How Many Engineers?

[Scott Martin]

I've been looking at crew levels in the various versions of Traveller, and I think that the levels needed in TNE/T4 are not only high, but absurdly high. Take a look here for a more detailed write-up, but by the numbers, TNE ships require on the order of 50 times more crew than the equivalent volume of drives in HG (skewed somewhat since I'm just looking at power plants, but still) and up to 100 times the levels needed in MT (although without all the errata I'm extrapolating from a pretty bad source: help please Aramis?)

I can accept a certain amount of "overcrewing" due to the automation paranoia in TNE, but even using T4's "High Automation" I still get numbers vastly higher than even LBB2. Am I doing the calculations wrong, or are these numbers really skewed?
http://www.scottmartin.ca/Space_RPG/Design_Notes/Engineering_Crew_Comparison.html

Assuming that I'm not deluded, what do you think the Engineering crew for PC-scale ships should be?


I'll start the ball rolling by saying that I think the Scout should need less than 0.5 engineers (so a pilot with engineering skill can handle it) and the Far trader / Fat Trader should need at least one engineer, while the subsidized liner might need 2-3 engineers.

Should small military ships *need* more engineers, or are they carried in case damage control is needed? In this context "need" being "required for normal operation" not "should they be standard crew"

Scott Martin

 

[far-trader]

I recall I house-ruled once something to the effect that what the Crew requirement represented was the total number of skill levels required. So a single Scotty (say Engineering-7) was the equivalent of several red-shirts (just Engineering-1 each). I don't recall which edition drove me to such but it could well have been T4. It might even have been HG. Not really much help as far as Canonicity goes.

I don't recall an issue with the TNE crew numbers so maybe there is some errata that fixed it? Or maybe I just accepted it as a new paradigm?

 

[whartung]

Yea, when I was doing the Merchant Drop tank work, I noticed FF&S wanted a pretty gross amount of engineers, basically related directly to power plant MW.

I can understand using the PP as a base number from which all things interesting happen on a ship, but still.

My 100K ton bulk freighter require 393 Engineers. The PP was 59000 MW, and 50K of that was for the 1G drive.

It's not like these guys on in the bowels of the ship shoveling fissile material in to the reactor.

Modern container ships certainly don't have huge crews.

But the implication is that by using the overall MW of the plant, it's supposed to be a simple mechanic to represent the overall complexity of the ship. But in cargo vessels, they seem a bit overkill to me.

 

[flykiller]

Should small military ships *need* more engineers, or are they carried in case damage control is needed?

military ships maneuver into harm's way, meaning they must be able to absorb casualties and handle damage control situations. they also must continually train their personnel, meaning they have inexperienced trainees aboard. yes, they'll have more engineers, and more of the other rates too. whatever the book says for civilian ships, for military multiply it by about 1.3 and that should do it.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

I'm sure that table is correct, but it's not very helpful, because even at low TLs a 35dt FF&S1/2 powerplant is enough to run a fair sized ship.

Assuming high automation and TL13, under FF&S2:

100dt scout/courier: 0 engineers
200dt far trader: 0 engineers
200dt yacht: 2 engineers
400dt sub merch: 1 engineer
800dt merc cruiser: 3 engineers

Lower TLs, automation, or computers will obviously increase these.

 

[sgbrown]

How about the following for house rules:

1 Engineer per power plant (regardless of size) required at start up or shut down. (if you want to bring multiple units up at once you'll need more people.) Pilots can also be used for starting up and shutting down "small" starship powerplants.

Full complement needed for performing cannon maintenance periods within the alloted time.

In port maintenance time increases if a full complement of engineers is not on board at a rate 1 day per missing engineer for each 2 weeks in operation. (this represents tasks that would normally be done in route - with a full complement of engineers.)

After 4 weeks, performance penalties begin if maintenance is not kept up.

 

[Lochlaber]

I use T-20 rules for engineers but in my opinion these are too small especially in the engineering department but what the heck, it's a game, not a rpg on running an engineering plant.

Running the level equivalent is nice and I think I will adapt it but it has some problems, mainly pay equivalents and what happens when you place all your engineering eggs in a single basket.

As far as maintainence goes, that is what your engineers should be doing during those long days in jump and is how I have them spend their time. Fixing plumbing, replacing filters, taking a main off line to replace a part/fuse, etc..

 

[GypsyComet]

I can't help but wonder if ship combat systems should be adjusted to show damage to systems in two forms: working/degraded/not-working, and "hours to restore". The first could simply be thresholds on the scale of the second, making questions of "what do we have left?" and "how long until we can use X again?" equally easy to answer...

 

[atpollard]

Real world container ships have a crew of 20 to 40 men no matter how big or small.

On a Traveller merchant ship, the steward and engineer are the only characters working most of the time. The pilot flys the ship for less than 8 hours to the jump limit and the Navigator plots the jump - then both take a week off while the ship is in jump and unmaneuverable. The gunner only works when you are being attacked and the medic earns his pay when someone is hurt.

My preference is about 1 crewman per 100 dTons of ship and about half of the crew are engineers.

 

[jfetters]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
I've been looking at crew levels in the various versions of Traveller, and I think that the levels needed in TNE/T4 are not only high, but absurdly high. Take a look here for a more detailed write-up, but by the numbers, TNE ships require on the order of 50 times more crew than the equivalent volume of drives in HG (skewed somewhat since I'm just looking at power plants, but still) and up to 100 times the levels needed in MT (although without all the errata I'm extrapolating from a pretty bad source: help please Aramis?)

I can accept a certain amount of "overcrewing" due to the automation paranoia in TNE, but even using T4's "High Automation" I still get numbers vastly higher than even LBB2. Am I doing the calculations wrong, or are these numbers really skewed?
http://www.scottmartin.ca/Space_RPG/Design_Notes/Engineering_Crew_Comparison.html

Assuming that I'm not deluded, what do you think the Engineering crew for PC-scale ships should be?


I'll start the ball rolling by saying that I think the Scout should need less than 0.5 engineers (so a pilot with engineering skill can handle it) and the Far trader / Fat Trader should need at least one engineer, while the subsidized liner might need 2-3 engineers.

Should small military ships *need* more engineers, or are they carried in case damage control is needed? In this context "need" being "required for normal operation" not "should they be standard crew"

I am totally with you on the TNE overcrewing of engineers. I had a post bitching about that some time ago.

I think all small ships (200-400 ton range, lets say) should all have a dedicated engineer. I was never a fan of the "one person to do all the jobs" paradigm of CT and MT.

In any case, the spreadsheet that I use for FFS ships has some kind of a high-automation feature, but I'm not sure if it is the same as what you are talking about (there are some other sprinkles of FFS2 features in the Yves spreadsheet) but I don't own FFS2, so I have no idea what that pertains to.

But the large ships definitely need something of a small army of engineers. When you break down the components covered in "Engineering" it makes sense: M-Drive, J-Drive, Gravitics, Maintenance and a bunch of other things I probably can't think of at the moment. A small ship can deal with a couple people for this, but the larger ships need dedicated teams for the "sub-groups" in engineering. The $6 million question is exactly how big those groups need to be.

 

[Scott Martin]

TNE also requires "Maintenance" crew. Isn't this what you use engineering crew for?

Scott Martin

P.S. That's a FF&S-2 spreadsheet, so the designs that come out of it are not TNE legal (one of the major differences is that it doesn't allocate enough space to "structure" since this was reduced to 10% of that required in TNE in T4...)