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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 25, 2019 20:09:30 GMT
Of course, a myriad of different scenarios exist. COADE's Fission Engines zip around the solsys in Months. Antimatter Engines zip around in days or Weeks. Chemical ones up to years. The longer the cruise, the more worthwhile it may be to have more crew on hand, but probably not by much, just a few spare hands to help out, yea? The less efficient your propulsion tech, the more prohibitive it's going to be to have a large crew and the harder it's going be to justify lugging around large complement of specialists on a single ship.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 25, 2019 23:45:57 GMT
2 people. One who works and one for the company! Assuming you always want someone awake that’s 6 people instead. But how realistic is it for six people to run a warship? Not at all, really. I think many are way too optimistic by an order of magnitude. Underneath all that automation in the software suite, we’re still dealing with real physics: electronics, mechanics, pnueumatics, and hydraulics, the same systems as always. These are not only prone to in-flight failure (temporarily attenuated by pre-flight maintenance, limiting operational time), but also require constant monitoring (necessarily increasing workload). You’re going to need a commander, executive officer, assistant(s), astrogator, weapons systems officer(s), non-weapon systems officer(s), countermeasures officer, electronic warfare officer, supply officer, medical officer, engineers, technicians, and so on and such. I think 24 is a (more reasonable) minimum. In CDE, we can pause. In reality, you cannot pause. Many of the important macroscopic decisions we make would have to be made live. That takes people, a lot of alert people. The astrogator/navigator, for instance, may have to supervise HOW the ship manuevers into a firing position, HOW it manuevers to avoid fire, HOW it takes evasive action in response to immediate fire, and to supervise not only the AI decision-making, but also THAT the ship’s actual movements match the predictions AND to supervise that all thrust and thrust-related systems (including sensors) are operating OK. There’s a reason why military airplanes take an hour to get off the ground, fly for 2-4 hours, and then spend another six hours on the ground and get hours of maintenance per flight hour... and that’s just an airplane! I imagine sea ships are even worse off. I think US Cyclones are a good reference. This is one of the best apologetics I've seen for Navigators/Astrogators writ large, and sort of what I'm seeking. In Space, of course, everyone needs a darn good reason to be there, and I had seen so little for the Navigator I had scrapped it out for AI controlled and plotted courses and jerkiness during battle. Can we expand on this? It's been said, for example, that the CO deals with the external goals of a ship; dealing with it in their pocket against the greater world, while a XO deals with the stuff going inside the ship; such as crew discipline and overview. Of course, a myriad of different scenarios exist. COADE's Fission Engines zip around the solsys in Months. Antimatter Engines zip around in days or Weeks. Chemical ones up to years. The longer the cruise, the more worthwhile it may be to have more crew on hand, but probably not by much, just a few spare hands to help out, yea? The less efficient your propulsion tech, the more prohibitive it's going to be to have a large crew and the harder it's going be to justify lugging around large complement of specialists on a single ship. Related to this, the more efficient, the more crew one can potentially afford?
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Post by gyratron on Mar 26, 2019 1:35:27 GMT
Apologetics? At least nine tenths of the tactical decisions your warship is likely to make are navigation decisions- where and how to best spend your limited delta-v depends on a huge number of often unclear factors, it's not something you can just autopilot. If you can have only one crewmember it should be an astrogator.
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Post by Apotheon on Mar 26, 2019 20:30:40 GMT
I know a lot (still amateur) about US Army organisation, but unfortunately, I don’t know as much about the US Navy or Air Force. But seaships are probably great references for spaceships. There are things that speak for small autonomous crew sizes, but also things that speak against.
- The Zumwalt crew size is only 147, compared to the Arleigh Burkes (276) and Ticonderogas (330) they’re replacing, while the Littoral Combat Ships (Freedom and Independence) crew size is only 40 (+10 in Freedom), compared to the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates (176) and Cyclone corvettes (28) they’re replacing.
- A part of the reductions above is due to budget and because maintenance is increasingly moved to the shore, rather than automation or capability.
- US Navy attack and missile submarine crew size is approximately constant since 1976 and 1959, respectively, and isn’t set to change until earliest 2080.
- Spaceships must be able to operate independently even in electronic warfare environments, when communications are stopped.
- Ships are crewed to function fully in action, not after what's appropriate when coasting across space.
Here’s the crew of the Littoral Combat Ships.They’re two classes (Freedom and Independence) frigates, succeeding the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates and Cyclone corvettes, and may be succeeded by the FF(X) frigate. Independence's got a core crew of 40, with 15 additional modular crew for anti-surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, or mine clearing, and 20 additional modular crew for air operations, for a maximum crew of 75, although I’ve heard the core crew is actually 50 or even 60 in reality. Commanding Officer Executive Officer Selected Enlisted Leader
Operations Officer Combat Information Center Officer Quartermaster Boatswain’s Mate x3 Operation Specialist x3
Combat Systems Officer Electronics Material Officer Fire Controlman x3 Information Technician x2 Gunner’s Mate x2 Electronics Technician x4
Chief Engineer Main Propulsion Assistant Gas Turbine Systems Technician x3 Engineman x3
Logistics Specialist Culinary Specialist x3 Hospital Corpsman
8 officers are italicized.
There's a few things here that you may not think of, such as the final positions. There are also autonomous ships entering service, but as far as I’m aware they’re still experimental.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 26, 2019 20:40:56 GMT
The less efficient your propulsion tech, the more prohibitive it's going to be to have a large crew and the harder it's going be to justify lugging around large complement of specialists on a single ship. Related to this, the more efficient, the more crew one can potentially afford? And need. If your ship takes months at least to reach its objective via Hohmann transfers, then spends maybe days to weeks in "heightened" alert (that still leaves plenty of time to react to anything happening - think hitting snooze a few times, taking a - recycled - shower and thinking about the possible solutions while sipping coffee), then at most minutes in frantic combat, you can take your sweet time fixing anything that won't kill you outright, because the enemy will be similarly unable to react quickly and stay active for prolonged periods of time. You can consult the command back home, read manuals, write/receive software, plan and make step by step checklists for solving issues or even retrain. But if you zip back and forth around solar system like it was a trip to chemist down the road, the enemy can too - then you might need to act NOW at all time and have full crew working around the clock to handle the unexpected. Of course the exact size of the crew and peak of crew size after which they will start shrinking again depends on relative pace of automation compared to your propulsion technology, and, of course, politics. Apologetics? At least nine tenths of the tactical decisions your warship is likely to make are navigation decisions- where and how to best spend your limited delta-v depends on a huge number of often unclear factors, it's not something you can just autopilot. If you can have only one crewmember it should be an astrogator. And this is also the reason why I strongly believe that astrogator and captain should be one and the same person - because astrogator has the best tools to actually understand situation and make informed decisions. On tiny minimalist ships (crew in lower single digits), they would also be the pilot, larger units are likely to afford separate "driver".
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 30, 2019 17:18:35 GMT
Apologetics? At least nine tenths of the tactical decisions your warship is likely to make are navigation decisions- where and how to best spend your limited delta-v depends on a huge number of often unclear factors, it's not something you can just autopilot. If you can have only one crewmember it should be an astrogator. Already, pilots and navigators aren't a big part of crew duties. MIR's collusion saw the deathknell to that, along with Buran's re-entry programming. Computers do most, if not all, of the work, the crew has someone trained just enough to intervene in a rare case something goes awry with the primary computer - which might just be 'make sure the second, third, etal computers are working to take over'.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 30, 2019 20:31:57 GMT
Apologetics? At least nine tenths of the tactical decisions your warship is likely to make are navigation decisions- where and how to best spend your limited delta-v depends on a huge number of often unclear factors, it's not something you can just autopilot. If you can have only one crewmember it should be an astrogator. Already, pilots and navigators aren't a big part of crew duties. MIR's collusion saw the deathknell to that, along with Buran's re-entry programming. Computers do most, if not all, of the work, the crew has someone trained just enough to intervene in a rare case something goes awry with the primary computer - which might just be 'make sure the second, third, etal computers are working to take over'. That is for peaceful missions where everything is pre-planned, and usually with a comprehensive and responsive connection with ground control. Deep space missions involving intelligent opponents that actively try to kill you is a very different ball game.
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Post by airc777 on Mar 30, 2019 22:21:45 GMT
Already, pilots and navigators aren't a big part of crew duties. MIR's collusion saw the deathknell to that, along with Buran's re-entry programming. Computers do most, if not all, of the work, the crew has someone trained just enough to intervene in a rare case something goes awry with the primary computer - which might just be 'make sure the second, third, etal computers are working to take over'. That is for peaceful missions where everything is pre-planned, and usually with a comprehensive and responsive connection with ground control. Deep space missions involving intelligent opponents that actively try to kill you is a very different ball game. Contextually debatable. If you're in the middle of a planetary transfer en route to the theater of operations and a guidance computer failure causes it to lose track of where you are while your NTR is still burning you're going to have a hell of a time eyeballing the approach angle, retrograde burn vector, and burn time. If you are in the theater of operations and your sensors detect what appears to be launch transients of a missile someone is likely to yank the flight stick away from the computer.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 31, 2019 0:31:15 GMT
We're not debating whether or not to take a flight computer, that seems to be a given- we're deciding whether it's worth taking a human to tell it what to do (which I guess would involve mainly designing new flight plans with very little if any stick action).
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Post by airc777 on Mar 31, 2019 2:15:19 GMT
We're not debating whether or not to take a flight computer, that seems to be a given- we're deciding whether it's worth taking a human to tell it what to do (which I guess would involve mainly designing new flight plans with very little if any stick action). If it's a purpose built combat craft, and it's reasonably nimble (say at least 0.1G wet acceleration and 30 second turn about) it would still make sense to have manual controls and to during peace times drill for the event of emergency evasive action. If nothing else its extra safety if the computer looks like it's about to botch a docking maneuver. The only real caveat to that I can think of being submarine crews are drilled to in the event of a collision with an unidentified object to not touch any of the helm controls until after they've identified what has happened, so they don't accidentally make it worse. But in the context of space there will be cameras will be all over any docking procedure, effective sensor range should be colossal, and collisions with unidentified objects are more likely to be with very small very fast moving things not other submarines that were to slow and quiet for either of you to realize you were ten feet from each other. But yeah any maneuver that's more then a minute away at the time of planning or any maneuver involving homing on a target will be done by a computer.
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Post by deltav on Apr 5, 2019 6:15:06 GMT
Hi. The Devs used Navy vessels as a guide for how much crew spaceships might need. This makes sense because people have a certain nature in military contexts, and navy operations are most similar to how space operations might be. Navy close cramped conditions, hostile environment not normally fit for human life, physical isolation from friendly forces and so on are similar to space conditions.
I've just seen an interesting documentary on Vietnam PBR boats, small fast heavily armed boats that patrolled the rivers during Vietnam looking for contraband and weapons to the Vietcong. Anyway, they always crewed 4. A petty officer as the captain, a communication/radar officer, and 2 gunners. You could say at the very minimum this might be the smallest crew possible on a space warship. Each position has a specialized skill and particular character traits that don't per se overlap.
You need 1 command officer that can independently make decisions separately from command and control, due to communication lag and other factors. He or she must be a strong leader and very cool under pressure, able to keep everyone calm and under control under extremely adverse conditions.
You need 1 officer to communicate and interpret sensor data and relay the need info from this to his or her CO, a kind of XO, comm officer, radar officer all in one. He or she must be extremely detail oriented, and a wiz at electronics knowing the radar and communication systems backward and forwards.
And you need 1 or 2 gunners to choose weapon priority, what targets should be attacked and in what order, as ammo is always limited, whether in the form of energy or in the form of physical ammo. They must know the weapons systems better than those who designed them, and know all their little flaws and intricacies, as the warship is ultimately useless without weapons.
These small boats used a kind of mothership where they would dock, and there would be cooks, sanitation, and a doctor. So even 4 crew is really stretching min crew to its breaking point.
Any thoughts? Anyhow have fun.
PS Then again all of this presupposes that human decision making is still better than AI in the CODE Universe. AI could in theory do all of this and not have the weight, life support requirements, and fragility of human beings.
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Post by Apotheon on Apr 11, 2019 18:12:57 GMT
I've look at a bit more at the small US Navy ships: the Mark VI (12 crew), Cyclone (28 crew), and Independence (40 crew), in other to find an analogy for space. The ships are 25 m, 50 m, and 125 m and are in the <100 ton, 100's of tons, and 1000's of tons classes. In other words, relevant in size and mass.
(Independence crew is apparently closer to 70 today)
The big difference I guess is the endurance of 1, 10, and 21 days, respectively, with 30 days for the Arleigh Burke, although I'm not aware exactly what endurance means and includes. Arleigh Burke gets supply shipments twice a month. In this regard, I suspect submarines that can operate independently for months are a better analogue. Indeed, just like in space, food (not air or water) is the limit, so that's analogous. And aboard submarines, we're talking about 150 people.
Here's the crew of the Mark VI patrol ship: captain, patrol officer, coxswain, navigator, engineer/communicator, engineer/gunner. The patrol officer is in charge of the 8 special forces operatives that can follow along. Here we clearly see some interesting overlap (with engineers) and some curious non-overlap (AFAIK, a coxswain steers, but apparently a navigator is still necessary). Obviously, everyone help everyone out even on Cyclones. Oh and there are two crews per ship! In other words, 12 people aboard, alternating watches. Maybe two watches are enough in space also?
Here's the Cyclone crew:
3 Boatswain's Mate 2 Gunner's Mate
2 Operations Specialist 1 Electronics Technician 2 Information Technician 3 Quartermaster
2 Engineman 2 Machinist's Mate 2 Electrician's Mate 1 Interior Communications Specialist 1 Damage Controlsman
1 Corpsman 1 Culinary Specialist
I'm uncertain about the officers. It's probably a CO, XO, a SEL who commands the engineers, one officer for operations and one for weapons.
As soon as we move up to ships of this size, we start seeing the split into weapons, operations, and engineering (and corpsmen and culinary specialists) and on bigger ships there's executives.
Compared with the Independence, there’s only one culinary specialist, no logistics specialist, and other roles are switched around, but there isn’t a lot missing, but the fire controlmen are absent on Cyclones.
One take-away point for certain here is that you're going to want corpsmen and culinary specialists.
Next, I gotta actually start up CDE and cross-check the in-game numbers! Edit: apparently the coxswains are in charge of the small special forces boats! In other words, on the Mark VI, there’s two guys concerned with the special forces... probably making the crew not quite representative of patrol boats that aren’t associated with special forces. Core crew of 4.
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Post by airc777 on Apr 12, 2019 14:32:47 GMT
The big difference I guess is the endurance of 1, 10, and 21 days, respectively, with 30 days for the Arleigh Burke, although I'm not aware exactly what endurance means and includes. Arleigh Burke gets supply shipments twice a month. In this regard, I suspect submarines that can operate independently for months are a better analogue. Indeed, just like in space, food (not air or water) is the limit, so that's analogous. And aboard submarines, we're talking about 150 people. This is a bit of an off topic tangent, but:
On the topic of endurance, does anyone have an equation or an educated guess on what the cross over point would be for how long of a deployment is more delta V and mass efficient to support by sending shelf stable food on your fleet tenders vs having your fleet tenders have their own hydroponic farms? How far out in the solar system would you have to deploy, or how long of an orbital occupation before it's just better to grow your own food?
I guess you could also extrapolate this question to reactor fuel and breeder reactors. Seeing as how a lot of our fighting ships designs in cde use super optimized 6 month run time reactors, we might change fuel rods more often then we change crews.
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Post by Apotheon on Apr 12, 2019 17:21:18 GMT
The big difference I guess is the endurance of 1, 10, and 21 days, respectively, with 30 days for the Arleigh Burke, although I'm not aware exactly what endurance means and includes. Arleigh Burke gets supply shipments twice a month. In this regard, I suspect submarines that can operate independently for months are a better analogue. Indeed, just like in space, food (not air or water) is the limit, so that's analogous. And aboard submarines, we're talking about 150 people. This is a bit of an off topic tangent, but:
On the topic of endurance, does anyone have an equation or an educated guess on what the cross over point would be for how long of a deployment is more delta V and mass efficient to support by sending shelf stable food on your fleet tenders vs having your fleet tenders have their own hydroponic farms? How far out in the solar system would you have to deploy, or how long of an orbital occupation before it's just better to grow your own food?
I guess you could also extrapolate this question to reactor fuel and breeder reactors. Seeing as how a lot of our fighting ships designs in cde use super optimized 6 month run time reactors, we might change fuel rods more often then we change crews.
According to page 10, a small amount of bioregeneration is only appropriate for missions with a duration to 10 months-10 years: spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/academics/697S15/TP-2015-218570.pdf There's probably a ton of dedicated studies also.
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Post by airc777 on Apr 12, 2019 17:33:42 GMT
That's actually shorter term then I thought. I assumed the lower bounds would be more like between 2 years and 6 years, because of the extra mass of the space needed to grow the plants and the extra crew and training. As well as other things like the extra energy to grow the food and the extra waste heat.
If it's justifiable to have hydroponics for deployments as short as 10 months then I could totally see some application for a carrier / mothership / fleet tender / interplanetary tug that get's left in very high orbit over a target planet (or even just a relatively nearby Sol orbit) and small torpedo boat style combat ships operating from it that aren't meant to be away from support for more then a few months.
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