Rita Wulff

@Varewulf

I Am A Delight

she/her
twitter.com/Varewulf

Old queer trans woman from Norway. Mainly post in English. I write stuff sometimes. Expect bad jokes. Girls and cats are nice.

Rita Wulff @Varewulf12/4/2023, 10:18 AM

To anyone with any insight on crew, and ship sizes.

I am trying to decide how big I want the spaceship in my story to be, and how many people would be onboard.

It's a warship, a capital ship, and my initial thought was "1 kilometre long, about 120 people", but then I started thinking like... is that both too big, and too few people?

I looked up what battleships and such used to have, and apparently it was thousands of people, but things don't necessarily have to be the same in space.

Let's say it's more like somewhere between 500 and 700 metres. Maybe 200 to 300 metres wide. It's a bit spacious, so it's not just everyone crammed together in as small of a space as possible. Decently wide corridors, comfortable enough quarters (maybe four people per room? except officers, of course), cafeteria, gym, rec rooms, medical section, engineering, workshop, hangar bay, etc. Assisted by various drones/robots/droids, and a ship AI, sci-fi style. How many people would you need for that?

#fiction #sci-fi #spaceship #spaceships #speculation

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Varewulf's post:

Neil Willcox Cursed With Beauty @NeilWillcox12/4/2023, 10:58 AM

Warships have lots of people because they are designed to keep working and fighting even when bits have been blown up. Civilian ships have smaller crews because it costs money to have more people on board. I would ask yourself a couple of questions. Does this ship have a terrestrial (oceanianic?) analogy? If so have a look at real ones and think about what's going on that's different. More importantly, does the analogy serve the story or not? A big crew lets you have mass scenes, bring a character out from nowhere when you need them. A small crew is more intimate.

I'm most knowledgable on Age Of Sail stuff, which you'd think would not make a good analogy for spaceships, but David Weber has made a career from his Honor Harrington Napoleonic War In Space and he's not the only one so why not.

Neil Willcox Cursed With Beauty @NeilWillcox12/4/2023, 7:40 PM

Sorry, been thinking about this so ignore me if you want an actual answer:

Almost everything you list as spaces on the ship are peripheral to the main requirements of a warship, which are Combat Power, Propulsion and Protection (guns, engines, armour) Traditionally the crew spaces are somewhat grudgingly jammed in between these requirements. Which is why you end up with narrow corridors that have pipes and stuff down them, odd shaped junior officer quarters etc. Your ship is either 1. doesn't have space constraints due to technology; 2. is not efficiently built for fighting (at peace a long time? So crewing is not about need anyway); 3. Not for traditional warship stuff, something like Star Trek on long patrols so crew comfort is a requirement, in which case you need enough crew to be able to bring the ship home after a disaster (same with normal warships, you need damage control parties and enough crew to fight a battle when you've been hit and half of everyone is a casualty)

Neil Willcox Cursed With Beauty @NeilWillcox12/4/2023, 8:58 PM

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm trying to stop it; every job on a warship should have at least two people to do it (Chief Engineer, assistant engineer, astrogator, assistant astrogator, master gunner, assistant gunner, captain, executive officer) on the assumption that one of them will be a casualty in combat. That's every job that needs to keep the ship running (combat power, protection, propolsion, (grudgingly) life support), stuff like postal officer, legal officer etc gets done in spare time. Action stations will have the regular job holder on station and the other in another part of the ship, so the Captain is on the bridge, the Exec in the Damage Control Centre, the tactical officer on the bridge, their asssitant in the Combat Information Centre, the engineer with the engines, the assistant engineer with the auxilary generators etc.

JcDent @JcDent12/4/2023, 12:00 PM

I'd say a lot depends on what you want your boat to do and whether you want it to also do storytelling via environment. A spacious, comfortable shit could be a sign of a technologically advanced society that will prioritize larger life support systems (for those wide corridors and comfortable quarters) rather than saving weight (which is always important in military design for anything that may need to move).

If its a big thing that your society relies a lot of automation, you can clearly show that via robits, various ship systems and so on. IIRC, Soviet subs had smaller crews during Cold War due to automation, I may be misremembering.

Also, carriers are the biggest military ships currently in operation, but they're weird due to their role. If you look at the several cruisers still hanging around (everyone's doing destroyers these days), Kirov-class is 250 meters long, 28 wide, and crams 710 Russians in it. So your boat is twice as long and about twice as wide, for a lot less crew. Is it well automated? Is it really luxuriously spacious? Is half of that space just FTL drive/big fuckoff mass driver/layer of armor three meters thick and a bunch of fuckoff engines to make all that absurd armor mass move? Maybe you packed in a park dome since it's a cruise ship patrolling the frontier and keeping the crew sane is of utmost importance?