S.C.E. (Starfleet Corps of Engineers)

Been reading these books, and it struck me as a gamable premise.
Basicly, a small ship with a large group of professional troubleshooters aboard who specialize in solving people's problems.

The ship is a Sabre Class which (they say) has a crew of about 40. I can identify around 25 of those. (For instance, one person is identified as the Alpha Shift Conn officer. One would assume there are at least 2 others for the other shifts.)
I count:
A doctor, nurse, and EMT.
A Security Chief, at least 4 guards, and Tactical Officers for each shift
A Conn officer for each shift
A Transporter Chief
A Chief Engineer and at least 1 other engineer
A Captain

The XO and 2nd Officer are in command of the SCE detachment, which has at least 3 specialists in certain types of technology, as well as a sociologist and a linguist.

Below I offer the teasers for the plots I've read so far (first 2 books). These will be only the tiniest of spoilers (no twists revealed).

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• A ship attacks a farming colony. The Enterprise disables it. The SCE is sent to investigate, freeing the Enterprise for other duty.
  
  A computer that runs all the technology on a world outside the Federation is malfunctioning, and the SCE are asked to repair it.
  
  A unknown ship crashes into a Federation member world. It must be secured and deactivated, preferably without destroying it.
  
  A vessel lost years before has been rediscovered, and the SCE are sent to retrieve it.
  
  The SCE must help Nog salvage parts from Empok Nor for use repairing DS9.
  
  A non-Federation government asks for help with a major construction project.

These stories break into about 100 pages each and each one could easilly be written up as an adventure.

I just noticed something odd, that makes me think that somebody made an enormous mistake about the size of the Sabre class:

The Nova Class (like USS Equinox) has 20 escape pods on the dorsal surface.
The Sabre Class has 74 escape pods on the dorsal surface.

Now, either of those ships might have a bunch on the underside, or elsewhere on the hull, and I really don't know what the capacity of those escape pods is either, but it seems like both ships have most of their pods right there on the dorsal area. And I have a hard time believing that a ship with half the crew of a Nova class has nearly 4 times as many escape pods.
In both cases, I am counting the pods on an image that is at least purported to be of the official CGI model of the ship in question. I am, of course, at the mercy of my sources. But I have a strong suspicion that the Sabre should have a crew roughly 4 times that of the Nova, or around 300.
Spacedock said a ship's "Emergency Capacity" is about 3 times the normal crew, so I'd guess you should have enough escape pods for that many people, so the 20 pods on the Nova are designed to serve roughly 270 people. I'd guess the real capacity is 10 people per pod, and there are 7-10 pods that I can't see on the Nova, or that a single pod could hold about 14-15 people. That would mean each pod represents about 5 crew, so the 74 on the Sabre represent 370 crew.

Those are some very vague numbers based on some pretyy heavy guesswork, but my main point is this: based on the number of escape pods shown on the models, I think the Sabre is supposed to have a crew much larger than the Nova, and definitely larger than 40.

Could be the redundancy for the Emergency Capacity you mentioned.

Plus, is there anything mentioned in the books about the Sabre class being modified for its duty in SCE? Perhaps expanded cargo bays for carrying all sorts of gubbins (spare parts, extra shuttles, emergency gear etc).

Keep in mind that, while it only requires a crew of forty, the Saber-class can accommodate between 160 and 200 more (depending on what the "200 Evac limit" from the technical specs on Memory Beta means) in a crisis.

Yes, but by the same token, a Nova with a crew of 78 has an "evac limit" of ... 234? That's what Spacedock would give it.
The Sabre is twice as long as a Nova and roughly three times as wide: it is a much bigger ship than the Nova.

Anyway, I think there is some doubt on the accuracy of the crew figures for the Sabre Class, and I think the SCE books (and Memory Beta) got it wrong.

I don't think you'll find a canon source for the size of the Saber-class, seeing as they were kinda just throwaway ships created so as to stand out as not being Enterprise in their original appearance. Personally, given its dimensions I'd stat it up and calculate the crew complement myself... novels and non-canon website be damned. For all we know, the figure stated may just be a typo.

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Originally Posted by RaconteurX

I don't think you'll find a canon source for the size of the Saber-class, seeing as they were kinda just throwaway ships created so as to stand out as not being Enterprise in their original appearance.

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This might be the closest thing you'll find...

Ex Astris Scientia does not allow hotlinking, folks.

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Originally Posted by spyone

Ex Astris Scientia does not allow hotlinking, folks.

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But if you copy the link and manually paste it into your navigation pane, you get to the correct place. And as canon sources go, that's not terribly helpful. What are we to do, count pixels? LOL

Novels may be damned, ut the novel Battle of Betazed has 3 Sbares in the backgrround dur ing a key scene, and keep referring to a crew of 40 on a standard vessel...

yes, I have also noted the escape pod issue, but as thats a relatively minor issue (Try counting escape pod hatches on the Defiant for instance, we know they are there... ) I just ignore it as an irrelevance.

Cant do that? OK, then they have very small escape pods rather than the 4-6 crew evac capacity that we assume for the rest... Then its just a minor redundancy issue. ;P

With a name like "Sabre" I'd assume that class was designed with an emphasis on combat ops. Personally, I'd be much happier going into battle on a ship that had more escape pods than are really needed. Wouldn't it suck if a torpedo hit right square on the pods and knocked out a bunch of them and there weren't enough left for the surviving crew to abandon ship?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RaconteurX

But if you copy the link and manually paste it into your navigation pane, you get to the correct place. And as canon sources go, that's not terribly helpful. What are we to do, count pixels? LOL

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That's... exactly what I do, actually.

Going by theStar Trek Fact Files drawings, the Sabre has 74 on the dorsal (as alluded to above) and 34 on the ventral surface... I think that even as safety conscious as the Federation undoubtedly is, 104 lifepods for a crew of 40 is ludicrous. Suffice it to say that Pocket Books has a rectocranial inversion...

Getting away from ships that are apparently designed to hold more escape pods than people, while I haven't read the SCE books, I kinda like the idea: group of trouble shooters solving mysteries and exploring cutting edge tech and mysterious alien artifacts. And, if I remember correctly, a certain 'Miracle Worker' is one of their members...!

I agree that the SCE offers potential adventures that Picard and the 'first string heroes' of Starfleet would never handle.
The first da Vinci mission ends in tragedy that hits the small crew right where it hurts. They get the job done, but still...

One idea I floated for an SCE campaign I never got going years back involved the team having to board a derelict 'weapons barge' drifting into a heavily populated system. It was loaded with illegal, unused subspace weapons - prototypes from the Minosians. Unused and unsafe prototypes! A tractor beam isn't an option, so how does the SCE team handle the derelict?

I always thought that the SCE should or would be like a Trek era 'Fringe Division'; taking care of those weird bits of tech that are beyond the scope of other forces.

Here's a crazy idea I had; sure, the SCE handles advanced 'alien' tech, but what do they do when they found anachronistic tech, like a 22 Century warp vessel, crewed by Americans, or what appears to be a phaser, made by humans in the year 2010?:eek:

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Originally Posted by Tricky

I always thought that the SCE should or would be like a Trek era 'Fringe Division'; taking care of those weird bits of tech that are beyond the scope of other forces.

Here's a crazy idea I had; sure, the SCE handles advanced 'alien' tech, but what do they do when they found anachronistic tech, like a 22 Century warp vessel, crewed by Americans, or what appears to be a phaser, made by humans in the year 2010?:eek:

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Pretty sure they'd call Temporal Investigations. ;)

They're not quite "fringe", but they tend to wind up there a bit. What they are is emergency engineers.
That means that when the river is flooding and the levees are over-strained and need support, they are the guys you call. That means when the natural disaster also messed up your port, the port through which relief supplies must come, so you need that port fixed NOW, they are the ones you call.
But it also means that when you find out that the massive earthquakes are being caused by a network of machines that have been buried for hundreds of thousands of years, and you definitely don't have the owners' manual for those things, they are the guys you call.
Tech Support for the universe.

The thing is, they are engineering crisis first-responders: it is their job to stamp out the fires, get life support working again, and move on to the next crisis while the regular guys put the rest of the system back together. As a result, they select people with a knack for ... innovative solutions. Their motto (well, one of them) is "Impossible takes ten minutes extra."

But they are not a font of technobabble: often the puzzle they face is more social than technical. What they thought was a malfunction might have been sabotage by a local dissident group, what they thought was a rescue mission might turn out to be a prison break, or they need to find a way to effect repairs to a planet-wide system without offending the religion of the locals.

There's also the possibility of 'competition' to think about. The Androssi are kind of the SCE's 'evil clone'. They offer technical fixes to problems... but they're motivated solely by what will benefit their homeworld patrons, and their solutions are often worse than the original dilemma.:eek:

I agree with the 'first response' assessment. Get in, find out what's going wrong, stop it going wrong... and warp out to the next assignment.