The minimum number of crew for a warship?

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.