Crew Complement

Hello!

Do you know how the ship crews are organized? How many of each rating and rank there is?
For example, how many impeller tech are there on the Fearless?

nigebo wrote:Hello!

Do you know how the ship crews are organized? How many of each rating and rank there is?
For example, how many impeller tech are there on the Fearless?

We actually only know the full crew compliments on ships introduced prior to 1905pd. There are a few ship newer than that which we have crew sizes, but not many. For the most part, we have total crew sizes, officers, unlisted and Marines for those older ships, and a handful of "hero" vessels. Rarely has a department been called out in size (One Exception was the Roland - I believe the Tactical team was ~15 out of a crew of 63 iirc).

The Courageous class (which the CL Fearless was originally) has a total crew of 385, with 20 officers, 180 enlisted and 185 Marines. The Star Knight Class (which the CA Fearless was a member of) had a listed crew of 925, with 47 officers, 424 enlisted, and 454 marines. Ironically, The Hexapuma had a crew of 355, 140 of which were marines - a smaller crew than a century old CL.

Most of this data is semi-canonical, coming from Jayne's Intelligence Briefings about the RMN. This was written in conjunction with RFC, but written later than the first 1/3rd of the books to rationalize the ship sizes, armament, and crews for the SITS tabletop game. This was known as the Great Resizing, because everything except the mass of the ships might be altered to fit a rationalized design approach so the ships didn't have the density of smoke (due to an early math error) and too many/few weapons systems. Parts of this update were canonized in the later House of Steel compendium, but it is considered rude to not mentioned this data's provenance, due to it varying from that written in the early books.

Pity we can't just glance at the bulkhead and see the Watch, Quarter and Station bill, but I suppose that's classified these days.

zuluwiz wrote:Pity we can't just glance at the bulkhead and see the Watch, Quarter and Station bill, but I suppose that's classified these days.

It's really easy to find the total crew count of a Nimitz class carrier, but try to find where the navy posts the list of divisions (and descriptions of what they do) of the Reactor or Combat System Department, much less the actual list of billets for a department.

It's not impossible to figure this out, but you are piecing together some obscure navy and lots of non-navy open source documents.

And you still are left with question, like why is the there no 3rd deck division on any of the carriers when there is a role for the 3rd division.

So it makes perfect sense that this isn't provided.

Also, the more you drill into this kind of detail the more background assumptions you have to make concrete. How the ship is organized and at what rank positions are held exposes a lot of history and the way it works at a low level.