Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Cyborg17 on May 21, 2015, 09:32:47 pm
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This
So I was curious about crew compliments for navy vessels because of how many are mentioned in the Destroyers for FS. Turns our that modern Carriers max out around 5000 crew, including flight operations, and that the next generation Carrier is actually going to reduce that number by removing steam as a power source (and therby reduce maintenance).
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4200&tid=200&ct=4
Given these numbers and disproportionate size, what is a reasonable number of crew for a destroyer, a cruiser, and a corvette?
I like the idea of cruisers maybe maxing out at 500 crew, and corvettes at 1300. Destroyers at 4000 seems resonable.
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The Gerard R. Ford has a crew of ~4700 and has a complement of ~80 aircraft.
A Hecate, with a complement of 150 (faster-than-light, nuke-chucking) spacecraft and powerful, death-dealing apocalypse doom cannons has a crew of 10,000.
Probably about half of those 10,000 guys are just maintaining the fighter complement. Imagine the ridiculous amount of work that goes into maintaining a squadron of 30-year old heavy space bombers. You would also need redundant crew in the event that horribly-beweaponed enemy corvettes repeatedly cut your hull to pieces with terrifying industrial lasers in the middle of some god-forsaken nebula.
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You can also imagine the crew that's responsible for POG jobs such the mess hall, stocking vending machines, cleaning the floors, gathering trash, manning the convenience stores, doing paperwork...
I imagine in the future they'd have automated labor to cut down on crew size to minimize the number of rear echelon jobs on these enormous ships but still, imagine signing up for the space navy so you can put yourself through space college. Then being assigned to a destroyer headed into the Knossos Nebula.
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I've never really considered the FS2 crew numbers disproportionate. Bear in mind that an FS2 cruiser is similar in size to a large aircraft carrier. Expecting a ship 6-7 times its size to have less crew seems rather silly to me.
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Well, if you actually put your brains to work in all of this, then the whole of FS2 breaks down. My mind reels like this: First you have to understand this is somewhat like 200 years from now. Everything's really automated. One really good maintenance crew of ten or twenty would probably manage every single one of those crafts. Cleaning and maintenance of the ship? Come on, even in 2010 we had roombas. Seriously, 10000 people? I'd imagine less than a thousand. But the problem is, if you go that mental route, then you will ask yourself, why have pilots? Why not just have a gazillion of AIs? And then you start to ask physics questions and .... yeah, better to just ignore the questions and just pretend this game is just some kind of metaphor for "Battles in the Pacific" regarding gameplay.
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There is some suspension of disbelief that has to happen. But I think it's almost reasonable to say that pilots would still be needed because of emergent situations and maybe latency issues.
I agree that cleaning tasks are a whole lot easier to automate, as are a lot of other tasks. So the main issue is engineering and maintenance challenges. If we know that fighter cockpits are not proportional to humans, than we can assume that capital ship sizes are a bit exaggerated for the sake of gameplay.
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I think the current crew sizes are pretty good.
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Yeah, we don't really know what the actually do on these ships, so it's pretty open to speculation.
IIRC, the only figures we have is about 10 000 people on a destroyer, 30 000 on the Colossus and thousands on a corvette and AWACS.
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A Destroyer in Freespace is a combo battleship-carrier. A ship class, like an Orion, needs crew for stupid battleship-esque tasks, plus crew for the functions required of a fleet carrier.
Stupid battleship crew roles might include:
- Armies of damage control teams to respond to the inevitable damage caused by dumb close-combat fleet actions
- Experts to care for and operate the main guns
- Specialized teams to handle the power demands that result from performing dumb battleship tasks
- Evacuation experts and technicians for the fleet of always-ready escape pods that the ship needs because it is doing idiot battleship stuff
Obvious carrier crew roles could be:
- Test engineers and technicians for maintaining a dozen different types of aging spacecraft
- Staff for testing and monitoring the ship's arsenal of ~10,000,000 nuclear warheads of various yields
- At least twice as many pilots as spacecraft for those long space patrols that really wear you down
- Vast tactical command staff to relay orders and mission updates
- Support ship pilots and maintenance crews
- Recreational facility faculty for keeping everyone sane in this big space city during long deployments
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Something to consider a FS destroyer is a 2 kilometers long hunk of metal.
This hunk of metal has Nuke and Antimatter weapons lobbed at it as a matter of routine during battle, I dont care how good your EM shielding is I would not want to rely on maintaining that massive warship to a heavily computer/AI managed damage control, at least at the business end of it because that EM protection will fail and when it does where does that leave your heavily computer managed and implimented damage control?
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We do have the rather surprising data point that the Dahshor had a crew of 6000 and the Carthage only 10,000, which given the difference in size and capabilities between a destroyer and a corvette is a much smaller gap than I'd expect.
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Which suggests either that Vasudan ships have higher crew complements than Terran ones for some reason, or that the difference is mostly made up by the air wing, which says unfortunate things about the efficiency of GTVA corvettes.
(Alternatively, the Sobek is meant to double as a troop transport or something, and just has an above-average complement, rather than corvettes in general having crews that high.)
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You can also imagine the crew that's responsible for POG jobs such the mess hall, stocking vending machines, cleaning the floors, gathering trash, manning the convenience stores, doing paperwork...
I'm almost 100% certain such crew positions don't exist on these ships. Their relatively low crew figures by volume mirror those of modern submarines or recently designed ships like the LCS; high automation, no "deck force", every crewman a highly-trained specialist in something, pretty much everyone has a GQ station where they're actively doing something and a damage-control situation is more about who you can afford to pull off their post at the moment than having spare personnel who make up D/C parties.
It's possible the Vasudans went the route some people in the USN wish they could and keep spare crew without specific assignment around to perform D/C work in combat.
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Isn't the Dahshor misidentified as a destroyer in-mission? It would be awkward if all this time we've been thinking corvettes were huge if the debriefing was written for a Typhon or something and the Zods are actually really spartan with their crews. Are there any other canon figures for corvettes or Vasudan ships?
Stupid battleship stuff
There's no horizon or drag or axis of movement limitation in space. If we're talking about realism, it's far more inaccurate to have strike craft at all than it is for capital ships to engage directly with lasers and missiles.
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I don't think it's ever called a destroyer in the mission. But the idea that it was originally a Typhon is possible. I don't recall crew numbers being mentioned for anything other than the Colossus, Dahshor, Repulse and Carthage off the top of my head so the number for the Orion is definitely confirmed in more than one place but I don't remember the number for a corvette being mentioned again.
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Isn't the Dahshor misidentified as a destroyer in-mission? It would be awkward if all this time we've been thinking corvettes were huge if the debriefing was written for a Typhon or something and the Zods are actually really spartan with their crews. Are there any other canon figures for corvettes or Vasudan ships?
Stupid battleship stuff
There's no horizon or drag or axis of movement limitation in space. If we're talking about realism, it's far more inaccurate to have strike craft at all than it is for capital ships to engage directly with lasers and missiles.
Actually there is ... considering how powerful weapons are ... if this was real life, you would have to take into account that a single direct hit to critical systems would potentially cripple or outright destroy a ship.
So why risk a single gigantic weapons platform when you can have hundreds of smaller ones that can take your enemy's large pieces off the gameboard just as well and across entire systems (FS2 strike craft were jump capable) where your large base of operations/capital ship is never threathened?
Losing dozens of bombers is acceptable as long as you destroy the enemy's base of operations. Losing your huge gigantic capital ship however means you just lost, period.
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Replace all instances of AAA on a Deimos with ULTRA AAA and see how long a flight of bombers lasts compared to another Deimos.
Smaller platforms are easier kills, and with instant hit weapons, are not harder to hit than larger ones.
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Actually there is ... considering how powerful weapons are ... if this was real life, you would have to take into account that a single direct hit to critical systems would potentially cripple or outright destroy a ship.
Depends. You can have ridiculously powerful weapons, but you can also have armor that can stop those weapons dead in their tracks. Remember, weapons are not the only thing that's being developed, armor is lagging behind in the modern world, but this was not always the case and might not be in the future. Really, it all comes down to armor vs. weapons. If armor "wins", you build bigger ships that can carry more of it, and big weapons that can pierce it. If weapons "win", you build a lot of more or less expandable fighters, each carrying enough firepower to damage/destroy the enemy ship.
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Capital ships may or may not be practical (and really, as FS makes little hard-sci-fi sense, 'practical' is really kinda arbitrary here.) Tell me which setup is cooler (and which one makes for more interesting gameplay?) Endless fighter dogfights and occasional attacks on/escort missions of poorly-armed carriers and installations, or epic clashes between heavily-armored behemoths bristling with weapons turrets pounding each other with devastating beams, while you try frantically to disarm enemy warships and dodge their flak?
Besides, strikecraft are artificially strong vs. capships in retail FS, as capships' default AA turrets are rather anemic. Just give capships the exact same weapons as strikecraft (never mind various mods' capship weapon buffs), and they'll probably end up curbstomping any strikecraft that comes their way. (Of course, make capship AA TOO powerful, and you mess up game balance, but this is a discussion about the practicality of capships from an in-universe standpoint, so...)
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IIRC from past experiments, retail capships with retail AI don't too well using strikecraft weapons, unless they're Maxims. The turret refire delay makes them marginal against fighters, but the biggest issue is range: they have to get inside clawing distance to hit other warships.
e: althoooo keeping the anti-warship beams is probably a trivial way around this
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Besides, strikecraft are artificially strong vs. capships in retail FS, as capships' default AA turrets are rather anemic. Just give capships the exact same weapons as strikecraft (never mind various mods' capship weapon buffs), and they'll probably end up curbstomping any strikecraft that comes their way. (Of course, make capship AA TOO powerful, and you mess up game balance, but this is a discussion about the practicality of capships from an in-universe standpoint, so...)
Isn't Rheyah's Ephesus/Shetland mod working toward something like this, so a player cannot take down a cap ship single-handed? Perhaps not this particular method, but I think he was working on rebalancing.
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There are lots of mods with buffed up capships.
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Besides, strikecraft are artificially strong vs. capships in retail FS, as capships' default AA turrets are rather anemic. Just give capships the exact same weapons as strikecraft (never mind various mods' capship weapon buffs), and they'll probably end up curbstomping any strikecraft that comes their way. (Of course, make capship AA TOO powerful, and you mess up game balance, but this is a discussion about the practicality of capships from an in-universe standpoint, so...)
Isn't Rheyah's Ephesus/Shetland mod working toward something like this, so a player cannot take down a cap ship single-handed? Perhaps not this particular method, but I think he was working on rebalancing.
I'd like to point out, that FS was all about fighter dogfights - capships were just an addon to it.
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I don't think that's inherently true.
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I don't think that's inherently true.
Inherently true? What does that even mean in this context?
edit 1: I looked up logical truth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_truth) on wikipedia in an attempt to understand, but I only became more confused
edit 2: the next post caused me to blow a gasket..."especially not inherently true", oh my gaaaawd
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It's especially not inherently true in FS2.
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It means that, depending on your play style its not always true that FS was about dog-fighting in a fighter. It wasn't INHERENT (absolutely true, built into the game mechanic true) that FS gameplay was all about fighters.
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I don't think FreeSpace inherently, as a core component of its gameplay and mission design without which FreeSpace could not be FreeSpace, requires a fighter-centric battlespace.
I don't think we got a good FreeSpace game until we got a game in which the role and capabilities of warships were enhanced, and they were given abilities which fighters could not access.\
V talked about warships as props in a game about fighters and bombers but I think they were wrong. Or, with a bit more nuance, I think they were actually articulating a principle of good mission design, namely that the player is (as far as they knew) going to be in a fighter or bomber and they need to have something to do.
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I'm still waiting for an ORION KOMMANDER mod that lets me be a destroyer captain; at full sim-level detail, I want to be managing my fighter complement, morale of my (excessively large?) crew, supplies and logistics, and other minute details.
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Well, if you actually put your brains to work in all of this, then the whole of FS2 breaks down. My mind reels like this: First you have to understand this is somewhat like 200 years from now. Everything's really automated. One really good maintenance crew of ten or twenty would probably manage every single one of those crafts. Cleaning and maintenance of the ship? Come on, even in 2010 we had roombas. Seriously, 10000 people? I'd imagine less than a thousand. But the problem is, if you go that mental route, then you will ask yourself, why have pilots? Why not just have a gazillion of AIs? And then you start to ask physics questions and .... yeah, better to just ignore the questions and just pretend this game is just some kind of metaphor for "Battles in the Pacific" regarding gameplay.
I pretty much agree with this. In the future more tasks should be accomplished with less people. FS2 just took WW2 warship crew compliments and used a rough multiplier based on the increased size of the ships. I saw a documentary of how much work it took to load a main gun on an Iowa class (WW2 era) battleship. 10 guys to remove the powder and shell from storage, 10 more guys to take it to the next room 5 loaders 3 gunners a communicator 5 bore cleaners and a commanding officer and more random roles I forgot about... just for one gun. A battery (turret) can easily be crewed by 100 men each doing a small task since almost nothing is automated. Freespace tech should not be so bulky. I mean your fighter weapons are automated right?
On the contrary, to support the dramatic numbers. I get the idea that in the FS verse due to population control issues or the way they conduct warfare that human life is just not as highly regarded as it is now. So that would support the dramatic numbers, because why have machines do it when you have so many damned people on all these planets.
Just some random thoughts. I'm sure it has all crossed our minds when command alarms us with the 10,000 crew aboard the Warspite and how they are in danger. I don't think they gave it that much thought since we spend 2 missions worrying about Kappa wing (4 pilots) and go on a killing spree with NTF capital ships during the bomber arc.
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Just some random thoughts. I'm sure it has all crossed our minds when command alarms us with the 10,000 crew aboard the Warspite and how they are in danger. I don't think they gave it that much thought since we spend 2 missions worrying about Kappa wing (4 pilots) and go on a killing spree with NTF capital ships during the bomber arc.
In war, you don't hold a candlelight vigil for the people aboard the enemy battleships that you must sink. It's war and everyone has a job to do....and then the war ends and we can think things like "oh my god, in retrospect I can't believe the things that we did. Oh my god, I killed like 20,000 people on that one mission."
Although their ships had some of the most suicidal captains in human history, I've always felt sympathy for the 20,000 poor bastards aboard the Vindicator and Uhuru. Did boiler-watcher and/or lightbulb repairman billybob deserve to die? Probably not, but the ship he was aboard needed to explode in order for the war to be won. Well, it probably needed to explode.
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So why risk a single gigantic weapons platform when you can have hundreds of smaller ones that can take your enemy's large pieces off the gameboard just as well and across entire systems (FS2 strike craft were jump capable) where your large base of operations/capital ship is never threathened?
Because your capital ship is always threatened. There's no horizon to hide behind, no terrain to shield you, no air resistance or gravity to limit weapon range. A ship so small as the space shuttle is visible from the asteroid field, eight light-minutes away. Bringing fighters, manned or otherwise, simply wastes delta-v that could be better spent on a missile or kinetic buckshot.
The game is based on WWII dogfighting (as is pretty much every other fighter sim), but if we're talking about realism, then we have to recognize that space is not an ocean and the obsolescence of naval battleships does not apply.
Either way we're digressing.
I pretty much agree with this. In the future more tasks should be accomplished with less people. FS2 just took WW2 warship crew compliments and used a rough multiplier based on the increased size of the ships. I saw a documentary of how much work it took to load a main gun on an Iowa class (WW2 era) battleship. 10 guys to remove the powder and shell from storage, 10 more guys to take it to the next room 5 loaders 3 gunners a communicator 5 bore cleaners and a commanding officer and more random roles I forgot about... just for one gun. A battery (turret) can easily be crewed by 100 men each doing a small task since almost nothing is automated. Freespace tech should not be so bulky. I mean your fighter weapons are automated right?
On the contrary, to support the dramatic numbers. I get the idea that in the FS verse due to population control issues or the way they conduct warfare that human life is just not as highly regarded as it is now. So that would support the dramatic numbers, because why have machines do it when you have so many damned people on all these planets.
Capella is stated to be a densely-populated system, with a population of... 250 million. Even if overpopulation were a problem in Sol, I don't think that's why the GTVA starts churning out 10,000-man Hecates. The crew count probably comes from the need for all sorts of specialists to not only keep the ship running, but to come up with solutions on-the-fly to unpredictable battle damage that could cause a fully-automated system to spew more errors than FSO does from a malformed .tbl.
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I'm still waiting for an ORION KOMMANDER mod that lets me be a destroyer captain; at full sim-level detail, I want to be managing my fighter complement, morale of my (excessively large?) crew, supplies and logistics, and other minute details.
Well, there is a MOD that places you in command of Orion destroyer... but without all that crew managment stuff
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I pretty much agree with this. In the future more tasks should be accomplished with less people. FS2 just took WW2 warship crew compliments and used a rough multiplier based on the increased size of the ships.
This is pretty much completely wrong, or an Orion's crew would probably be something in the range of nearly a hundred thousand people, not ten thousand. The ships are actually fairly undercrewed for their size in most cases; this probably explains their lack of effective damage control in most missions, where we never see weapons or systems come back into action.