Crew of the Enterprise-D

[DavidGutierrez]

But maybe the OP is referring to minimal ship complement to carry out Galaxy-class missions for Starfleet. That would be different.

I was talking about the minimum requirement for a fully-crewed Galaxy-class starship ready to carry out missions. Basically, all the Starfleet personnel with none of the civilians attachments or passengers.

I think the 800 figure is more reasonable than the figures below 500. While the Enterprise was indeed much more advanced than Kirk's ship, the size of the ship begs a larger crew. According to Sternbach's TNG Manual, there are two sickbays in the saucer section, for instance. Or, the engineering personnel required to maintain the ship.

Yes, on person could operate the ship a la "Remember Me," but I was speaking more about a fully-crewed ship.

 

[tighr]

I still think the crew compliment was not that large. Otherwise, it would not have been difficult for Riker to re-arrange the ship to four duty shifts, there would have been sufficient personnel for each post.

 

[Cmdr.Druss]

Right. I was gonna say...
Are you strictly talking about the crew required to operate the ship itself, keep it functioning? Or are you also including crew needed to have the ship fulfill missions and operate as a starship?

All the security and medical and tactical and ordnance and science personnel can be dropped right off, they're not needed to operate the vessel. Correct?

This was my thought, all though do you need the tactical department for offence/defence? shields and weapons?

Couple of my own thoughts:
What would the minimum/skeleton crew be for an operational vessel?

For the sake of this question, lets say thay 800 crew is the standard for an operational Galaxy-class ship - How many crew are assigned to each department?
Command, engineering, flight control, medical etc...

 

[sojourner]

I still think the crew compliment was not that large. Otherwise, it would not have been difficult for Riker to re-arrange the ship to four duty shifts, there would have been sufficient personnel for each post.

Um, what? This only makes sense if you assume that a large number of that crew is just waiting around for something to do. Otherwise, the larger the shift crew needed, the more work it's going to take to try and work in an additional shift full of workers without taking on more crew.

It was actually pretty stupid for Jellico to just willy-nilly order Riker to make a change like this. Assuming the ship was staffed for 3 shifts, where was the additional manpower supposed to come from for that fourth shift?

 

[Timo]

Well, the working hours per day are one constant, and the crew count is another. Four shifts will involve just as many man-hours as three - it's just that some people will have to participate in two shifts when they previously did only one, or in three when they previously did two.

It's not as if we would have seen our main heroes stick to just one shift anyway. Even outside emergencies (when one might assume that people from all shifts are beaten to general quarters) we saw different combinations of heroes awake when, say, Riker or Crusher flaunted their pajamas to the camera.

What would be won by more shifts would be shorter shifts, chiefly - potentially increasing alertness and OTOH giving somewhat greater flexibility in responding to casualties.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MacLeod]

But maybe the OP is referring to minimal ship complement to carry out Galaxy-class missions for Starfleet. That would be different.

I was talking about the minimum requirement for a fully-crewed Galaxy-class starship ready to carry out missions. Basically, all the Starfleet personnel with none of the civilians attachments or passengers.

I think the 800 figure is more reasonable than the figures below 500. While the Enterprise was indeed much more advanced than Kirk's ship, the size of the ship begs a larger crew. According to Sternbach's TNG Manual, there are two sickbays in the saucer section, for instance. Or, the engineering personnel required to maintain the ship.

Yes, on person could operate the ship a la "Remember Me," but I was speaking more about a fully-crewed ship.

One of those medical bays could have been for civilian use. A larger ship does not automatically equal more crew.

More advanced automation systems could actually reduce the need for crew to do tasks which they used to, but now the computer does them.

 

[sojourner]

Well, the working hours per day are one constant, and the crew count is another. Four shifts will involve just as many man-hours as three - it's just that some people will have to participate in two shifts when they previously did only one, or in three when they previously did two...

...What would be won by more shifts would be shorter shifts, chiefly - potentially increasing alertness and OTOH giving somewhat greater flexibility in responding to casualties.

Timo Saloniemi

You realize that having people work double shifts to fill out a 4 shift rotation is essentially just running a 2 shift rotation?

Adding another shift doesn't add any man hours, in that you're correct. lets take for example a shift rotation of 3. You have 3 crew to work that rotation. now your boss asks to add a fourth shift. You have 2 options. Somebody works a double shift or you add another crew member. The former is a scheduling nightmare if you want to keep it fair to the entire crew and also means you'll have a shift that is more exhausted at the end than others. The second option requires another person that needs to be accommodated.

 

[Timo]

You realize that having people work double shifts to fill out a 4 shift rotation is essentially just running a 2 shift rotation?

Yup - but the point would be that the two separate working periods are shorter by half than the previous single one, which may be to the advantage of the ship in reducing short-term fatigue. And Jellico wouldn't be dealing with the long term, as his intent would be to secure the very existence of the long term through sacrifices made here and now.

We have to consider, though, that Jellico was also factually adjusting the number of crew involved in the various pursuits. He was e.g. removing engineers from the equation and placing them on "standby" security duty - in which case it might indeed be a smart idea to turn the three shifts into just two (as 1/3 of the personnel was lost), and then split each in half to combat the fatigue.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

In "Timescape", the USS Hera was lost with 800 hands. Backstage sources consider her Nebula class, thus identical in size to Galaxy, supporting the idea that no more than 800 people are needed - and many of those could be passengers, too. (Onscreen, we don't learn how big the Hera would have been, however.)

In the episode (actually "Interface") Geordi says about how the ship has "over three hundred people onboard". If the Hera is Nebula-Class she seems very understaffed. However one explanation could be, that since they were just on a routine courier mission they were operating with just a skeleton crew.

We never saw her in uniform, so it's hard to tell. It's only in the novelization of "Emissary" that she is identified as a Starfleet officer.

I always assumed that Jennifer was a civilian. Her line in "Emissary" about watching out for junior officers seems an odd thing to say for someone who was in Starfleet. She is never seen in uniform and in the Mirror Universe on the Defiant, Ben treats her like she doesn't know much about engineering/science (she has to remind him that over there she is Professor Sisko).

Perhaps the Saratoga was a survey ship, not intended for frontline combat and as such permitted to have family members onboard (she was pressed into service at Wolf 359 by being in the wrong place at the wrong time). Just a thought.

 

[Sindatur]

Well, the working hours per day are one constant, and the crew count is another. Four shifts will involve just as many man-hours as three - it's just that some people will have to participate in two shifts when they previously did only one, or in three when they previously did two...

...What would be won by more shifts would be shorter shifts, chiefly - potentially increasing alertness and OTOH giving somewhat greater flexibility in responding to casualties.

Timo Saloniemi

You realize that having people work double shifts to fill out a 4 shift rotation is essentially just running a 2 shift rotation?

Adding another shift doesn't add any man hours, in that you're correct. lets take for example a shift rotation of 3. You have 3 crew to work that rotation. now your boss asks to add a fourth shift. You have 2 options. Somebody works a double shift or you add another crew member. The former is a scheduling nightmare if you want to keep it fair to the entire crew and also means you'll have a shift that is more exhausted at the end than others. The second option requires another person that needs to be accommodated.

Another option is that you use efficiencies to expand your available man-hours. Say, you have 2 people manning consoles, that could be handled by one person running both consoles, since there is wait time involved for processes to run (IE: Fire off one search, or diagnostic, and while it's running go do soemthing on the console, etc). This one change just gave you 3 extra people for that extra shirt. I could imagine there are alot of these cases, since they're not worried about having to save on expenses and you wouldn't want to run your crew at 100% efficiency all the time and filling every minute of their time with workload, or they would get burned out.

 

[Timo]

In the episode (actually "Interface") Geordi says about how the ship has "over three hundred people onboard".

Oops, double fault! Sorry about that...

If the Hera is Nebula-Class she seems very understaffed. However one explanation could be, that since they were just on a routine courier mission they were operating with just a skeleton crew.

Or then a largely Vulcan crew handles things more efficiently than a human one...

Perhaps the Saratoga was a survey ship, not intended for frontline combat and as such permitted to have family members onboard

Quite possible - but we lack explicit evidence that dedicated combat vessels would shun families, or more exactly, non-contributing (civilian, underage, overage) family members. And Picard's mission didn't appear to be a "limited" one in any sense; the fact that he had "passengers" aboard seemed more a reflection of the zeitgeist than of mission profile or ship design.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Or then a largely Vulcan crew handles things more efficiently than a human one...

A logical assumption

Quite possible - but we lack explicit evidence that dedicated combat vessels would shun families, or more exactly, non-contributing (civilian, underage, overage) family members. And Picard's mission didn't appear to be a "limited" one in any sense; the fact that he had "passengers" aboard seemed more a reflection of the zeitgeist than of mission profile or ship design.

Timo Saloniemi

True. I suppose it would depend on the ship size and the current status of Starfleet (war, peace, etc). Though I'm pretty sure spouses would find something to do onboard in order to help out and fill the day with something other than just sitting around.

 

[Timo]

...Did we ever learn what Jennifer Sisko did for a living?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[tighr]

What I was getting at with the shift rotations was that Jellico may have wanted the ship to run leaner. Riker was concerned that they wouldn't have ENOUGH manpower to adequately staff all three shifts... which would lead to not having enough crew, since the Galaxy-Class ship already runs pretty lean. Jellico had not previously been a Captain of a Galaxy-Class.

 

[Timo]

One wonders what the crew complement of a 24th century Excelsior would be like. One such ship was lost with something like 1,200 hands in "Field of Fire", but since that was a wartime event, there might have been a large number of troops aboard. We don't know if this "Battle of Ricktor Prime" involved ground action, but we might argue it did, as it apparently is named after an individual planet...

Riker would be intimately familiar with the Excelsiors of the era, having served as XO on one just before the E-D. So, agreed that he could well see the problems in Jellico's thinking.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[tighr]

I work in a manufacturing plant for a large company that has multiple manufacturing plants throughout the country. Ours is the 3rd largest out of 30+, easily one of the most automated, and we have one of the smallest amounts of employees. For every piece of automation, that's 4-5 people that we don't have to have doing manual labor, instead replaced by a single operator who pushes buttons.

This could easily translate to starships. Reference the engineering scenes from TWOK, with the massive numbers of enlisted crewman. We've never seen that many people working in Engineering in any of the TNG films.

 

[Timo]

We could easily argue, though, that those people were there solely for training purposes - and that in normal circumstances, nobody would even enter the facility where coveralls appear to be required, and all engineering functions would be handled from a shirtsleeves environment similar to the TOS facility.

In TMP they would in turn be there because this was the first time the engines were being used.

Sure, we could argue that "progress" has taken place between TOS movies and TNG. But TOS already showed that Scotty tended to work pretty much alone, and very seldom got really down and dirty with any repair job. He was one of the few characters never to wear the wraparound coveralls, IIRC!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[tighr]

TOS already showed that Scotty tended to work pretty much alone, and very seldom got really down and dirty with any repair job. He was one of the few characters never to wear the wraparound coveralls, IIRC!

True, but Scotty was also in charge down there.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

For the Excelsior-Class, in the DS9 tech manual, it says that they have a crew complement of 750--exactly the same as a Nebula-Class.

I find that hard to believe. The Nebula has a far greater internal volume than the Excelsior, how the two ships could share the same number of crew baffles me. In my head the crew on the Excelsior-Class is around the 550 mark.

 

[tighr]

In TUC, the USS Excelsior really crammed that crew in like sardines. VOY: Flashback also seemed to confirm the sardine-like nature of the crew.