Starship Crew to Officer Ratio

[Owen E Oulton]

Overall, in the US Navy there is 1 officer for every 5.30 non-officers. Take that for what it's worth.

[JALU3]

On a related note, how do you handle occasional players? Are they Special Guest Stars? Do you assign them specific roles based on their occasional appearances, or do they remain there always in the background?

mactavish out.

For perspective players, since I have stat'd out, and provided personalities for all the small ships NPCs, I have them play a character that they are comfortable with of the NPCs, if the existing players (and myself) enjoy the player then I will have them create a character and introduce that character at a story appropriate time. The player can accumulate experience points towards that character while playing the NPC until that time. For occasional player(s) (I presently have one who travels to Asia due to work), their character is aboard, but are background when they aren't around (character doesn't earn experience except as NPCs normally do (which is slower than PCs) when they aren't around to play their character). For characters of people who have left the group, they are transferred off the ship.

Back to the original question see page 13 (or 40 in this PDF) for a real life example. So the ratio can be 1:4 up to 1:8.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

I'm worried about those poor kids in the US Clarinet Corp.

Putting the contemporary numbers in perspective, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is just over half the length of a Galaxy-class starship (and a fourth to sixth of its width, I think) and has a ship's company of 3 200ish. That doesn't include the 2 480 people in the air wing. The Enterprise-D has 1000ish people in its complement, and a total of 1014 people was mentioned specifically in 'Remember Me,' which means that includes civilians like Keiko. That means that the total number of Starfleet personnel is smaller than 1000, perhaps drastically smaller, as many crewmembers on board the Enterprise are depicted as having civilian family members on board.

So what I hypothesize, based on these numbers, is the Galaxy class is so advanced that the jobs for most of those 3 200 crew (of whom there are, eyeballing it, 600ish officers and 2 500ish enlisted?) are just absent. I mean, what do you do as an enlisted officer on a ship? Cleaning seems to be a big part of it, and I don't think we've never seen anyone on TNG do that. A lot of things that aren't concerns or are automated on a starship, I'd bet.

My vote for officer vs. enlisted is either 1:2 officer:enlisted or enlisted personnel doing jobs that don't map to contemporary naval operations. How many aircraft carriers have biology labs on board, anyway? How many can deal with epidemics? These are things the Enterprise explicitly deals with, but that's way outside the US Navy's prerogatives.

[Owen E Oulton]

To really cloud things, there's the comment by Stephen Poe (Whitfield) in The Making of Star Trek that in TOS there were NO enlisted ratings and that everyone was an officer. Ridiculous on the face of it, especially in the light of such characters as CPO Garrison and the many crew simply addressed as "Crewman so-and-so". Poe was misinterpreting Roddenberry's statement that all crew are fully trained astronauts and were the equivalent of today's officers. You can't run a ship with all chiefs and no injums. I tend to use a ratio of 1:3 or 4. A lot of the science types are lab technicians, and a lot of the medical types are PCAs (patient care assistants) and orderlies. Command and Operations would have a lot of yeomen and technicians. There would probably be at least as many CPOs and POs as officers.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

You know when Kirk orders, like, "Ancient Earth clothing, circa 1950," or whatever, what's the title of the crewman who ends up doing that?

[Cpt. Lundgren]

TOS era Enterprise was a unique five year mission into the unknown. Enterprise era Enterprise was pretty much the same. So even the chef would most likely have more ship related training, and have passed through a far rigorous selection process, than most junior officers on other ships. During TNE/DS9/Voyager, it is more of a "business as usual" situation.

In my mind, there are a higher officer to enlisted ration in Starfleet than in a modern navy (especially on ships and certain starbases), as there are more automated tasks; so a lot of those officers are in command of a computer screen instead of people. The science departments would probably be very officer heavy. I also always have imagined Starfleet as an organization that prefer getting people coming from a formal academic education (college/university), and also counts as one itself. So a lot of tasks that would be done by an NCO today are done by a SF officer. But there still is a lot of work done by enlisted crewmen, and I can also see more NCO getting positions officially held by officers today.

Hm... I maybe should run for office. A long winded reply without giving a definite answer

[Owen E Oulton]

You know when Kirk orders, like, "Ancient Earth clothing, circa 1950," or whatever, what's the title of the crewman who ends up doing that?

That would be Technician 2nd Class Arnold Judas Rimmer, who of course sluffed it off onto Technician 3rd Class David Lister.

[JALU3]

That would be Technician 2nd Class Arnold Judas Rimmer, who of course sluffed it off onto Technician 3rd Class David Lister.

That reminds me I have both of them stat'd out for ICON, thanks to Dan for starting it, I have modified them some since the Ganymede. Enjoy!

It could be said, that there are no enlisted, that aboard the Enterprise, because it was on a unique five year mission, like what was said, that the ship was primarily staffed with seasoned crewmembers. Therefore, all were "officers", commissioned, warrant, and NCOs.

Although there are missions that are not naval, even Medical ships and survey ships have non-officers aboard. The USS Mercy had 80 officers to 436 enlisted, that still only makes officers 15% of the crew. For instance the new Hassler has 14 berths, they can't all be NOAA Commissioned Officers, someone has to keep the ship running. And the Settle has 5 officers out of a crew of 22, that's 18%.

As for automation, that's great and all until excrement makes contact with the rotating air accelerator. Doing damage control, when a significant number number of your crew are incapacitated or injured, means less persons to make repairs (or heal their battle buddies), and patch holes. All the reinforced bulkheads and automation when a ship is severely damaged, won't keep a ship "afloat" without persons making repairs to the automation and physically patching holes.

[WaveMan]

space dock ranges between a 28%-72% to a 45%-55% split (officer/enlisted, cruiser/explorers and such have around 30% officers) depending on star ship class, but as others have said you can have what ever feels best for your series.