Crew size for sci-fi warship

Would depend on your tech level. Could be entirely A.I. run or with a few dozen time-accelerated uploads or people with computer/brain interfaces in survival tanks, directing robots and expert systems. Or if it's closer to modern day it could be thousands of people.

I don't think it would have anything to do with size. I'd imagine it'd be more by function:

Engineering crew
Bridge crew
Security & Weapons crew
Medical crew
Communications
Navigation
Galley (unless you're synthesizing food like they do in Star Trek)
Etc.

I think you could really go with 'whichever number suits the story', as we don't have any working starships, and how many crew one would take to operate is a matter of pure speculation.

Does the story need a small, intimate crew where everyone knows each other? Look at the Alien movies, or Alastair Reynolds's novels, where the ships are kilometres long but they're run by skeleton crews. Do you need a hierarchy onboard, with multiple levels of command and enough crew to populate a small town? Look at the biggest aircraft carriers, which have five or six thousand crew, or things like Star Trek.

efreysson said:

Well, I'm going for a sort of retro sci-fi setting, somewhat in the vein of Star Wars in terms of technology, and very little AI after a Skynet-type incident.

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If that's what you're going for, then I'd say follow your original thought: research existing warships, particularly aircraft carriers (which are sort of floating cities, in my impression), and upscale as desired. Adjust as you write, maybe letting tech take over some areas you don't want to deal with or come up with crewmembers/characters for. Your Skynet-type incident history, like Dune's Butlerian jihad, would be sufficient cultural rationalization for a lack of excessive automation. Or just don't mention it; the audience has probably seen Star Wars and read other space operas, many of which have large Navy-type crews and battles despite the possibility/probability of AI and remote robotics/drones being more practical under the circumstances, and will accept whatever reality you present them with, provided it's entertaining and internally consistent.

JMHO...

Take a look at the crew sizes for the brand new American destroyers like the USS Zumwalt. It uses less than half the crew of the Arleigh Burke class Destroyers. Even without AI there will be more automation.

I would think actual crew size to run the warship could remain relatively small, but you might want to throw in Infantry Soldiers or Fighter Wings depending on the overall function of the ship.

Hi Eli. Go to the Atomic Rockets site, there is more information on building a starship crew than you could ever possibly need, and then some. Amazing resource all around, BTW.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crew.php

One of the first questions I'd ask myself, as a reader, is "Where does the food come from? Where is the water?"

Depending on how fast your ship is traveling, you'd really need to fill up a lot of space with some sort of solution to the problem of food.

To dip further into the Atomic Rockets fanset, the incomparable (if unapologetically libertarian) Alastair Young has a writeup of one of his starships that should become the industry standard.

https://eldraeverse.com/2015/03/15/drake-class-frigate-spec-sheet/

A frigate, so not quite a capital ship, but big enough to get the job done. He lists 39 personnel

Flight Commander
Flight Executive
Flight Administrator
3 x Sailing Master, most senior serving as Flight Director
3 x Tactical / Payload Officer
3 x Astrogator / Relativistics / Sensory Operations Officer
Flight Engineer
Propulsion / Power Engineer
Thermal Systems Engineer
3 x Data Operations / Data Systems Engineer
3 x Life Support / Auxiliary Systems Engineer
12 x general techs
6 x espatiers (cross-trained in starship operations)
Thinker-class AI

A very well-rounded bunch, if you ask me! In my own setting, the protags have got their starship crew down to six:

Flight Commander/Captain
Pilot, not a dedicated role, with such a small crew the captain usually takes this job, with most of the rest of the crew rated for it.
Comms/Sensors/Data/Cryptography/Information Warfare
Astrogation and Guidance
Flight Engineer
Payload and Weapons

This works because the ship is mostly automated and the crew is not afraid to cut corners, also they're terminally overworked and everyone is expected to have their hands in everything. It's deliberately meant to be an insufficient list, if the characters could afford more crew they'd probably split payload and weapons as well split the flight engineer into drive and power. No life support officer is present, since the ship runs an entirely virtual crew and, when their even is a habitation module, it's powered down to save money.

There are several models of spaceship types we can use in our stories. The size and nature of the crew depends on which we choose.

Are they similar to circa 1800 sailing ships? Military or mercantile? What size are they: cutter, frigate, battleship, dreadnought? This what David Drake and David Weber use in their space war series. The crew is large, none too educated, and tough as they are fighters.

Or are they at the other end of the futuristic spectrum, such as my asteroid sized starships carrying 3000 ships of various sizes, with weapons which can destroy a planet? The only crew is a Guardian who melds her mind with the AI-assisted ships and runs them with her mind. She is typically several centuries old with a gene-cleaned body and highly educated mind.

In between we might model our ships on those of the US Navy, which includes nuclear-powered aircraft carriers longer than three football fields end to end. Typical crew size is 3000 plus 2500 air crew. All have at least a high-school education, and many have advanced degrees as well as specialty certificates. Every job is assisted by computers of all sizes and capabilities.

Carriers are typically part of a battle group which will include long-range warships of various sizes, including various frigate classes, typically the length or length-and-half of a football field. Crew size of the most modern is a few hundred, up to a thousand of the larger and older types.

In sum, you can make your crews and crew sizes anything you want to tell the story you want!

Get a copy or reference traveller pretty sure they would have evey spaceship you could dream of.

2500 metres is about 1.6 miles, in the Imperial system. That is about eight times as long as the largest military aircraft carrier in today's current world. Which, at the same proportions, translated to three-dimensional volume, would be about 60 times as large. The crew of a current big aircraft carrier is . . . what? Google can probably tell you that.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the same proportion of crew would be required for the same proportion of volume, but it's a consideration. As are lots of other practicalities. Star Trek has always got around these things with a lot of handwavium like replicators and artificial gravity, and the fandom has readily accepted such nonsense in the service of a fun story. You can get way too wound up in trying to force practical science into an impractical fictional situation, and ruin your story in the process. How much of this stuff do you really need?

caw

p.s. Red Dwarf had a crew of 1 sought of.

Beanie5 said:

p.s. Red Dwarf had a crew of 1 sought of.

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Let's not be speciesist and corporealist. It had a crew of four plus Holly.

I think using real-life ships as a basic reference is a good starting point, but (depending on the level of technology) don't forget that a space ship would have to recycle all of its air and probably couldn't support the population of a navy ship at the same size.

Didn't you know that space ships have oxygenators that create it by using warp technology in conjunction with the CO2 exhaled by the crew and their compost produced from eating synthesized food.

We are talking science fiction here after all, right?

Star Trek's NCC-1701 had a crew of about 400, as I recall. Can't find a size for the Constitution class, but I didn't put much effort into it.

Current US carrier staffing is about 3,500, but that includes air wing personnel.

This questions puts me in mind of Straczynski, who was asked by fans how fast his Babylon 5 Fury spacecraft could go. His response was that they went at the speed of plot.

IMHO I think it would be wise to exercise caution in drawing corollaries between our era warships and future technology. I love Star Trek, but there was a scene in one episode, where there was something like 2 or 3 crewmen required for the business of launching a photon torpedo. Oh, mam fach! It seems they don't have automation in the 23rd century.

You're writing this thing and can cut your cloth to fit. What do you need?

dpaterso said:

The number of jobs you can think of, times 3, because shift rotations, people gotta sleep and eat. I figured around 48 crew for my boat.

-Derek

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Is this your actual​ boat? I want a boat!

I feel that crew number would be directly related to how resilient the ship is. If everyone needs spacesuits because a hull leak needs direct and fast repair, then you probably won't have a very large crew, because there's no way that a large crew wouldn't suffer some accidental deaths. But if your tech makes the physicality of space an afterthought for most people, then 200 for a 900m war/science ship sounds about right to me. maybe 20 for a pleasure boat.

Fiender said:

I think using real-life ships as a basic reference is a good starting point, but (depending on the level of technology) don't forget that a space ship would have to recycle all of its air and probably couldn't support the population of a navy ship at the same size.

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As Jason pointed out, future spaceships will have life support tech that matches all the other tech. So it could be any size, including the size of asteroids. They might even be asteroids converted into spaceships and have city-sized habitats and inhabitants inside them.

Helix also makes a good point. The ship can contain non-human and artificial crew members.

So basically a future spaceship can be any size and any crew size that the author wants it to.

2.5km is a big ship, so you can go big. A Warhammer 40k Lunar-Class Cruiser has a crew of 100,000, but that's probably because they need teams of hundreds to manually load each torpedoes and few security battalions to put down all the mutinies. Even a Star Destroyer has a crew of 37,000.