SharkHunter wrote:Crew numbers though, I wonder... If it only takes 50-60 for a multi-megaton freighter on an extended voyage, it shouldn't take any more to move any ship, aka, bridge crew plus engineering shifts. Besides, even with higher crewing requirements, pulling 90% of a larger group back onto a troup ship or whatever while still in hyper would still leave a small enough crew to abandon the SD later and is simple/possible (In Enemy Hands).
What takes much more crewing is to fight the ship at all, and we know there are fire and forget capabilities for the missiles that take no crewing interaction whatsoever. So you'd need 50 RMMC crews to do the ferrying to get rid of all that space junk around Spindle to somewhere else to let the other bad guys do the target practice, and one slightly more creative fire and forget sequence programmed to execute remotely a la Filerata's Folly to make the ships appear to be a fighting formation. Let Harkness get in their and play!
On second thought, maybe someone less talented than Sir Horace. We wouldn't want that space junk to actually win a battle against with fully crewed SLN fleet units, would we?
Echoes of Honor made quite clear that it takes many times more than 50 crewmen to even make a warship move. The ships transporting refugees from Cerberus were not manning weapons. They were using minimum crews, and had an awful time coming up with enough. A warship has multiple fusion generators instead of just one, each of which is more complicated than a freighter's. The nodes and hyper generator are larger and more complicated. Systems are redundant, and the redundancies need to be manned as well. You just can't get away with the crew levels of a freighter.