Crew size for sci-fi warship

Laer Carroll

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One of the questions we need to consider in future war craft (or future commerce craft, for that matter) is not only crew size but also crew QUALITY.

Today's modern soldier is tech savvy, even the ground troops, because they operate modern equipment. Ground troops use four-wheelers to move over rough ground. They fly drones to recon rough country and urban terrain. They have smartphones (or even smart helmets) programmed with maps that are constantly updated with the locations of friendly and enemy troops. At border checkpoints and in field interrogation some can use facial recognition to identify possible enemies and see if they are in a growing database of previous contacts.

In fighter, bomber, and recon aircraft crew use advanced sensor suites which "fuse" info from many sources: radar of several types, infrared, satellite imagery, and more. Engineers try to make using such equipment easy to use, but even so it takes trained personnel to successfully use it.

Now think ahead to the future. AI is increasingly sophisticated and useful, but there's still far to go before we have full AI robots which mimic all human functions, including self-awareness and emotions. No matter how smart the AI programs and machines get up to that point it still will take lots of training to know how to make full use of them. An AI program can be incredibly smart in some ways and incredibly dumb in others.

And if our crew includes aliens. Well, other crew will have to understand their psychology to avoid offending or misusing them to get their jobs done. So, again, crew QUALITY is as important as crew size.
 

dickson

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This is a delightful thread!

In my work-in-progress, I use a 100 km X 50 km craft that is a quilt made from pieces of differentiated asteroids, and I gifted it with a population of 16,000,000 mixed biological beings and a large number of robots. It's as much a mobile city-state as it is a vessel. Oh, and yes: About 90% of the total mass of the fully laden system is in the form of relativistic protons and antiprotons, used for navigating at semirelativistic speeds between nodes of a hyperfast travel network (q.v. Alcubierre and Krasnikov, variously) The inhabited bits are fairly crowded.

All the stats made up for purposes of the story; I suppose I could spend more time fretting about the plausibility of this concept, but it serves the needs of my tale. I think that should be the reigning consideration.