of the service at age 22 after a single term.

Given the character's social standing of 9, they probably got their commission from a "connected" recommendation ... and then proceeded to fail miserably once given actual responsibilities. My (fluff text) interpretation of the outcome would be that when "personal merit" became a required qualification, this idiot couldn't hack it and got drummed out of the service as quickly (and politely) as possible.

 

[Badenov]

Peter Principle: People tend to rise to their "level of respective incompetence."

Your "loony tunes" ensign got promoted to O1 ... and then "promptly" washed out of the service at age 22 after a single term.

Given the character's social standing of 9, they probably got their commission from a "connected" recommendation ... and then proceeded to fail miserably once given actual responsibilities. My (fluff text) interpretation of the outcome would be that when "personal merit" became a required qualification, this idiot couldn't hack it and got drummed out of the service as quickly (and politely) as possible.

So he didn't wash out, I chose to not reenlist him. I agree he might have gotten commisioned based on his social, but that means the Navy is not bothered about commisioning complete idiots. The character is literally in the dumbest 3% of the population. McNamara didn't even dig that low, and particularly didn't commission them, and their lack of success is well-documented.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

So, the Command section for a ~94,000 dT ship is 48 Officers plus 24 enlisted.

No, it's 94000/10000×5 = 47 personnel including 33% ratings.

Command Section: The ship should have a commanding officer, an executive officer, a computer officer, two navigation officers, a medical officer, and a com- munications officer. The section should also have some support personnel, ratings equal to 50% of the total officers in the section. On large ships (over 20,000 tons), the number of personnel in the command section should amount to 5 per 10,000 tons of ship.

So, about 31 officers and 16 ratings.

There is no aux con installed because any hit likely to take out the bridge will be catastrophic and take out all of the crew, leaving no one to crew the ship from the bridge or aux conn.

For RP purposes you can have as many rooms as you want, including an aux. bridge or CIC (see Kinunir). Won't save you from a critical hit of course.

So my example ship was not a carrier per se, but a single-ship ferry. I agree a carrier would require different crew numbers.

OK, here we run into the level of simplification, it's the same size Command Section for a battleship, a carrier, and a transport.

This ^ is surprising to me. I've never had the chance to play it out, but I've run a few mock battles by crunching the numbers, and none took nearly this long. Most were effectively over in 3-6 rounds, but were fleet actions using trillion-credit-sized fleets.

So for a single, smaller ship, like my 19,000-ton light battleship (sheet attatched, possible at TL15, and you get 47 in a trillion-credit fleet), the base to hit of 4, -6 for agility is 10, pilot 3 (surely there's one pilot 3 in the subsector - this is where you want them) pushes that to 11, size +0, that's 3/36 or 1 in 12 chance to hit, and cut roughly in half with screens, I can see that going for a long while if it's one-on-one. So, giving 2 negations with dampers before the third hit connects, that does work out to 36 turns or 12 hours. If the dampers do hold a third time, it's 4 more hours, so 16 hours total. Still not a days-long battle, and only 1 in 8 (closer to 42% each time, so more like 1 in 13.5) should make that meson screen roll three times and go to 16 hours.

It can be even worse, as we are using secondary armament to degrade the spinal. It will not stay full factor for long.

So this tactics interlude is all tangential to the original discussion of crew bloat. I can accept that if combat goes past 8 hours, you would need to send part of your crew to rest and fight on at partial-strength, but only in MgT1, in CT that does not work. For CT, at any strength less than full strength,the ship can no longer fire weapons. This implies deliberately over-crewing even more so you're at 100% of required crew with some of your crew sleeping.

Below the level of simplification. A crew hit is assumed to kill about 90% of the crew (before errata).

The normal crew requirements covers normal operations, that might include extended ops in shifts.

This may be a good use for frozen watch, to wake up if the skipper needs to send half his GQ crew to sleep in shifts. With half-crew worth of frozen watch, you could wake them, send half the main crew to sleep, then wake the sleepers and send the other half of the main crew to sleep, and run in shifts until the crisis was over.

Reviving a frozen watch kills a fraction of the frozen crew. Presumably only used in an emergency.

 

[Badenov]

No, it's 94000/10000×5 = 47 personnel including 33% ratings.

So, about 31 officers and 16 ratings.

So I have been misreading that this whole time as 5 officers x tonnage/10,000 plus 50% of that number as enlisted rather than as 5 people x tonnage/10,000, of proportioned as N officers +0.5N enlisted. Thank you for noticing this, it will change my numbers, though I don't think by much.

For RP purposes you can have as many rooms as you want, including an aux. bridge or CIC (see Kinunir). Won't save you from a critical hit of course.

Yes, but without allocating tonnage for a second bridge, one bridge hit takes out all your control, however distributed it is.

OK, here we run into the level of simplification, it's the same size Command Section for a battleship, a carrier, and a transport.

It can be even worse, as we are using secondary armament to degrade the spinal. It will not stay full factor for long.

Yes, but it doesn't degrade as fast as all that. Between agility and dampers, nuke missiles won't appreciably degrade a spinal unless you dump everything onto one or maybe two targets. A Tigress with 430 nuke battery 9's still needs a 9 to hit, and needs a 10 to beat the nuke dampers. That's about 20 actual hits, which are distributed evenly between the weapons. That degrades the hell out of the spinal, but doesn't completely pull the teeth. And only 1 of the opposing fleet takes that damage.

Below the level of simplification. A crew hit is assumed to kill about 90% of the crew (before errata).

The normal crew requirements covers normal operations, that might include extended ops in shifts.

Yes, but a typical spinal N hit is generally good for 3 or 4 crew hits depending on the exact rolls, one on Interior Explosion and 2-3 on Radiation. That's on a target with Crew Size 3. Even if you only get two, that's 2/3 the crew after errata. The spinal T of course gets even more hits.

Reviving a frozen watch kills a fraction of the frozen crew. Presumably only used in an emergency.

A fight in which someone's shooting at you with a spinal mount for 8-12 hours almost certainly qualifies as emergency.

 

[kilemall]

So I have been misreading that this whole time as 5 officers x tonnage/10,000 plus 50% of that number as enlisted rather than as 5 people x tonnage/10,000, of proportioned as N officers +0.5N enlisted. Thank you for noticing this, it will change my numbers, though I don't think by much.

Yes, but without allocating tonnage for a second bridge, one bridge hit takes out all your control, however distributed it is.

Yes, but it doesn't degrade as fast as all that. Between agility and dampers, nuke missiles won't appreciably degrade a spinal unless you dump everything onto one or maybe two targets. A Tigress with 430 nuke battery 9's still needs a 9 to hit, and needs a 10 to beat the nuke dampers. That's about 20 actual hits, which are distributed evenly between the weapons. That degrades the hell out of the spinal, but doesn't completely pull the teeth. And only 1 of the opposing fleet takes that damage.

Yes, but a typical spinal N hit is generally good for 3 or 4 crew hits depending on the exact rolls, one on Interior Explosion and 2-3 on Radiation. That's on a target with Crew Size 3. Even if you only get two, that's 2/3 the crew after errata. The spinal T of course gets even more hits.

A fight in which someone's shooting at you with a spinal mount for 8-12 hours almost certainly qualifies as emergency.

On the crew hits I thought the errata was 10% per hit.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

On the crew hits I thought the errata was 10% per hit.

One crew section per 1000 Dt (rounded up). A 200 kDt battleship has 200 crew sections and can take 200 crew hits.
Toss in a few low berths in a corner and crew hits are irrelevant...

 

[AnotherDilbert]

So I have been misreading that this whole time as 5 officers x tonnage/10,000 plus 50% of that number as enlisted rather than as 5 people x tonnage/10,000, of proportioned as N officers +0.5N enlisted. Thank you for noticing this, it will change my numbers, though I don't think by much.

Agreed, not much. A rounding error compared to the armies of engineers and service crew.

Yes, but it doesn't degrade as fast as all that. Between agility and dampers, nuke missiles won't appreciably degrade a spinal unless you dump everything onto one or maybe two targets.

Degrade a Mes-J one step to Mes-H and the kill chance goes down from ~1/30 to ~1/50 against a well-defended ship, because the lower screen penetration chance. That only takes a single Wpn hit.

Larger guns are more resilient, but there are a lot less of them...

A Tigress with 430 nuke battery 9's still needs a 9 to hit, and needs a 10 to beat the nuke dampers. That's about 20 actual hits, which are distributed evenly between the weapons. That degrades the hell out of the spinal, but doesn't completely pull the teeth. And only 1 of the opposing fleet takes that damage.

Or degrades 20 enemy spinals one step each every round...

A Tigress is an inefficient abomination in HG combat, basically just a hapless target...

Yes, but a typical spinal N hit is generally good for 3 or 4 crew hits depending on the exact rolls, one on Interior Explosion and 2-3 on Radiation. That's on a target with Crew Size 3. Even if you only get two, that's 2/3 the crew after errata. The spinal T of course gets even more hits.

With the errata one crew section per 1000 Dt, no longer a problem. Fuel Tanks Shattered is the problem...

A fight in which someone's shooting at you with a spinal mount for 8-12 hours almost certainly qualifies as emergency.

I suspect an automatic 8% crew loss at the start of every battle would affect morale and retention negatively...