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Post by EshaNas on Mar 12, 2019 2:54:48 GMT
This is more of a personal thing, and I have read the COADE article on Crew and this prior thread. But can ship crews be made even lower? We have some extremes; from basically just a crewed command ship (at most) overseeing hordes of drones to ships with hundreds of crew. Common archetypes are a bomber-crew from 3 to 5 to around 10 - would such a crew exist in a world where ships are fast and infrastructure is prevalent, allowing for rapid deployment and return? Would a system where ships are out for months on their own jack the numbers up? What do ya'll think?
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Post by bigbombr on Mar 12, 2019 5:33:34 GMT
This is more of a personal thing, and I have read the COADE article on Crew and this prior thread. But can ship crews be made even lower? We have some extremes; from basically just a crewed command ship (at most) overseeing hordes of drones to ships with hundreds of crew. Common archetypes are a bomber-crew from 3 to 5 to around 10 - would such a crew exist in a world where ships are fast and infrastructure is prevalent, allowing for rapid deployment and return? Would a system where ships are out for months on their own jack the numbers up? What do ya'll think? I personally think the need for in flight maintenance will be limited as much as possible, because this drastically raises the amount of crew members you need. I think this can be accomplished (illustrated by how long some of your unmanned rovers and probes last). I'd personally expect an absolute minimum crew of 3 or 4 per shift (think MBT or aircraft more than naval vessel). This gives a minimum crew of 9-12.
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Post by AdmiralObvious on Mar 12, 2019 8:57:46 GMT
I think it depends more on the persons involved and the tech you need.
In the case of CDE, you need a tech and an engineer for pretty much anything. It's fairly safe to assume you can roll those roles into one. With luck they might also know how to cook, so you'd shave off a bit more there.
I don't imagine you'll be able to get less than 8 people, safely at least, assuming you want two 12 hour shifts.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 12, 2019 18:48:20 GMT
Unlike anything planetside, even aircraft, spaceships are hit really hard by monkey tax, so I would expect going to much greater lengths to minimize crew counts.
For minimalistic warship capable of independent operation I might even see crew of as little as 3: - a person tasked with flying the ship - a person tasked with keeping the ship in working order - a person tasked with keeping the other two in working order.
Other tasks, would be either part of additional responsibilities of one of crewmembers, or taken in turns.
In space most of the stuff can be seen coming for a long time so keeping an eye on sensors/comms is low intensity job. Similarly, most of the high intensity tasks can be planned ahead and accommodated (to avoid, say, tactical pilot suffering from a jet lag in mid combat), failing that, there are always stimulants for emergencies. Apart from short, critical windows and stuff that will kill you really fast if it malfunctions, most of the things also allow for longer service times (because you are likely either in transit or in orbit most of the time).
Such a minimal ship would probably have some spinal gun for hard hitting, CIWS, and a variety of fire&forget missiles (not suitable for trans-orbital fire).
Larger ships would get dedicated weapon officers, specialized technicians for their large variety of system, shifts with more redundancy, and captain/astrogator that doesn't actually fly the ship. Very large ones might even get their dedicated pencil crews, but paperwork is really one of the easier things to keep to minimum (compared to everything else, that is), especially with very small crews.
CDE represents the most pessimistic assumptions regarding crew size reduction.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 13, 2019 12:14:16 GMT
I think it seems like the game was made with the assumption that parasite craft would always be unmanned drones, so all crew modules have to be able to deal with everything by themselves for the standard 6 months. When you consider this against the most demanding missions in the campaign like interplanetary invasions and isolated sieges it actually doesn't sound too unreasonable. A 3 man crew is quite viable for a parasite craft that operates from a base or mothership, but you wouldn't want that craft operating by itself for over a month doing all it's own servicing and tactical decisions under heavy pressure from the enemy.
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Post by Anon1 on Mar 21, 2019 21:27:17 GMT
A single person is not going to be able to maintain a spacecraft in working order for months. This is especially true of a complex craft like a warship. The complexity of a rover is orders of magnitude less than that of a warship. The LCS is a failure in part because of its small crew size. The computers need computer engineers, not mechanical engineers. The reactor/engines need trained with nuclear engineering specialties. The sensors need electrical engineering personnel. Expecting one or even a few people to be super handymen that can fix everything that could break down on a multi-billion dollar warship is something that only belongs in space fantasy. Repair bots? Well who repairs them? A single super AGI? Well who repairs it? Human crews have doctors for a reason. You want these ships to be drone carriers? Well, then you need people that can repair the drones and a way to re-arm the drones. You aren't just going to use the drones once for combat. You need to have training missions that prepare your forces to fight a war that hopefully will never come. That includes live exercises where you will be using those drones and various other systems. Practice makes perfect. You train the way that you want to fight.
If you are going on a single science mission, then you don't need a lot of maintenance personnel because it is like taking a new car for a spin. If you are just hanging out in orbit, then people on the ground can send up whatever you need to fix if something goes wrong. But if you are using a warship for combat patrols, then you don't know when a part will decide to fail. The more complex your system, the more points of failure that you have. having the ability to repair something back at space dock is not going to help you when you are millions to billions of kilometers away and getting ready to go into combat tomorrow. Are you going to tell the enemy to wait for you to go to spacedock and repair your ship before you start fighting? Or do you want someone onboard that can fix the problem now? If the Navy thought that they could reduce the number of people onboard a nuclear submarine then they would do it. They don't because they can't. A space warship would be even more complicated than a nuclear submarine.
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Post by airc777 on Mar 22, 2019 0:25:49 GMT
I think it seems like the game was made with the assumption that parasite craft would always be unmanned drones, so all crew modules have to be able to deal with everything by themselves for the standard 6 months. When you consider this against the most demanding missions in the campaign like interplanetary invasions and isolated sieges it actually doesn't sound too unreasonable. A 3 man crew is quite viable for a parasite craft that operates from a base or mothership, but you wouldn't want that craft operating by itself for over a month doing all it's own servicing and tactical decisions under heavy pressure from the enemy. While I agree that it's fundamentally true that a craft doesn't need a full maintenance crew if it's not intended to be away from it's base of operations for months at a time, I have to ask:
If the craft in question is only a few hours away from the crewed base of operations why would it need to have a crew on it at all? 0 crew is less massive then 1 crew after all.
You should be able to maintain constant radio contact with a drone with minimal latency with only a handful of small communications relay satellites. So the only benefit I would see is if you determined that you needed a human to make autonomous judgement calls that you couldn't trust a drone computer to do and you needed to maintain radio silence.
If that is the case then this is a question of information warfare and how good the enemies sensor systems are, and that is something that is not at all modeled in CoaDE.
If the dev was just going to up and give us single seat craft to toy around with I wouldn't exactly be upset about it, but unless there is something really obvious that I'm missing (and if I have please do mention it) I don't honestly see the point.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 22, 2019 9:14:47 GMT
A single person is not going to be able to maintain a spacecraft in working order for months. This is especially true of a complex craft like a warship. The complexity of a rover is orders of magnitude less than that of a warship. The LCS is a failure in part because of its small crew size. The computers need computer engineers, not mechanical engineers. The reactor/engines need trained with nuclear engineering specialties. The sensors need electrical engineering personnel. Expecting one or even a few people to be super handymen that can fix everything that could break down on a multi-billion dollar warship is something that only belongs in space fantasy. Repair bots? Well who repairs them? A single super AGI? Well who repairs it? Human crews have doctors for a reason. You want these ships to be drone carriers? Well, then you need people that can repair the drones and a way to re-arm the drones. You aren't just going to use the drones once for combat. You need to have training missions that prepare your forces to fight a war that hopefully will never come. That includes live exercises where you will be using those drones and various other systems. Practice makes perfect. You train the way that you want to fight. If you are going on a single science mission, then you don't need a lot of maintenance personnel because it is like taking a new car for a spin. If you are just hanging out in orbit, then people on the ground can send up whatever you need to fix if something goes wrong. But if you are using a warship for combat patrols, then you don't know when a part will decide to fail. The more complex your system, the more points of failure that you have. having the ability to repair something back at space dock is not going to help you when you are millions to billions of kilometers away and getting ready to go into combat tomorrow. Are you going to tell the enemy to wait for you to go to spacedock and repair your ship before you start fighting? Or do you want someone onboard that can fix the problem now? If the Navy thought that they could reduce the number of people onboard a nuclear submarine then they would do it. They don't because they can't. A space warship would be even more complicated than a nuclear submarine. Counterpoint: our spaceships already have triple layer redundancy, don't they? A warship in a future setting might have even more. You want to have a few people as possible because people are expensive: expensive to lug around, expensive to maintain, expensive to pay. If one system breaks down, activate the backup and have the standby on, well, standby while you work to fix the first system. Lugging around specialists for 'just in case', while they do nothing but routines and stand around for weeks to months on end, is a net loss. Meanwhile, a smaller crew has more time to fill up with work and become jack-of-all-trade engineers, enough to fix what is absolutely necessary for the rest of the ship, which already is a hugely automated beast, to continue on. If all systems are down, then having specialized personnel for them, for that moment, probably won't be worth it, because the damage is so catastrophic to cause such huge failures that the ship is effectively lost or everyone is already dead. Especially if ships are weeks or days away from mission control and repair bases throughout the system, which is probably built up ontop of probably having fast travel times in order to enact wars in the first place. Mission Control can relay specialist instructions and commands, making up for a lack of specialist crew ontop of that, right? Now, if your ship is flung out to deep space or interstellar missions with little to no supporting infrastructure/flotillas, then I can see a slight increase in crew to compensate for the loss of support. Though what would necessitate crewed missions so far and so long would be interesting to see by itself.
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Post by Rocket Witch on Mar 22, 2019 22:09:26 GMT
Repair bots? Well who repairs them? A single super AGI? Well who repairs it? Wouldn't an AGI with control over repair bots have the capacity to repair itself, and make the bots repair each other? Not that this is a fundamental progression over crewed ships, but neither does it appear to be a regression — it simply replaces the food/air cargo with spare mechanical parts. Counterpoint: our spaceships already have triple layer redundancy, don't they? What spaceships? I'm not aware of triple redundancy for anything other than reaction wheels on real ones (unless the ISS counts), and the only triple redundancy we're guaranteed to require for a valid design in CDE is the three crew shifts themselves.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 23, 2019 21:24:35 GMT
Repair bots? Well who repairs them? A single super AGI? Well who repairs it? Wouldn't an AGI with control over repair bots have the capacity to repair itself, and make the bots repair each other? Not that this is a fundamental progression over crewed ships, but neither does it appear to be a regression — it simply replaces the food/air cargo with spare mechanical parts. Counterpoint: our spaceships already have triple layer redundancy, don't they? What spaceships? I'm not aware of triple redundancy for anything other than reaction wheels on real ones (unless the ISS counts), and the only triple redundancy we're guaranteed to require for a valid design in CDE is the three crew shifts themselves. The shuttle had five general purpose computers, at 64 lb each, and only needed one to fly the launch and entry if the others failed, for example. Soyuz has some vague backupcomputer systems Voltok talked about after the Soyuz failure of last? year, and Dragon has 3 general computers as well (though off the self and rad-hardened?)
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Mar 24, 2019 18:52:56 GMT
A 3 man crew is quite viable for a parasite craft that operates from a base or mothership, but you wouldn't want that craft operating by itself for over a month doing all it's own servicing and tactical decisions under heavy pressure from the enemy. That's the part I don't buy. At CDE tech level, if the enemy can exert any pressure over prolonged period of time, no ship can operate by itself, period. It does not matter if it has crew of 3 or 300, old man Tsiolkovsky says it won't work. If the enemy can do *anything*, then ship won't be operating alone if it's going to be operating at all. Otherwise, apart from few narrow critical windows, the crew can take their sweet time with anything that won't kill them right away.
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Post by airc777 on Mar 25, 2019 2:16:02 GMT
A 3 man crew is quite viable for a parasite craft that operates from a base or mothership, but you wouldn't want that craft operating by itself for over a month doing all it's own servicing and tactical decisions under heavy pressure from the enemy. That's the part I don't buy. At CDE tech level, if the enemy can exert any pressure over prolonged period of time, no ship can operate by itself, period. It does not matter if it has crew of 3 or 300, old man Tsiolkovsky says it won't work. If the enemy can do *anything*, then ship won't be operating alone if it's going to be operating at all. Otherwise, apart from few narrow critical windows, the crew can take their sweet time with anything that won't kill them right away.
I'm having a somewhat hard time even picturing an 'engagement' or even 'posturing maneuvers' in coade's context that would last more then a few hours.
Even in the context of a large fleet of tiny laser drones propelled by mpdt's capturing from a planetary transfer into an engagement with another large fleet of tiny laser drones you wouldn't really duel or posture at the extreme ends of your ranges while attempting to maneuver into positioning advantage, you would want to time your whole fleet to arrive at roughly the same time and bring all of their weapons to bear on the enemy at once instead of trickling in one at a time and being eliminated easily.
Launching volleys of missiles to try an run down a target craft that is trying to out delta V your fleet wouldn't actually take that long either, in spite of what it feels like plotting maneuver nodes manually in coade.
So how loosely are we defining 'engaged with the enemy' and 'idly waiting for transfer window'? The only 'long' engagements that I can think of will probably be ship to surface conflicts in cases where the planetary defenses are backed by just shear tonnage of infrastructure and the engaging fleet is attempting to stay non nuclear.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 25, 2019 2:31:32 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?
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Post by Apotheon on Mar 25, 2019 14:24:29 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, specialists, and so on and on.
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.
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Post by gyratron on Mar 25, 2019 17:13:15 GMT
I suppose in your own orbital space it might be possible to have your maintenance experts and high level tacticians in a ground control center, but I can start to imagine how even a minute of light speed lag could make troubleshooting very difficult. You can send all the advanced monitoring data and telemetry you like back to base but if it takes a whole minute to see the result of any solution you try that's still going to slow you down.
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