"More refugees than the ship can support"

[Deks]

I think voyager handled a similar situation at one point with the Numerians (I think)... the ones with the Translocator device?
They kept all of them in Cargobay 2 for the most part and they still had room to spare.
If Voyager has 2 cargobays and each can hold at least 200 people (which is doable), then we are talking about 400 people for both cargobays, and extra 300 for 2 holodecks (the second Holodeck appears to be smaller than the first one though, but we can't be 100% certain of that).

Adding to that the shuttlebay... that's about 900 people in total with the corridors clean.

Also... how many crew quarters have been filled on Voyager?
My guess is not all of them. Granted, in 'The good Shepard' episode featured quarters where 2 crewmen shared the same quarters, but I would imagine that's predominantly because they don't have high enough officer status (Kim being the exception most likely as he's considered one of the senior team members).

So, even if the crew doubles up in quarters and decides to share their floor space with some refugees (at least in a pinch)... I guess we can deduce that the ship can hold many people.

Oh and there's the mess hall (not exactly the largest room, but decent to probably hold a lot of people (I think we've seen bunk beds in the alternate timeline when Kes visited the 'Year of Hell' events).

 

[spooky spice]

This was as subject brought up on an episode of Stargate Atlantis or possibly two, I don't have an IDIC memory!) where they want to use the Daedalus to evacuate Atlantis, but can't as there are too many people, Rodney explained that it was something to do with the ship having finite oxygen resources ... I can't remember the full technobabble

 

[Timo]

I still find it difficult to believe that the Federation would be technologically advanced enough that it could ignore such limitations.

We've never seen a starship jam-packed with people: even when there's extra folk aboard, the corridors are empty and there are cabins with lots of unused floor space ("Journey to Babel" is an intriguing example of this - more than a hundred extra people aboard, and Kirk gets ambushed in a corridor that was never so empty in any previous episode!). Also, there never exists a situation where a very large number of people wanted to get aboard and some had to be left ashore (at best we get bottlenecks in the boarding routines). So we never get a chance to test the limits of a starship's carrying capacity.

Yet we know that even the futuristic spacesuits of the 23rd and 24th centuries can run out of fresh air, typically in a matter of hours rather than days. That doesn't bode well for a starship's ability to provide free air for an unlimited number of people!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

One word: 'Drama'.

From a technological point of view, Feds in the 24th century shouldn't be using space suits, but a far more reliable method of forcefields...
Or at the very least a very slim version of the spacesuit that has a weeks worth of air if not more.

The amount of technology packed into a suit for survival purposes can be quite high.

 

[Crewman47]

Somone mentioned Holodecks above and I was going to say that Sternbachs Enterprise D Blueprints show 4 large holodecks and 8 smaller ,(maybe about a quarter size of the large ones) holodecks on the ship, so does the maximum evac limit include fitting people into them, with a holo simulated environment, as well as fitting them into cargo bays and the shuttle bays or could these be used as extra space?

 

[Rojixus]

Inspite of all the whining the Engineering and Medical staffs may make, I don't believe that any starship would leave even one individual behind, regardless of safety conditions.

I've never seen one do it, and if I was captain, I would never, ever do it.

Never? Would you truly risk all the lives on your ship for just one person? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

 

[Timo]

...Indeed, we've seen couple of times how our heroes decide they can't save everybody, so they decide to save nobody! How's that for a moral triumph?

(See "Ensigns of Command" for an example.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SFRabid]

Another consideration would be how fast they can load the ship. There is a HUGE difference in bringing 50 people on board in an emergency and bringing 10,000.

 

[scotpens]

Store them in the transporter pattern buffer.

Or borrow Kelvan technology and store them as plaster cuboctahedrons.

. . . So we're talking maybe 500, 700 refugees, tops. Especially if the nearest starbase or colony is weeks and weeks away . . . .

Oddly enough, that corresponds with the materials in the old AMT/ERTL model kits of the original Enterprise--accommodations for about 500 passengers in addition to her normal 430 crew complement.

According to the instructions for the ERTL re-issue of the classic AMT 18-incher:

The standard ship’s complement numbers four hundred and thirty, of which forty hold officer’s rank. Under normal conditions there are permanent stateroom accommodations for five hundred; however, lounges and cargo holds can be easily converted into staterooms whenever the need arises.

That’s accommodations for 500 persons in total, not in addition to the normal crew — which is consistent with the Franz Joseph plans. Of course, the description of the ship’s complement is inconsistent with TMOST’s “everybody’s an officer, there are no enlisted personnel,” but a lot of fans don’t take that as canon anyway.

 

[Timo]

...Which is sort of understandable considering how many TOS supporting characters there were with explicit "crewman" titles or implicit lesser-than-Ensign roles.

Also, I'm still not quite convinced on the stateroom accommodations idea, considering the earlier-mentioned fact that later ships (including newbuilds, not merely refits that might have had to reduce accommodation standards to squeeze in new equipment) featured bunk beds for enlisteds. But the idea of there being space for about 500 even when the usual numbers embarked are lower is quite convincing - figures like this would match the couple of "diplomatic shuttle" missions where it appears there is a shortage of large staterooms and even our main heroes have to pack their gear and move, but where taking aboard a hundred extra people is still practicable as such.

I wonder how flexible the accommodation really is, physically speaking. Can staterooms be combined and separated at will, by installing new walls or closing doors that otherwise would be kept open? The standard two-room suite of our main TOS heroes seems to feature two corridor doors, of which only one is in actual use, perhaps supporting the idea of flexible arrangements. This would be helpful in adjusting the crew numbers during starbase visits, but probably difficult and time-consuming for ad hoc passenger/personnel hauling missions. "Refugees" would probably still be bunking in cargo holds and the like.

One interesting idea is the external carriage of passengers. It shouldn't be too difficult to simply create a big balloon with air refreshers and tow that behind the ship at sublight... Again it boils down to it being possible to accommodate large numbers of people for short periods in benign conditions, but much smaller numbers for longer periods in more demanding situations.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

Oddly enough, that corresponds with the materials in the old AMT/ERTL model kits of the original Enterprise--accommodations for about 500 passengers in addition to her normal 430 crew complement.

According to the instructions for the ERTL re-issue of the classic AMT 18-incher:

The standard ship’s complement numbers four hundred and thirty, of which forty hold officer’s rank. Under normal conditions there are permanent stateroom accommodations for five hundred; however, lounges and cargo holds can be easily converted into staterooms whenever the need arises.

That’s accommodations for 500 persons in total, not in addition to the normal crew

According to the instructions for the ERTL issue of the refitted 18-incher:

In addition to the standard complement of 430, each starship of this class has permanent stateroom accommodations for 500 passengers.

That's 930 persons in total, including the normal crew.

Now, we can easily say that in her original configuration, the Enterprise didn't have permanent staterooms for more than 500, but she could still carry up to 1000 regardless through the aforementioned conversion of lounges and cargo holds into staterooms if the need arose.

 

[scotpens]

According to the instructions for the ERTL issue of the refitted 18-incher:

In addition to the standard complement of 430, each starship of this class has permanent stateroom accommodations for 500 passengers.

That's 930 persons in total, including the normal crew.

If you mean the AMT/ERTL kit of the Enterprise Refit as introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that's a totally different model. It's about 22 inches long.

Since the Refit in Trek-reality is only marginally longer overall (1000 feet vs. 947 ft.) and not much bulkier than the TOS Enterprise, I wonder where all that extra living space was supposed to come from. My guess is that the information in the instruction sheet got garbled somewhere along the way.

 

[C.E. Evans]

According to the instructions for the ERTL issue of the refitted 18-incher:

In addition to the standard complement of 430, each starship of this class has permanent stateroom accommodations for 500 passengers.

That's 930 persons in total, including the normal crew.

If you mean the AMT/ERTL kit of the Enterprise Refit as introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that's a totally different model. It's about 22 inches long.

(Shrugs) Didn't have a ruler with me.

Since the Refit in Trek-reality is only marginally longer overall (1000 feet vs. 947 ft.) and not much bulkier than the TOS Enterprise, I wonder where all that extra living space was supposed to come from. My guess is that the information in the instruction sheet got garbled somewhere along the way.

I believe the space was always there. One of the ideas that was thrown around in those pre-internet days was that during the refit, a lot of interior space was freed up by the elimination of some duplicate areas in both the primary and secondary hulls.

 

[scotpens]

If you mean the AMT/ERTL kit of the Enterprise Refit as introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that's a totally different model. It's about 22 inches long.

(Shrugs) Didn't have a ruler with me.

That's okay. I realize not all obsessive Trek geeks are obsessive model-building geeks -- though there's a sizable overlap.

 

[Rocketeer]

Memory Alpha list 15,000 as the evacuation limit. I assume that is short term, with people piled up in the cargo bays.

I also assume that the normal life support systems would be capable of supporting up to 1500-2000 personnel. That's based on a crew of 1000+ with 200 visitors. (The life support would probably be running at 70% load on an average day.)

 

[Timo]

Life support probably has significant overcapacity in certain ways: say, air purification must be capable of dealing with the toxic gases released in shipboard fires and leaks, and the amount released in a typical combat engagement might not be insignificant. Thermal loads would also significantly increase at such times. Quite possibly, then, clean air might be available at overkill levels, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to keep on breathing indefinitely (unless there was combat!), whereas food, clean water and waste might become insurmountable bottlenecks at the refugee levels postulated above.

Timo Saloniemi