www.ditl.org

Bad guy: You're nothing but a stupid monkey!

You, know when they get around to the actual battles it was pretty cool.

Anyway...weapons are still undecided. That's the Galor main phaser, maybe a couple of their guns. 4 torpedo tubes. What else should we have?

40 10-lb. cannon, black powder, and a monkey!

Not to knock you guys off track (I've been lurking on the thread until now) but, exactly what is your expected total crew complement? It seems like the more beings you have to fill out a big ship, the bigger drain on the profits (thinking like a Ferengi...).

Guns and cargo and names are nice when you get them sorted out, but I got to thinking about day to day operations on the vessel, crew morale issues, and so on. The more mercs and freelancers you have, the harder it would be to keep the ship 'happy'.

I personally was under the impression that our named characters were pretty much the extent of the crew. Obviously there is a minimum necessary number of people to operate a starship, but I didn't think there would be a sea of faceles crew like a Starfleet vessel.

Well, when you cut out the science crews, cut a certain amount out of the engineering crew due to not being using completely state-of-the-art technology...

You still need more than just the one engineer. It wouldn't be like a starfleet engineering department, but for a ship this size you'd still want maybe two dozen in the department. Brute force for cargo handling is a lot less necessary than it once was, of course.

Captain, helm, astrogation on the bridge. Tactical would exist, but likely would not be manned all the time. You'd have the first mate aboard who mostly manages the crew. A very few dedicated weaponsmen to watch things in the unloading and whatnot. Probably not more than a squad's worth actually dedicated to that. There'd be a ship's doctor, plus a few people with what amounts to EMT training in addition to their regular job.

Merchantmen tend to have a lot of cubage for their crew. For the senior officers, it's home. Crewmen come and go, and it might not be unlikely to take some on as techs or the occasional grunt at any port.

More thoughts when I think of them, I suppose.

I think just having the named characters, and maybe a few NPCs around, would be the extent of the crew complement.

Rochey wrote:I think just having the named characters, and maybe a few NPCs around, would be the extent of the crew complement.

It's a 300 meter ship, Rochey, and pretty compactly built. Even a ship without much machinery density would end up with a lot of pipes in the end, with that size. I mean, it's three football pitches long, one wide, and six or eight stories high. It's just plain a lot of ground to cover for the engineering techs, which is why they'd make up the bulk of the crew.

Good points.
And we definitely need someone who's a good engineer just to stop the ship breaking down every five minutes.

Especially if we are incorperating a variety of technologies: Cardassian Phasers, Romulan Cloaking devices etc. I doubt the array of systems will work perfectly with each other.

Yeah, this ship is going to be hell to keep working.
Good!

Think Miles O'Brian is available? Come to think of it he named his tricorder Sally at one point. That's an odd coincidence.

But I know I(my character) has some engineering experiance, having picked up a thing or two from the best in hir universe of origin. Jabbers claims he's a good engineer. With some heavy automation we really shouldn't have too much trouble with engineering. Voyager was able to operate with only a one-person crew for a month and was able to make it, with the only trouble coming from the Nebula's negative effects. That ship was larger then ours, so I think us and our NPCs should be enough.

You know, we wouldnt need a full engineering crew if we had a bunch of Scuzzer droids to do all the repairs and routine stuff on our behalf.. then youd only need a few qualified engineers as supervisors and to do any tricky stuff the Scuzzers cant handle...

Allthough, having a bunch of expendable NPCs is allways good, especially if they're soldiers. Because, as the soviets say, "eventually the enemy will run out of bullets."

I have rudementary engineering capability. Cant restart a warp core but i can connect power relays. Plus i would have more expertise than anyone when working with the Cloaking device.

Good point, Blackstar. Though given that we'll be adding in tech from various races and probably modifying what parts we don't replace, we'll need someone to keep the ship running after a while. It wont really be a factor at the start, but after a while things will start falling apart without maintanence.

As far as my character goes, his background has little or no engineering experience. He knows how to work things just fine, but putting them back together again would be quite a challenge without an instruction manual.

True, but if added after I take command I would have some idea how it works.