How many people on Voyager?

[Tracy Trek]

In "Caretaker", we know that Voyager lost Cavit, Stadi, the 2 medical staff and the chief engineer. How many others in the Caretaker's abduction?

How many on Chakotay's crew. Plus given that it was just a small ship, how many crew did he need anyway? Off the top of my head, I remember Chakotay, Torres, Ayala, Seska, Suder, Dalby, Chell, Henley, Gerron, Tabor, Jonas and Hogan. At least I think Jonas and Hogan were Maquis. My personal theory (if it was a great deal more than the ones listed above) is he may have been transporting some additional Maquis troops to a different location when the Caretaker grabbed them.

An observation. Did it seem like the Maquis crew were used as red shirts more often than the Starfleet crew? You know, the one who ends up getting killed in an episode.

Now I know that crew members were lost over the course of the series, and they gained a few ( Neelix and Kes, Naomi, Seven, the Borg children, the Equinox five). In certain episodes where I've heard a specific number stated, it seems to be (and seems to stay) between 140 and 150.

Bonus questions. How big was Voyager compared to TOS Enterprise, TNG Enterprise and the Defiant? Also, exactly how many shuttles did they lose during their 7 years in the DQ?

 

[stardream]

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/USS_Voyager_personnel

You might find this helpful. I have no idea who complied this or what methods they used to build this roster.

I don't believe I ever heard the crew count go below 140.

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/inconsistencies-voy.htm

This talks about the shuttles.

 

[hux]

Caretaker = 141 + Tom = 142

Dead? Cavitt (1st Officer), Stadi, the chief engineer, the doctor, and his Vulcan nurse. In the next episode (Parallax) Janeway says they need a new transporter chief and astrogation officer so at least two more presumably dead = minimum 7

142 - 7 = 135

Add Neelix and Kes = 137

Durst dies in "Faces" = 136

In "The 37's" Janeway says there are 152 crew

That means there are 16 Maquis (17 including Seska who left before the 37's).

If you want more Maquis then you just need more people to have died in Caretaker (offscreen).

 

[Catarina]

what's the point of doing the math? Like Janeway's birthday I could have sworn they also arbitrarily name off the crew compliment.

 

[Tracy Trek]

17 seems like a reasonable number for the Maquis ship, I don't know why I thought it was more.

Edited to add: Ok, I clicked on the 2 links. On the site I was directed to for the second link, there was a section that had 17 shuttles probably destroyed over the course of 7 years. With a number of others recovered but badly damaged. Plus, from the photo's given, the shuttle bay looked barely big enough to hold 2 shuttles. Neelix's ship was supposed to be stored in there as well.

That link also had a section for crew numbers as well, and whoever wrote it had an estimate of more than a dozen deaths caused by the Caretaker based on a quote from the episode Nightengale. Plus the amount of the Maquis crew was much higher based on the episode Repression.

 

[Timo]

If you want more Maquis then you just need more people to have died in Caretaker (offscreen).

Or even onscreen, literally. That is, the screen we see in "Imperfection", where Seven of Nine contemplates past losses. There are four there with rank of Lieutenant Commander or higher. None is named Cavit. Only one of those would be the otherwise unnamed Chief Medical Officer with two and a half pips.

It doesn't sound plausible that people of such high rank would have remained alive and merely unseen after "Caretaker". Whether the loss of so many high-rankers should be taken as statistical evidence for the loss of even more low-rankers is a different argument, but at least we can add those three people to the list.

How many Maquis could there be? Easily a hundred in terms of the size of Chakotay's ship: they were desperately fleeing, and a desperately fleeing runabout can pack sixty or so. Probably fewer in terms of the observed balance. But not so many fewer that Janeway could seriously have considered giving them holding cells instead of crew cabins.

If we wanted to get serious about the crew count, we would probably have to postulate a "passenger" quota there, something to compensate for the impossibilities in the quoted figures. It certainly wouldn't be out of bounds for Janeway to take one to three people aboard for short passages, a few weeks or months at a time, and for these to make no appearance because appearing wasn't their duty aboard.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lynx]

It depends on how you count.

A tip: Go to the Kes Website , choose the link "Crew List" in the left column. There you will see how, where and how many the crewmembers were.

It's all made up by using Memory Alpha, Memory Beta and a little imagination!

 

[vulcan redshirt]

The list on the Kes website seems to make most sense, as the one on Memory Alpha does include names off information screens, that may either be inconsistent and also include in-jokes and name drops for production crew.

Not sure exactly where I saw it, but I'm sure I remember seeing that someone did a screeengrab exercise and compiled pics of all crew on Voyager, including extras in non-speaking roles, and I think that also came to a sensible 150-ish. So, If I remember this correctly, one can assume that during the run of Voyager, we did see everyone at least once.

 

[Lynx]

^^
It wasn't me who did that one but I do have some photos of un-named crewmembers. On some occasions I've given them names from the books which makes some of the books more fun to read.

Maybe I will sort out those photos and publish them on the website. We'll see.

 

[Tracy Trek]

I rediscovered a good website with lists of minor crew members. It's called Star Trek Voyager Lower Decks. Besides the crew rosters, it also has fanfic.

Since I'm a relatively new member her, am I allowed to post links yet?

 

[borgboy]

It depends on how you count.

A tip: Go to the Kes Website , choose the link "Crew List" in the left column. There you will see how, where and how many the crewmembers were.

It's all made up by using Memory Alpha, Memory Beta and a little imagination!

That's a great resource Lynx!
Here's two more to add to your list, Noah Mannick and Brad Harrison, security officers who had recently begun a romantic relationship in Jeri Taylor's Pathways.
They were just extras, but it still meant a lot to me at the time as they were a gay male couple on Voyager at a time when gays in Trek, even in lit, was pretty rare. AFAIK they are the only confirmed gays on Voyager - and for that matter I don't know of any gays serving on DS9, TNG, TOS or Enterprise during the tv series era even still, but there are lots of new books I haven't read yet. Between Generations and First Contact Trek lit gave us Keru and Hawk as a couple. So while it wasn't much, they were still groundbreaking.

 

[Drone]

Does it matter? As exemplified by the empty cargo bay in the '37's, they were all Janeway acolytes anyway.

 

[Takeru]

Re: How many people on Voyage

17 seems like a reasonable number for the Maquis ship, ...

No, it doesn't, if there were only 17 Maquis on Voyager it would make no sense to have Chakotay as first officer and them him demanding another position to give them representation on the senior staff. If there were only 17 Janeway should have told Crewman Chakotay to shut up and scrub the floor in her ready room or he can spend the rest of the journey in a cell.

For the Maquis/Chakotay to have any kind of leverage their number has to be high enough to make running the ship impossible or at least very hard without them, they should be a third of the crew.

The Maquis ship being small does not mean there were only a few people on board. They were fleeing from Cardassians so a bunch of additional Maquis might have been in the ship that had evacuated a base or the ship always had a relatively large crew compared to the ships size. They were fighting a war, so it makes sense to have more people who can actually fight.

 

[RoJoHen]

Oddly enough, I just watched Season 7's "Repression," where Tuvok's mind melds "reactivate" the Maquis. Towards the end, Chakotay says something like, "There are still 32 of our people that need to be awakened."

32 might not be the right number, but he definitely said something in the 20s or 30s. Based on what had happened in the episode until that point, I'd wager that there were about 50 Maquis crewmembers on board.

 

[hux]

17 is purely based on the assumption of 7 Stafleet deaths in Caretaker. I think a more realistic number would be closer to 30/40 so you simply assume more (unseen/unmentioned) deaths take place in Caretaker.

 

[Tracy Trek]

Re: How many people on Voyage

17 seems like a reasonable number for the Maquis ship, ...

No, it doesn't, if there were only 17 Maquis on Voyager it would make no sense to have Chakotay as first officer and them him demanding another position to give them representation on the senior staff. If there were only 17 Janeway should have told Crewman Chakotay to shut up and scrub the floor in her ready room or he can spend the rest of the journey in a cell.

For the Maquis/Chakotay to have any kind of leverage their number has to be high enough to make running the ship impossible or at least very hard without them, they should be a third of the crew.

The Maquis ship being small does not mean there were only a few people on board. They were fleeing from Cardassians so a bunch of additional Maquis might have been in the ship that had evacuated a base or the ship always had a relatively large crew compared to the ships size. They were fighting a war, so it makes sense to have more people who can actually fight.

I based the 17 on what another person posted and on wondering how many people were actually needed to run a ship that didn't seem that big. After I read the articles from the 2 links, I believe it was a larger number, perhaps transporting additional Maquis troops to a new location. Or as you said, they were evacuating a base.

 

[Drone]

How many Maquis could there be? Easily a hundred in terms of the size of Chakotay's ship: they were desperately fleeing, and a desperately fleeing runabout can pack sixty or so. Probably fewer in terms of the observed balance. But not so many fewer that Janeway could seriously have considered giving them holding cells instead of crew cabins.
Timo Saloniemi

Whatever the complement of the Val Jean was likely to have been, isn't it fairly plausible that many more of them would have been killed outright in the encounter with the displacement wave than Voyager, by virtue of the latter's superior shielding, the damage that the former had already taken from the Cardassians, and its performance being characterized of dubious quality at least as far as the age and reliability of its engine was concerned?

 

[RoJoHen]

Follow up: I just watched "Shattered," and Janeway says the Voyager crew started with 153 people.

 

[Timo]

Or then deaths were directly proportional to the degradation of the Caretaker's already addled mind and body, and Chakotay's team had the fortune of getting there first.

Janeway also basically had a crew of rookies in an untested starship, so damage control may well have killed more of them than the initial impact. Chakotay had a crew of survivalists.

I guess we have to discuss other technicalities as well. Supposedly, the bulk of Chakotay's crew was still aboard the Val Jean when the battle with the Kazon ensued. They were all beamed out under combat conditions. Where do we hit the limits of plausibility on that? Chakotay and Kim would both have to drop their shields again and again, and since the issue arose after the Kazon had taken the Voyager out of the fight, Chakotay was under constant fire from the Kazon juggernaut...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[hux]

Follow up: I just watched "Shattered," and Janeway says the Voyager crew started with 153 people.

Janeway doesn't know her arse from her elbow.