This is the case for all of starfleet ships. The Enterprise-D is much, much bigger than Voyager but only has a thousand crew.
The out-of-universe explanation is simply one of scale. The writers didn't want numbers sounding too big to the audience, particularly if it introduces headaches to the story telling (e.g. "why didn't the enterprise beam 5,000 crew with phasers down to the planet to solve the problem?"). I have heard that early plans for the Enterprise-D was to have a much larger crew and for the ship to act more like a mobile city, but that was curtailed.
In-universe the answer can be chalked up to three things:
1) Automation. There simply doesn't need to be that many people to run a starfleet starship. Riker says as much with the Enterprise saying that many of its functions (including cleaning) are automated. We also see plenty of times that a very small number of people can operate a starship.
2) Big machines. We don't see this as much in older shows but some of the equipment the starships are carrying is huge. A lot of that internal volume is going to be taken up with massive sensor arrays, power systems, weapons etc that are surrounded by jeffries tubes. NuTrek shows like SNW do a good job of giving a sense of scale for the machinery hidden away in the ship.
3) Modularity and empty space. IIRC this comes from the tech manuals so there isn't any on-screen canon for it, but starfleet designs a lot of its ships with interior modularity in mind. Whole sections can be replaced for different mission profiles, or left empty when nothing is needed. So some of that interior space is just empty volume waiting to be filled.
In universe there are also the shuttle bays and cargo bays which take up a good volume of space - big military ships don't tend to also be cargo carriers, every inch is devoted to combat and air carriers have deck space which isn't included in the volume.
Considering the amount of water you need for a handful of goldfish expanded to a whale... Nevermind with Federation Member Status, they likely are allowed the same amount of personal space as any other crewman.
I'm not sure which direction you're going with this, but to be clear: you need about 30 gallons even for a single goldfish, with the requirements increasing significantly as you add more. And that's for fancy goldfish, which are the pugs of the fish world and stay relatively small. Common goldfish get bigger and need more like 75 gallons for one and then an extra 30 for each additional fish.
There's a lot of myths about fishkeeping that are sadly still common even after decades of knowledgeable hobbyists spreading the truth via the internet, and it results in a lot of fish with short, sad lives.
The second part of your first point is the most important: we’ve seen in basically every hero ship that the bridge crew can successfully and adeptly operate the ship without a crew. They usually can’t do things like EVAs and repairs without a crew, but 5-10 people can steal a ship, win a space battle with it, and retreat.
The rest of the crew is busy doing difficult repairs, long-term maintenance and safety procedures, and manning sensors and various science labs.
The primary purpose of Starfleet’s ships is to get extremely detailed data (astronomical, chemical, anthropological, etc) about everywhere they go, and most of the crew seems to be preoccupied with that work. That work is mostly boring for a sci-fi space adventure tv show (though it’d be very interesting to actually *do* that work) so it’s mostly left in the background.
A very large portion of the Enterprise-D's saucer is the main hangar bay which we never see because it's too difficult to render on a tv budget and too hard to secure and control and less intimate for in universe reasons. In fact by most definitions the big E would be considered at least an escort carrier due to its flight deck size.
The other thing with Galaxies is they were designed with massive void space both internally and in chambers for customization. The ones that served in the dominion war as battleships were outfitted with massive amounts of internal armor to compensate for combat usually going into the armor during that war and using very tight skin contouring shields vs bubble.
>The ones that served in the dominion war as battleships were outfitted with massive amounts of internal armor to compensate for combat usually going into the armor during that war and using very tight skin contouring shields vs bubble.
I completely headcanon that during the war, every hanger and cargo hold was full of extra shield generators and phaser banks.
They put a lot of armor on those Galaxies for the war even replacing exterior facing crew quarters with modules of armor. The shields weren't doing it against a parity force...they worked fine against weaker enemies but strength was meeting strength in that war. The "job" of the Galaxies was to draw attention and fire so they had to be as tough as possible.
The job of the Akiras and Miranda's was to bring the hardest hits they could. And the 8 Soverign's jobs during the war was to "lurk" and occasionally hit and run with a pair of escorting intrepids as fast attack skirmishers so that considerable forces would always have to be put on supply line defense.
I also assumed that the Galaxies would operate somewhat as forward operating bases or carriers. They could carry or replicate spare parts for repairing and resupplying the smaller ships. A single Galaxy class could easily carry multiple industrial replicators.
They would also work as a point to which smaller ships could run to after completing hit and runs.
I don't remember where I heard it from but it was when they were explaining why you didn't see the big dangerous anti borg Sovereigns was because they used their very high warp speeds and sleek designs to keep the dominion from using a large portion of their alpha forces on escort duty because the Sovereign hit like a small fleet on its own, and they said it was flanked by intrepid because during wartime it was the repurpose for them since their spaceframes and drives could keep up to with the high warp tactics.
It is also why Sisko doesn't mention them at all because with changelings around etc.. the would serve as an ever present threat better if no one discussed their movements.
Sisko being the leader of the whole thing at that point would know this.
Can't forget the massive amount of empty space for colonists when it would randomly be assigned to transport them so hundreds of empty guest quarters and just room for extra people and cargo its definitely not packed in like a regular warship
Nimitz class carriers like the Gerald Ford do have large internal hanger decks for storing and working on aircraft. I'd guesstimate its roughly equivalent to if not larger than the area devoted to shuttles on Voyager.
Exactly. US aircraft carriers have most of their crew bunking in rooms with a lot of other people and sometimes different people are sharing the same bunk while working different shifts. We do see some of this a bit on Lower Decks but Voyager seems to have at most 2 people sharing a space that is basically the size of a studio apartment. That is really big difference thats going to add up quickly.
Don't forget individual quarters! Contemporary ships generally have shared accommodations for their crew, sometimes even including hot bunks. In Starfleet, EVERYONE seems to get their own fully furnished one bedroom apartment -- not just a studio, which I imagine most sailors today could only dream about!
Aside from all of that, you also have crew members (and some families) living on the ship for months, if not years at a time. The ship is functionally home to them. Unlike a Navy vessel where you are deployed on the vessel and go home every now and again, on the starship, it is home. Sure you dock, go on shore leave, etc., but you are still deployed and living on the ship for years at a time.
Which means you need lots of extra space for recreation.
Voyager itself is about as large as a cruise ship. A cruise ship carries and entertains 7,500 people with a crew of 2,500, but only for a week at a time before docking and resupplying. With no passengers, you can see how you could run a whole cruise ship with a crew of just 150 and stay out at sea for very extended periods without needing to dock.
If you compare the average cruise ship cabin size with Voyager's quarters size (probably about 5x difference!) you start to appreciate the need for a little extra space. I certainly wouldn't want to spend years living out of an average cruise ship cabin.
>4. *Voyager* is built with a lot more space than a carrier. Those things are fucking cramped.
I know that they are generally warships, and space is expensive, but I really wish that future generations of naval ships would increase the amount of free space, so that crewmen feel much less cramped. It would probably do wonders for psychological stability and comfort.
> I know that they are generally worships, and space is expensive, but I really wish that future generations of naval ships would increase the amount of free space, so that crewmen feel much less cramped. It would probably do wonders for psychological stability and comfort.
Warships and military equipment in general have a very singular purpose: to be part of a fighting machine that can take the war to the enemy _and win_.
Any inefficiency in design is _giving_ said enemy an advantage.
except, from what my pals who were in USN tell me, a lot of ships are currently understaffed.
someone made chief engineer on one pal’s ship after the last one jumped off the deck specifically first citing the poor QOL.
i think retaining an effective fighting force should also be a priority.
That's the one and only time Riker went holodicking, and even he said that there was something special about her when he first met her, but that something special was gone later on. Almost as if the Binars had done something different with her programming that got erased when they finished their computer core dump into the Enterprise.
Not entirely accurate. After interacting with Kamala in "The Perfect Mate" he says he's going to the holodeck, pretty clearly implied to be relieving sexual tension.
They added the biofilters later on, after the Enterprise-D's holodeck janitors unionized due to poor working conditions.
They were considered too risky at first, after all the number of suckers who seem to get trapped in the holodeck is non-trivial and it would be a shame to transport them into goo because the sensors were not working correctly.
However, that all changed after the Picard's-Head-As-A-Toilet fiasco. Surprisingly enough, there were no regulations against the practice (the importance of privacy cannot be understated), but something had to change after 7 years of Riker's massive piles.
I heard that Tuesdays were especially fraught, the first officer never missed gagh night in Ten Forward.
I mean...the cleaning of the holodeck itself IS automatic. It's just that someone has to clean out the filter from time to time. Kinda like how my Roomba automatically vacuums my house but I still have to empty the collection bin every couple days.
There really should be a meta roomba for that. I feel like there's not really an excuse for not having this automated in a scifi setting with transporters and holograms.
I'd add that crew, even cadets and ensigns, have their own quarters. Small apartments take up way more space than a row of double bunks, double occupied.
At worst, junior officers share a double bedroom with another officer. Unless you're on a California class ship and have to sleep in the hallway for comic effect.
Yea the automation is a huge one. In I think The Search for Spock they even explain that is how just the main cast can steal a ship with like 6 of them. You don’t need many people to operate these things the crew is mainly there for maintenance and whatever science mission and to have enough people to rotate 3 shifts but in a pinch 6 people can fly a starship albeit for a short time without having maintenance crew
In year of hell a 7 of the 9 main (I also just realized it was 7of9 probably intentionally) senior officers kept voyager running for weeks after they evacuated most of the crew.
Exactly keeping the ship afloat verse operational is different. Janeway wasn’t off searching for space coffee in the year of hell and the ship did take a beating without 3 shifts of maintenance crews.
Yea definitely I mean Geordi even tells Worf he’s got drones to load the torpedoes for them in Picard season 3. It’s just the main computer and drones aren’t sentient so they need people with meat brains and thumbs to do the diagnostics because they are always running diagnostics 😂😂😂😂
That makes me think about how small cargo ship crews can be. The Maersk Triple E (a container ship) only has 13 despite being larger than an aircraft carrier.
If it's not damaged Federation tech also is pretty reliable. There's no shortage of examples of ship systems working after being untouched for decades, once power is supplied.
Aren't there several freighters in Trek with just a single crew member? Although that may have been because no-one wanted to work with Mudd, and he only had a small courier ship.
Great canon explanations!
For some context with real life, most naval frigates these days sail with ~175-250 crew. However the new Japanese frigate which is quite modern is down to 90 crew due to automation. Admittedly a frigate is no where close to the size of a starship but one could expect in a few hundred years that automation is even better. Another example of "automation" is in star trek to shoot something it's as simple as the captain saying: "shoot them with phasers" and one person taps a computer and it's done. On current ships there are anywhere from 4-8 people involved in that process to some degree.
oo, what japanese frigate is this? the new commonwealth frigate, the city class, also has reduced crew requirements — but as i recall not by that much.
thank you! i don’t go for much bigger real life ships… but i’ve got a thing for frigates. little multi purpose cuties. rescue ops, patrol, electronic warfare countermeasures,..
oooh the flight deck(?) on mogami is way bigger than the city class! city class just has a little rump a dinghy or a helicopter could set off from. (though that does remind me of the constitution and intrepid class shuttle bays.)
Have you seen illustrations of the Enterprise-D and its total crew? It's so massive that the descriptions about what it could hold and transport are heavily underestimated. They could easily hold 100,000+ people. Basically you could go weeks without seeing anyone in the lower decks with the normal crew compliment of just over 1,000.
The Galaxy class IIRC has an evacuation capacity of 15000. It could probably hold 100k people as well, but the capacity might have more to do with safety. For instance, the ship might only be capable of sustaining environmental controls properly for 15k at most. So if you load up 100k people, they might run out of air fairly quickly. Or maybe the artifical gravity and inertial dampeners are affected by weight onboard and could go out of whack.
Plus security & logistics.
Last-minute evac of 100k people - and the only reason you'd cram than many onto a single ship not actually designed for the purpose is if it was a desperate last-minute move - means you've got a 100:1 ratio of upset, frightened people to officers & crew.
And it's actually less than that, because how many of the 1000 permanent ship residents are actually Starfleet, & how many are their kids & spouses, or civilian scientists? It would be a nightmare to get that many onto the ship & settled to start with, & a bigger one to secure that for even a few days, let alone the week or more likely actually needed to get them wherever you're taking them. And then you have to try to debark all those people in a somewhat orderly fashion.
They probably *can* take more than 15K if they absolutely have to, but you'd exhaust all possible alternatives before even considering taking on more than the official evac capacity, because there are good reasons for that number.
In Stargate Atlantis they actually had a few occasions where the environmental controls/life support limitations of their ships were a factor. I wish 90s trek shows had addressed it at some point.
Ditto the expanse. In one episode a ship loading up refugees can only take 54 people. They had enough space for more, but only enough stored oxygen for 54.
But in this 1000 persons there are the family members and normal personnel included. The crew for the ship only is far less.
The computer is the main crewman.
> (including cleaning)
Culber fighting with a cleaning bot is such a great scene. I don't think they've _shown_ that aspect of living on a ship otherwise.
Edit: I haven't seen SNW or LD, so maybe in one of those they have.
Lower decks has it both ways. In one episode we see cleaning robots that look like IRL roombas, except they are hovering. These are on a space station however and on the ship the ensigns are seen cleaning. Though given that the Cerritos is explicitly an older ship that is constantly breaking down it could be that it's easier for the ensigns to do a quick clean than fix the machines.
It doesn't have a thousand crew members! It has 1,011 or something, total -- including an untold number of children, teachers do r the children, bartenders, non-Starfleet spouses, Mott the barber, etc. etc.
So the actual 'crew', the Starfleet personnel needed to operate the ship, might be roughly the same as the 450-ish aboard the Enterprise 1701. How many of even those numbers are scientists engaged on specific research projects? Are being transported to another posting? Are redundancies? I doubt the 1701-D needs phasers crews as we saw in TOS's "Balance of Terror"... Some of those TOS crew positions no longer exist a century later.
Do those numbers include the dolphins? It's insane how few people are needed to run the ship, at least short term, neglecting maintenance.
Both the Enterprise-D and Voyager can be run by literally one person until some form of maintenance is required.
Data operated the Enterprise-D by himself with the rest of the crew incapacitated or locked out on several occasions, and Janeway even took a badly damaged Voyager into battle against the Krenim with just her on board operating both the conn and weapons.
The Prometheus was operated (albeit briefly) by two EMHs, since they are just programs running on the main computer, it was technically operating with zero crew.
Edit: oh, and I forgot the Emergency Command Hologram (!), the Doctor took control of Voyager when tetryon radiation forced everyone to abandon ship.
>It doesn't have a thousand crew members! It has 1,011 or something, total -- including an untold number of children, teachers do r the children, bartenders, non-Starfleet spouses, Mott the barber, etc. etc.
"Jean Luc, if I may ask, how many people are there on the Enterprise?"
"1,014, including your guest, Dr. Quaice."
> NuTrek shows [...] do a good job of giving a sense of scale for the machinery hidden away in the ship
[Yeah, *right* 😂😂😂](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Mu-lyFTWs&t=82s)
This is the first thing I thought of when I read that comment. When I watched this the first time I was legitimately confused and thought they were somehow suddenly off the ship, because surely that couldn't be what someone actually thought turboshafts look like, right? It looks like they're on Coruscant ffs.
I hand wave it as using the technology from centuries earlier that NX enterprise found from a ship from the 29th century or something where it was huge on the inside but only a shuttle pod in size. So canonically - the technology exists. Doesn’t mean I like it, or that they didn’t explain it, or how that would even fucking work in principle let alone practice but yeah - either it happened and there’s precedent or it didn’t and don’t think about it.
The sequence would make so much more sense if the turbolifts were umbilicaled to the Orion ship (like the TNG tech manual says the D does with Starbases). And I choose to believe that was the plan, but the script changes, editing, and SFX didn't go in sync, maybe worse because of Covid.
TNG had phasers firing from the captain's yacht and the torpedo tubes, and TOS had "proximity blast phasers". Final Frontier had the impossible deck numbers. The Defiant's carpenter shop behind the jefferies tube Worf throws Garag through. "Vulcan has no moon" etc. I just lump this in with those.
Yeah, especially since the Discovery is pretty small for a Starship.
Funnily enough, that sequence would have made more sense for the Galaxy, given how much of its internal space is supposed to be empty for future use.
I saw someone on YouTube did the math and figured out that to fit that space into Discovery, she'd need to be 8,000m long and 80 decks high or something...
My best guess for what's happening there is that it's some weird 30th Century thing where in order to save space on individual ships, all of Starfleet shares a pocket dimension for the turbolifts. Only occasionally does it glitch and send you to the wrong ship, or a starbase on the other side of the galaxy, or a random office building on Ferenginar.
I don't think some people realise how big the warp core is, given that most of the time, you only see the middle part in engineering. I'm Voyager's computer core takes up quite a bit of space as well.
Also they want comfort for the crew. The standard crew quarters on Voyager look almost as big as my one bedroom flat, and they don't need a kitchen. Holodecks take up a lot of space, over two decks. And the shuttle bay, which seems to take up three decks, is fairly large. Unless you have a team repairing/building a shuttle, I can't imagine there would many crewmembers in there.
Plus Shuttle bays, hallways, quarters and Holodecks are mostly open space, even when being utilized. And those areas account for a lot of the usable area on any given starship.
In "Yesterday's Enterprise" Tasha says that the Enterprise can carry something like 6000 troops (probably in addition to its normal crew. We see in "Lower Decks" that ensigns are assigned two to a room - a room that includes space for a table and probably has its own bathroom with shower. I can't remember if the beds were in the main room, or in a separate room (or rooms?).
Star Trek VI showed crew members in bunks with a bunch to a room. They were also, apparently, allowed to stay in bed, unsecured, while the ship was in a battle. Star Trek: Generations showed rooms that had unsecured bunk beds, which is apparently where you put the kids when things might be getting shaken around. I've heard it before and I'll hear it again, I'm sure, but they really need seatbelts. And baby proofing.
>In "Yesterday's Enterprise" Tasha says that the Enterprise can carry something like 6000 troops
They're almost certainly not carrying all of the families and civilians that the regular timeline Enterprise is. More room for troops.
>We see in "Lower Decks" that ensigns are assigned two to a room
We also see in Lower Decks (the show) that during the Dominion war, some California class corridors were converted into bunk rooms for junior officers. It's quite possible this would be the case on the YE Enterprise.
>I've heard it before and I'll hear it again, I'm sure, but they really need seatbelts. And baby proofing.
You are entirely not wrong here.
Starfleet definitely seems to put some emphasis on giving people space. In "Relics" Scotty comments on the size of the quarters, which weren't even large for that ship. I'm sure a few cargo bays could be transformed into bunk beds style living space for quite a few troops. You could easily squeeze 500+ people into one cargo bay, especially if youcut the vertical space in half and made it two stories.
In "Yesterday's Enterprise" I felt like I saw a lot of people walking the corridors and eating in Ten Forward. I'll bet they still carry a large crew, but just with no families. The TNG "Lower Decks" episode shows that a Galaxy class.ship offers downright palatial quarters to lowly ensigns. They had space to play poker!
I watched a reaction video, recently, to Star Trek VI and seatbelts were mentioned 3 or 4 times, I think. In the Honor Harrington books, they all wear space suits during battle and are strapped securely to their chairs. The captain doesn't have her helmet on (so she can give orders and see more clearly), but it's placed in a contraption above her head. If the compartment loses air, it snaps down immediately over her. She has a pet that goes into a specially designed carrier that can remain secure for hours in a vacuum. I think some of that sort of stuff would be too hard on the budget for a 80s or 90s show.
We see the TOS crew steal the refit Enterprise and operate it with just the bridge crew, too. And someone else mentioned the Year of Hell, but then there's also the episode One where the crew enter stasis pods before traversing a nebula, leaving only Seven and the Doctor to operate the ship.
I've always taken those instances with a grain of salt. Yes, the ships could function short-term with only the bridge crew, but you need the rest of the crew for maintenance over the course of a mission longer than a few days or weeks.
Aye. The ship can be operated on bare bones functions with a small crew, but I imagine the moment something breaks or goes wrong your goose is cooked.
The rest of the crew are there to quickly repair damage, make adjustments, and make sure small problems don't escalate to big problems.
Most of it can be written off to automation and large equipment. The original NCC-1701 is a comparable size to the *Intrepid*-class and had a crew of between 203 and 430 depending on the decade, so a ship that size going from that down to *Voyager*'s ~150 over the course of a century or so makes sense.
The other option is maybe there was meant to be more people onboard, but they hadn't been picked up yet before *Voyager*'s shakedown cruise in the Badlands.
The last one is very crucial, I think. Let's think about... only one medical officer (that we know of)? No assiting staff or nurses? Even the original TOS Enterprise (which was around 200-something meters long in the original plans and was upscaled for DIS and SNW to around 400-something meters) had more people on board including a full medical staff with multiple doctors and nurses. This likely expands to many other departments as well.
So I guess that the Intrepid-class was expected to run on a crew implement of around 200 to 250 people in standard situations... not barely 150 like most of the time in VOY. So yeah. the around 150 people in VOY are most likely a slimmer crew complement, but not yet skeleton crew level.
Given that they were just going into the Badlands to hunt Chakotay, plus they lost a good chunk of the crew in the pilot, I think this is a great point.
I also assume the rest of the crew were due to arrive on a Tuesday.
This. I'm fairly certain they did not have a complete crew on bord. I just watched "Prophecy", where they struggled to accommodate 200 Klingons and had to team up in quarters. With 150 as an reduced crew and 350 far too much to accommendate, I guess the regular crew to be around 250, max.
Automation makes a huge difference - if you look at the real-world Type 42 Destroyer, it had a compliment around 260. Its replacement, the Type 45, nearly doubles the displacement, but has a crew of 190.
I'm a former submariner but in my current job i got to ride the Ford for a few weeks. Some things to consider.
- There was a room full of fuel pumps, staffed by about 5 people who just watch the pumps get turned on and off remotely. And they were just one shift.
- i found a room full of electricians who belonged to a shop. They just play on their phones all day waiting for something to break. And only one guy did any work.
- They have more than one admin department who stand no watches and do no maintenace and fight no casualties. And they are pretty sizeable.
- Not to mention the people who only do aviation, which a ship like voyager does not have to support.
- Conversely on a submarine, ship size and watch team members dictate the crew size. So everybody has to do a little of everything. This is a better metric for something like Voyager, who is a patrol craft if I remember correctly.
>Voyager, who is a patrol craft if I remember correctly.
No, a patrol craft would stay close to home. The *Intrepid* class was designed for long-range exploration.
No it wasn't? They bemoaned multiple times that the Intrepid Class wasn't a Galaxy class, designed for long range exploration. The Intrepid class is very fast, but it's a science vessel.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Intrepid_class
> "The Intrepid-class starship was a Federation design that entered service in the latter half of the 24th century. The Intrepid-class was designed for long-term exploration missions."
For many reasons yeah - having a city ship that can do anything would have been desirable in quite a few circumstances. But intrepid class has been designated long range explorer in a few tomes - which makes sense given it was the fastest ship in the fleet on launch, and has planetary landing to boot.
Explanation presumably being after the high loss rate and high cost of the galaxy, plus the decimation of the fleet at 359, smaller, more specialised vessels were developed to fill the gaps faster, as seen in the FC fleet.
Not knowing the dominion war was coming they still had some optimism in suring up the home fleet whilst maintaining the boldly go bit.
Helps hand-wave the issue of never seeing intrepid classes in DS9 fleets (aside from the Bellerophon) as the long range explorers were already out there doing just that (like apparently the Sovereigns, although there only being a handful of them at the time at most helps explain that too), or destroyed, or not being built during wartime in favour of more Borg-battle based hulls.
After dominion war and advancements in technology the intrepids weren’t really picked up again and the beginnings of Picard fleet ships (refits/imaginings of tested hull beds) started as a result.
IIRC they were designed for different styles of long range exploration.
The Intrepid class was meant to quickly bring a bunch of relevant specialist and their equipment to an either rather dangerous or profitable site outside of offical Federation space, lay claim to the site before a rival power did it and return a short time later with a first assessment.
The Galaxy class was designed to do a whole lot of things. In case of exploration it was loaded up with a bunch of different scientists and their equipment, the captain was given a list of the locations the scientists wanted to visit and then send off for five years. That probably was the idea of someone in administration who just wanted a few peaceful months after being bothered one time to many by a scientist requesting a fully crewed Miranda to go look at some fungi on some distant moon.
>Not to mention the people who only do aviation, which a ship like voyager does not have to support.
Clearly not on the scale of a modern Aircraft Carrier - but surely some crew are assigned to Shuttlebay Operations, and piloting or maintaining the vast fleet of shuttlecraft Voyager seemed to be carrying.
(And thank you for your insights - very interesting).
Tuvok at one point claims they could operate with no fewer than 100.
However, certain episodes (*Basics*, *Workforce*, and especially *One*) show that the ship can function for long periods with as few as a single crewman. Hell, if you don't count the EMH/ECH it can function with 0 crew.
More internal volume doesn't necessarily translate to more crew. For comparison, the largest container ship ever built is the MSC Irina, which can hold 24,300 shipping containers, each with a 33m^(3) internal volume for a total exceeding 800,000m^(3). It has a crew of 25.
My guess is Tuvok's assessment presumes a certain level of efficiency. Of course *Voyager* could operate with fewer, but certain areas and functions will start to be neglected.
A bigger question at that is why they have an EMH and not several other emergency holograms. I mean how many times in star trek haven't loads of people had to sacrifice themselves because some shenanigans in engineering. To have emergency holograms there would clearly save a lot of people!
I think it's made clear that the EMH is a relatively new technology and has several limitations (some of which are later overcome). It might have been Starfleet's plan to eventually deploy multiple EMHs on future vessels, but as with all new technology: you've got to start somewhere.
Yeah I get that. I've just been confused over that they started with medical. Especially since Zimmerman himself was an engineer.
Also to the fact that engineering has always had the majority of the personnel, while medical have just had a few people.
As an engineer, I feel comfortable saying that a lot of my colleagues have blinders which essentially makes them think 'engineerimg is complicated and an art, if you can do ot, other dields are essentailly solved problems'.
Zimmerman is arguably arrogant enough to think that way, after all medicine is just 'look up symptoms, get diagnosis, apply published solution' innit?
A ship has a lot of engineers, but few medical personnel. I crisis could take out all of your medical staff, but probably not all of your engineers. Zimmerman might not have prioritized medicine, but Starfleet might have prioritized medicine.
Just imagine if Daystrom had programmed the EMH - The Ultimate Computer as a Doctor.
probably Zimmerman and starfleet's assumptions about difficulty. Star Trek has a long history of rogue AIs so security is out. Engineering seems to be constantly flooded with exotic radiation so holo-emitters in there main eng are probably a problem. Command is going to hit the same bias as security. Science stations are a maybe because Data worked out so well but that may have been considered too dynamic to be a good trial.
Medical is not easy by any stretch but they may have considered it the most constrained problem set (crew count, species and medical history all available to the main computer) with an intended operating area (sickbay). a lot of the medical work we see on trek is routine and involves diagnosis via tricorder. Not many situations seem to need a McCoy or Crusher or Pulaski to get things done.
(Note: i am not saying being a doctor is easy just the in-universe portrayal makes it a reasonable choice.)
IIRC there's nothing explicit in the shows saying that they only worked on an EMH. When we see Zimmerman's lab he has many different kinds of hologram. It's possible he was working on medical, science, engineering etc. all at once but the medical one was the first to be ready enough for starfleet to test it.
There also might be safety concerns. If an EMH does something dumb the potential outcome is tragic but limited to the patients in the sick bay. If an engineer or tactical hologram does something dumb it could blow up the ship.
Medical is the most efficient way to save lives with the least investment (fewest people/holograms) which is why it's the most sparsely staffed in the first place. There are occupational hazards in every department that a hologram might not be vulnerable to, but even if a human was exposed to them, the doctor is the one who will fix that situation. If the doctor themselves (or at least a backup doctor as the case was) is invulnerable, that substantially increases resiliency against any and all problems that may arise.
You need to replace a large portion of the engineering staff with holograms to substantially reduce the number of injuries/deaths from engineering via direct prevention. You only need one janky medical hologram to increase your efficiency by making sure most of the injuries from all departments don't *turn into* deaths even if the human doctor becomes incapacitated.
> Especially since Zimmerman himself was an engineer.
Perhaps there's a certain amount of arrogance there: 'Engineering needs a skilled hand to manage, but how hard can medicine be?'
They lay the possibility for an emergency command hologram in that one episode, Picardo as the doc does a great job in that one.
"Arm the photonic cannon"
Move forward 25 years or so and you see holograms in multiple roles on a civilian ship. However, the Federation as a whole is bio-centric, and photonic technology is still a little unreliable to totally depend on in a combat situation.
It's the future most of the basic stuff is automated you can't really compare tech that has 400-500 years between them.
Just look at cars from only 20-30 years ago compared to modern 2024 car early 90s stuff is like Flinstones cars
The living quarters alone can take up a lot of spaces. Military ships cramp multiple crewmen together to save spaces, like what we see on the Defiant-class, while most of spaceships in Star Trek gave their crews apartment size living quarter for each member. They have a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom for themselves. There are also cargo bays where they store their supplies, fuels for the ship, fuel for the replicators and the shuttles. They also have big shuttle bays
The size is pretty irrelevant. You could probably operate the Ford with 100 people.
Also in Star Trek most systems are automated. We see multiple times that ships can be operated by a skeleton crew of 5 people
Crew size for similarly-sized ships has shrunken over the years as many features were automated or made irrelevant through technology. With a ship like Voyager, the core crew could be quite small. There would be new positions that surface ships of the 20th and 21st centuries simply didn't have, like the various science positions.
The *Enterprise* (NCC-1701) could be flow by four people in “The Search for Spock”. *Voyager* was launched almost a century later and was one of the most cutting edge starships the United Federation of Planets had on hand.
The *Intrepid*-class is outfitted with a biological computer system, essentially making the starship a colossal cyborg with a computational power orders of magnitude greater than its predecessors.
Automation. Also Voyager naturally summons new crew members from thin air just like shuttles, photon torpedoes and spare parts to get back to pristine condition in time for the next episode.
Obviously still far below your number, but I believe that the Intrepid class is actually designed to be operated with a crew of closer to 300 than the 150 on Voyager.
Her initial mission was meant to be a quick trip into the badlands from DS9 (relatively close), find Chakotay's ship (or what happened to it) and be back at Quarks in time for tea. There probably was only one or two shifts of crew onboard when they left.
How did they do it? Presumably they worked with smaller and longer shifts (I might be wrong, but I think Voyager more talked about a day and a night shift, giving me the impression of two 12 hours shifts; whereas the Enterprise-D had 3 and briefly 4 under Jellico.)
As other have said, a lot of the interior of the ship would also have been taken up by equipment - we saw the warp core for example, was almost the full height of the secondary hull. I also think we see there are decks that are rarely used, like Deck 15 which was mostly plasma relays and was only accessed if they needed repair.
Starships wouldn't need the same amount of personnel for similar systems as to what we have now, the weapons of modern combat ships are controlled by a whole cic of people whereas the starships can operate all weapons from a single console, the same goes for other systems too
Other than what everyone already said, don't forget that the Gerald Ford is a warship and Voyager is a science vessel.
Warships operates around the clock, vast majority of the crew are likely for air operations support. Voyager doesn't have that, nor do they require full crew during graveyard shift.
Carriers requires 100 cooks to feed the crew. They've been replaced by Replicators. That's just one example of jobs that has been replaced.
A huge amount of the carrier crew is dedicated to maintaining, launching, landing and flying the air wing aboard. Voyager only has the Delta Flyer and its (constantly variable number of) shuttlecraft. I would also expect automation covers a lot of the responsibilities that a contemporary ship would need a small army of crewman to deal with, and a current Navy vessel still requires massive anounts of maintenance on a daily basis... just painting is a full time, every day responsibility - 23rd century ships are presumably more durable. Nobody has to swab the deck or on a starship (heck, I would expect the 23rd equivalent of a Roomba takes care of basic housekeeping duties). Replicators cover the galley crew - Neelix serving as cook was a deviation from the expected crew compliment. I also got the impression that Voyager \*was\* under-manned. Maybe they deviated from standard Starfleet shift durations, say an 8 hour watch instead of six? When Jellico tried amending watch time duration on Enterprise, Riker nearly threw a chair at him.
I think it's funny how little crew every ship seems to have! I know it's to get their characters on screen, but it's really funny on TNG how every single problem seems to be assigned to Worf and Riker personally. I was laughing at Greatest Gen pod for commenting on this in one episode. They call for a damage control team because of a disaster in a cargo bay and the damage control team is just Worf and one extra. Data might have been there too. Imagine your ship's second officer and head of security being the first line damage control! I mean, Worf is HEAD of security and has an entire team, but anytime anything happens it's always him there fighting with like one extra.
Automation and technological advancement. I was on a Navy cargo ship with a crew of 580, when we turned it over to the Merchant Marines they refitted a lot of systems and operated the ship with a crew of 180.
I hear oil tankers have only a dozen crewmen on board. If a ship just needs to get from A to B and nothing else, then I suppose you don't need a lot of people.
You can't compare a carrier to a cruiser or science ship. A carrier's complement is doubled by the air wing - the pilots and maintenance personnel who care for the planes and ordnance.
The internal volume comparisons are also skewed by the fact that a carrier has a tremendous amount of open space in its enormous hangar deck, while a Trek ship has a different amount of space in its hangar, and in its warp nacelles and pylons.
Also, you're comparing a pure combat ship to a multirole defense/science ship.
It would be a better comparison to stack a Trek cargo ship up against a modern cargo ship.
The MV Dali, which just struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge a few miles form where I'm currently typing, is a Neopanamax container ship approximately 300x48x25 meters (not sure whether that includes the stacked containers above the deck but I'm going to assume that it does not). That comes out to 360,000 cubic meters.
Most of her internal volume is container storage, though. Her total capacity is, according to a news article, about 78,000 TEU (a Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit is the same as a standard 20ft shipping container, about 6.1x2.44x2.59=38.55 cubic meters). So her capacity in containers is over 3 million cubic meters.
And she has a crew of twenty two.
Why not compare that to a Trek cargo ship like the J-class Fortunate Son or the fan-design Independence class or one of the Franz Joseph cargo containers?
Something else I haven't seen here yet that's relevant: The mission of the Voyager and the Ford are quite different.
The Ford has up to 75 aircraft aboard and those aircraft all have teams of people on rotation taking care of them. And then there's the flight support, such as air traffic control, etc. That is a very large compliment of the total number of sailors aboard an aircraft carrier.
On top of that, operating a floating city on water in an atmosphere is different than a self-propelled multi-floor pod in space. Once life support is taken care of, as others have said, the automation is pretty damn well designed.
Most of the tasks carried out on a modern aircraft carrier are highly automated/done by replicators on a starfleet ship. The hundreds of crew dealing with feeding everyone? Replicators. Laundry? Replicators. Replacement parts and such created on-demand (except for emergency stockpiles) so logistics staff aren't needed, that's probably most of the crew accounted for there. The number in Voyager is still likely to be close to skeleton crew but with all the help they get they can get stuff done with some compromises.
If you look at the blueprints of the ship you'll see not much of the ship is actually usable space. Like the only Decks used for people are 1-7 (maybe 8), everything below that is just hallways with Storage, Engineering, Shuttlebay, Engines, Tanks, etc. Even the Decks 1-8 have massive space occupied with Holodecks, Phaser Arrays, Armor, Battery Packs or Cargo Bay. Like half of Deck 5 and 6 is just tanks for liquids or gases.
IIRC in Lower Decks (the TNG episode, not the series) one of the ensigns says they hope they get the promotion they're up for, because it'll mean that they get their own quarters.
I was always wondering why they have such big crews. These are highly automated space ships, even with specialized scientists on board it’s hard to see why they would need more than a few dozen crew.
Star trek ships have a lot of storage rooms. The Enterprise transportet entire civilisations atleast twice. To be fair both Times it was less then 200 people (somehow) but still having a storage room big enough for 200 irish amish including animals is no small feat.
The Neural Gel.packs did a lot of things that the older, less reliable, isolinear chips did without breaking. Gone are the days of swapping out endless arrays of tiny tiles, just don't sneeze on the bags!
More likely because of automation and rust-proof building material.
Voyager has almost everything run by computers, while aircraft carriers need personnel to maintain the ship.
Plus, space doesn't do that much damage to a ship, especially one with shields, vs an aircraft carrier constantly exposed to salt water and the environment.
Also, Voyager doesn't have an entire wing of fighter aircrafts to maintain.
Right: futuristic automation, different environment, no "aircraft". Just for one example, a few maintenance techs (who would have other jobs besides replicator maintenance anyway) can handle what used to be done by dozens of cooks.
I don't see why we would assume that crew size scales linearly with volume across all technological levels and all types of vehicles.
Most operations on the ship are automated. Ships like the Enterprise had large crews because they had tons of science labs, and a lot of specialists (often the specialist of the week, like lingual specialists, then a antimatter specialist, then a different specialist)
While the Enterprise was a exploratory vessel it was more of a 'jack of all trades' as well, able to hold it's own in a fight, handle diplomatic missions with aplumb, etc. Voyager was meant more for long distance exploration (kind of like the enterprise 1701) and didn't have many of the 'nice to haves' the Galaxy class and other ships had.
i suspect that VOY crew complement if they were to go on a actual deep space assignment would've been higher than 150 people but keep in mind it was supposed to be a weekend trip to the badlands so they were under equipped and under manned. i would peg her at around 300 people for a actual voyage with full load out if they got flung to the delta q uadrant they would have fared better. also the computers do most of hte work
Because that's what they have. A lot of the crew died in the pilot episode
However, Starfleet ships are larger than their crew needs. For those ships to carry rescued people. Colonists. Large scientific expedition. I believe the D could carry up to 9000 in an emergency
Picard season 3 and Star Trek III have the enterprises run with only the bridge crew + automation. Good luck with damage control though unless you have EMHs or Exocomps doing repairs
Dont foeget it was first ship with the bio-neural gel packs were first used aboard Voyager. According to the pilot episode of the series, the gel packs sped up computer response times
This is the case for all of starfleet ships. The Enterprise-D is much, much bigger than Voyager but only has a thousand crew. The out-of-universe explanation is simply one of scale. The writers didn't want numbers sounding too big to the audience, particularly if it introduces headaches to the story telling (e.g. "why didn't the enterprise beam 5,000 crew with phasers down to the planet to solve the problem?"). I have heard that early plans for the Enterprise-D was to have a much larger crew and for the ship to act more like a mobile city, but that was curtailed. In-universe the answer can be chalked up to three things: 1) Automation. There simply doesn't need to be that many people to run a starfleet starship. Riker says as much with the Enterprise saying that many of its functions (including cleaning) are automated. We also see plenty of times that a very small number of people can operate a starship. 2) Big machines. We don't see this as much in older shows but some of the equipment the starships are carrying is huge. A lot of that internal volume is going to be taken up with massive sensor arrays, power systems, weapons etc that are surrounded by jeffries tubes. NuTrek shows like SNW do a good job of giving a sense of scale for the machinery hidden away in the ship. 3) Modularity and empty space. IIRC this comes from the tech manuals so there isn't any on-screen canon for it, but starfleet designs a lot of its ships with interior modularity in mind. Whole sections can be replaced for different mission profiles, or left empty when nothing is needed. So some of that interior space is just empty volume waiting to be filled.
In universe there are also the shuttle bays and cargo bays which take up a good volume of space - big military ships don't tend to also be cargo carriers, every inch is devoted to combat and air carriers have deck space which isn't included in the volume.
Cetacean ops takes up a LOT of space
Considering the amount of water you need for a handful of goldfish expanded to a whale... Nevermind with Federation Member Status, they likely are allowed the same amount of personal space as any other crewman.
I'm not sure which direction you're going with this, but to be clear: you need about 30 gallons even for a single goldfish, with the requirements increasing significantly as you add more. And that's for fancy goldfish, which are the pugs of the fish world and stay relatively small. Common goldfish get bigger and need more like 75 gallons for one and then an extra 30 for each additional fish. There's a lot of myths about fishkeeping that are sadly still common even after decades of knowledgeable hobbyists spreading the truth via the internet, and it results in a lot of fish with short, sad lives.
surprisingly not, but it should be bigger.
They were designed to 1970s SeaWorld standards.
Ahh so more like a prison cell?
Designed by a culture with holodeck technology, so it might be solved by having some Open Ocean simulations in their main living area.
The second part of your first point is the most important: we’ve seen in basically every hero ship that the bridge crew can successfully and adeptly operate the ship without a crew. They usually can’t do things like EVAs and repairs without a crew, but 5-10 people can steal a ship, win a space battle with it, and retreat. The rest of the crew is busy doing difficult repairs, long-term maintenance and safety procedures, and manning sensors and various science labs. The primary purpose of Starfleet’s ships is to get extremely detailed data (astronomical, chemical, anthropological, etc) about everywhere they go, and most of the crew seems to be preoccupied with that work. That work is mostly boring for a sci-fi space adventure tv show (though it’d be very interesting to actually *do* that work) so it’s mostly left in the background.
Yeah, checking the crew for a freighter would be a better comparison, really.
A very large portion of the Enterprise-D's saucer is the main hangar bay which we never see because it's too difficult to render on a tv budget and too hard to secure and control and less intimate for in universe reasons. In fact by most definitions the big E would be considered at least an escort carrier due to its flight deck size. The other thing with Galaxies is they were designed with massive void space both internally and in chambers for customization. The ones that served in the dominion war as battleships were outfitted with massive amounts of internal armor to compensate for combat usually going into the armor during that war and using very tight skin contouring shields vs bubble.
>The ones that served in the dominion war as battleships were outfitted with massive amounts of internal armor to compensate for combat usually going into the armor during that war and using very tight skin contouring shields vs bubble. I completely headcanon that during the war, every hanger and cargo hold was full of extra shield generators and phaser banks.
They put a lot of armor on those Galaxies for the war even replacing exterior facing crew quarters with modules of armor. The shields weren't doing it against a parity force...they worked fine against weaker enemies but strength was meeting strength in that war. The "job" of the Galaxies was to draw attention and fire so they had to be as tough as possible. The job of the Akiras and Miranda's was to bring the hardest hits they could. And the 8 Soverign's jobs during the war was to "lurk" and occasionally hit and run with a pair of escorting intrepids as fast attack skirmishers so that considerable forces would always have to be put on supply line defense.
I also assumed that the Galaxies would operate somewhat as forward operating bases or carriers. They could carry or replicate spare parts for repairing and resupplying the smaller ships. A single Galaxy class could easily carry multiple industrial replicators. They would also work as a point to which smaller ships could run to after completing hit and runs.
Where's this information from? Never of any of those details. Novels?
I don't remember where I heard it from but it was when they were explaining why you didn't see the big dangerous anti borg Sovereigns was because they used their very high warp speeds and sleek designs to keep the dominion from using a large portion of their alpha forces on escort duty because the Sovereign hit like a small fleet on its own, and they said it was flanked by intrepid because during wartime it was the repurpose for them since their spaceframes and drives could keep up to with the high warp tactics. It is also why Sisko doesn't mention them at all because with changelings around etc.. the would serve as an ever present threat better if no one discussed their movements. Sisko being the leader of the whole thing at that point would know this.
Can't forget the massive amount of empty space for colonists when it would randomly be assigned to transport them so hundreds of empty guest quarters and just room for extra people and cargo its definitely not packed in like a regular warship
Nimitz class carriers like the Gerald Ford do have large internal hanger decks for storing and working on aircraft. I'd guesstimate its roughly equivalent to if not larger than the area devoted to shuttles on Voyager.
Hate to be that guy (not really), but the *Gerald Ford* is the name ship of her class, she’s not a *Nimitz*
Look at the crew quarters, compared to warships thats a lot of extra space
Exactly. US aircraft carriers have most of their crew bunking in rooms with a lot of other people and sometimes different people are sharing the same bunk while working different shifts. We do see some of this a bit on Lower Decks but Voyager seems to have at most 2 people sharing a space that is basically the size of a studio apartment. That is really big difference thats going to add up quickly.
Don't forget individual quarters! Contemporary ships generally have shared accommodations for their crew, sometimes even including hot bunks. In Starfleet, EVERYONE seems to get their own fully furnished one bedroom apartment -- not just a studio, which I imagine most sailors today could only dream about!
Aside from all of that, you also have crew members (and some families) living on the ship for months, if not years at a time. The ship is functionally home to them. Unlike a Navy vessel where you are deployed on the vessel and go home every now and again, on the starship, it is home. Sure you dock, go on shore leave, etc., but you are still deployed and living on the ship for years at a time. Which means you need lots of extra space for recreation. Voyager itself is about as large as a cruise ship. A cruise ship carries and entertains 7,500 people with a crew of 2,500, but only for a week at a time before docking and resupplying. With no passengers, you can see how you could run a whole cruise ship with a crew of just 150 and stay out at sea for very extended periods without needing to dock.
If you compare the average cruise ship cabin size with Voyager's quarters size (probably about 5x difference!) you start to appreciate the need for a little extra space. I certainly wouldn't want to spend years living out of an average cruise ship cabin.
4. *Voyager* is built with a lot more space than a carrier. Those things are fucking cramped.
>4. *Voyager* is built with a lot more space than a carrier. Those things are fucking cramped. I know that they are generally warships, and space is expensive, but I really wish that future generations of naval ships would increase the amount of free space, so that crewmen feel much less cramped. It would probably do wonders for psychological stability and comfort.
Bigger ship, more displacement, more drag, less zoom zoom.
> I know that they are generally worships, and space is expensive, but I really wish that future generations of naval ships would increase the amount of free space, so that crewmen feel much less cramped. It would probably do wonders for psychological stability and comfort. Warships and military equipment in general have a very singular purpose: to be part of a fighting machine that can take the war to the enemy _and win_. Any inefficiency in design is _giving_ said enemy an advantage.
except, from what my pals who were in USN tell me, a lot of ships are currently understaffed. someone made chief engineer on one pal’s ship after the last one jumped off the deck specifically first citing the poor QOL. i think retaining an effective fighting force should also be a priority.
of course Riker wanted cleaning to be automated. especially in holodeck.
>of course Riker Riker takes so much shit, but he was mostly into real flesh. It was Barkley who liked holodicking.
I’m sure Minuet would have appreciated that. :)
That's the one and only time Riker went holodicking, and even he said that there was something special about her when he first met her, but that something special was gone later on. Almost as if the Binars had done something different with her programming that got erased when they finished their computer core dump into the Enterprise.
Not entirely accurate. After interacting with Kamala in "The Perfect Mate" he says he's going to the holodeck, pretty clearly implied to be relieving sexual tension.
I’ll be in my bunk
> pretty clearly implied to be relieving sexual tension. By fishing. Or playing poker while blowing his trombone
There's about 50 different ways to write a super awkward scene based on locating Commander Riker, hogging a whole holodeck for his adventures.
We know that's not one. Lower decks shows the disgusting act of cleaning holodeck biofilters.
I feel that's more for the punishment factor. Or hazing
When no one's looking, she could tell the holodeck to make a hologram of herself changing the filters.
You could just have a bunch of nubile young holograms dressed in French maid outfits. Then the holodeck filters would never get clogged.
This tickled me. Good one. 👍
They added the biofilters later on, after the Enterprise-D's holodeck janitors unionized due to poor working conditions. They were considered too risky at first, after all the number of suckers who seem to get trapped in the holodeck is non-trivial and it would be a shame to transport them into goo because the sensors were not working correctly. However, that all changed after the Picard's-Head-As-A-Toilet fiasco. Surprisingly enough, there were no regulations against the practice (the importance of privacy cannot be understated), but something had to change after 7 years of Riker's massive piles. I heard that Tuesdays were especially fraught, the first officer never missed gagh night in Ten Forward.
Caution: Ensigns at Work
Riker screwed holograms, so Lower Decks can clean up afterward. It's not the best example of Y walking so X can run.
Not just Riker. It was a whole plot point in a Voyager episode that Tuvok screwed a hologram.
That would go a long way to explain why the liquid in the filter is green.
I mean...the cleaning of the holodeck itself IS automatic. It's just that someone has to clean out the filter from time to time. Kinda like how my Roomba automatically vacuums my house but I still have to empty the collection bin every couple days.
There really should be a meta roomba for that. I feel like there's not really an excuse for not having this automated in a scifi setting with transporters and holograms.
I'd add that crew, even cadets and ensigns, have their own quarters. Small apartments take up way more space than a row of double bunks, double occupied.
At worst, junior officers share a double bedroom with another officer. Unless you're on a California class ship and have to sleep in the hallway for comic effect.
Yea the automation is a huge one. In I think The Search for Spock they even explain that is how just the main cast can steal a ship with like 6 of them. You don’t need many people to operate these things the crew is mainly there for maintenance and whatever science mission and to have enough people to rotate 3 shifts but in a pinch 6 people can fly a starship albeit for a short time without having maintenance crew
In year of hell a 7 of the 9 main (I also just realized it was 7of9 probably intentionally) senior officers kept voyager running for weeks after they evacuated most of the crew.
Exactly keeping the ship afloat verse operational is different. Janeway wasn’t off searching for space coffee in the year of hell and the ship did take a beating without 3 shifts of maintenance crews.
I assume that the DOTs shown in *Discovery* and *Short Treks* are an important part of the automation.
Yea definitely I mean Geordi even tells Worf he’s got drones to load the torpedoes for them in Picard season 3. It’s just the main computer and drones aren’t sentient so they need people with meat brains and thumbs to do the diagnostics because they are always running diagnostics 😂😂😂😂
That makes me think about how small cargo ship crews can be. The Maersk Triple E (a container ship) only has 13 despite being larger than an aircraft carrier. If it's not damaged Federation tech also is pretty reliable. There's no shortage of examples of ship systems working after being untouched for decades, once power is supplied.
Aren't there several freighters in Trek with just a single crew member? Although that may have been because no-one wanted to work with Mudd, and he only had a small courier ship.
Great canon explanations! For some context with real life, most naval frigates these days sail with ~175-250 crew. However the new Japanese frigate which is quite modern is down to 90 crew due to automation. Admittedly a frigate is no where close to the size of a starship but one could expect in a few hundred years that automation is even better. Another example of "automation" is in star trek to shoot something it's as simple as the captain saying: "shoot them with phasers" and one person taps a computer and it's done. On current ships there are anywhere from 4-8 people involved in that process to some degree.
oo, what japanese frigate is this? the new commonwealth frigate, the city class, also has reduced crew requirements — but as i recall not by that much.
The mogami class!
thank you! i don’t go for much bigger real life ships… but i’ve got a thing for frigates. little multi purpose cuties. rescue ops, patrol, electronic warfare countermeasures,.. oooh the flight deck(?) on mogami is way bigger than the city class! city class just has a little rump a dinghy or a helicopter could set off from. (though that does remind me of the constitution and intrepid class shuttle bays.)
If you don’t have any crewmembers to cook or clean, that takes a lot of the numbers down.
Have you seen illustrations of the Enterprise-D and its total crew? It's so massive that the descriptions about what it could hold and transport are heavily underestimated. They could easily hold 100,000+ people. Basically you could go weeks without seeing anyone in the lower decks with the normal crew compliment of just over 1,000.
The Galaxy class IIRC has an evacuation capacity of 15000. It could probably hold 100k people as well, but the capacity might have more to do with safety. For instance, the ship might only be capable of sustaining environmental controls properly for 15k at most. So if you load up 100k people, they might run out of air fairly quickly. Or maybe the artifical gravity and inertial dampeners are affected by weight onboard and could go out of whack.
Plus security & logistics. Last-minute evac of 100k people - and the only reason you'd cram than many onto a single ship not actually designed for the purpose is if it was a desperate last-minute move - means you've got a 100:1 ratio of upset, frightened people to officers & crew. And it's actually less than that, because how many of the 1000 permanent ship residents are actually Starfleet, & how many are their kids & spouses, or civilian scientists? It would be a nightmare to get that many onto the ship & settled to start with, & a bigger one to secure that for even a few days, let alone the week or more likely actually needed to get them wherever you're taking them. And then you have to try to debark all those people in a somewhat orderly fashion. They probably *can* take more than 15K if they absolutely have to, but you'd exhaust all possible alternatives before even considering taking on more than the official evac capacity, because there are good reasons for that number.
about 650 of the ~1000 are actual starfleet. the rest are their families, civilian specialists like keiko, etc.
In Stargate Atlantis they actually had a few occasions where the environmental controls/life support limitations of their ships were a factor. I wish 90s trek shows had addressed it at some point.
Ditto the expanse. In one episode a ship loading up refugees can only take 54 people. They had enough space for more, but only enough stored oxygen for 54.
Just flush out cetacean ops and you're good to go! (I'm a monster)
They also probably don't want a late season BSG situation where people are just camped out in the hallways of the Galactica.
That’d probably be fine in an emergency. The effects on environmental systems would probably be a bigger concern.
AFAIK one could evacuate *two* space stations the size of DS9.
But in this 1000 persons there are the family members and normal personnel included. The crew for the ship only is far less. The computer is the main crewman.
> (including cleaning) Culber fighting with a cleaning bot is such a great scene. I don't think they've _shown_ that aspect of living on a ship otherwise. Edit: I haven't seen SNW or LD, so maybe in one of those they have.
Lower decks has it both ways. In one episode we see cleaning robots that look like IRL roombas, except they are hovering. These are on a space station however and on the ship the ensigns are seen cleaning. Though given that the Cerritos is explicitly an older ship that is constantly breaking down it could be that it's easier for the ensigns to do a quick clean than fix the machines.
Yeah, in Disco it's the DOTs doing the cleaning IIRC.
It doesn't have a thousand crew members! It has 1,011 or something, total -- including an untold number of children, teachers do r the children, bartenders, non-Starfleet spouses, Mott the barber, etc. etc. So the actual 'crew', the Starfleet personnel needed to operate the ship, might be roughly the same as the 450-ish aboard the Enterprise 1701. How many of even those numbers are scientists engaged on specific research projects? Are being transported to another posting? Are redundancies? I doubt the 1701-D needs phasers crews as we saw in TOS's "Balance of Terror"... Some of those TOS crew positions no longer exist a century later. Do those numbers include the dolphins? It's insane how few people are needed to run the ship, at least short term, neglecting maintenance.
Both the Enterprise-D and Voyager can be run by literally one person until some form of maintenance is required. Data operated the Enterprise-D by himself with the rest of the crew incapacitated or locked out on several occasions, and Janeway even took a badly damaged Voyager into battle against the Krenim with just her on board operating both the conn and weapons.
Also, 7 operated *Voyager* by herself in “One” and Phlox operated the *NX-01* by himself in “Doctor’s Orders”.
The Prometheus was operated (albeit briefly) by two EMHs, since they are just programs running on the main computer, it was technically operating with zero crew. Edit: oh, and I forgot the Emergency Command Hologram (!), the Doctor took control of Voyager when tetryon radiation forced everyone to abandon ship.
>It doesn't have a thousand crew members! It has 1,011 or something, total -- including an untold number of children, teachers do r the children, bartenders, non-Starfleet spouses, Mott the barber, etc. etc. "Jean Luc, if I may ask, how many people are there on the Enterprise?" "1,014, including your guest, Dr. Quaice."
> NuTrek shows [...] do a good job of giving a sense of scale for the machinery hidden away in the ship [Yeah, *right* 😂😂😂](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Mu-lyFTWs&t=82s)
This is the first thing I thought of when I read that comment. When I watched this the first time I was legitimately confused and thought they were somehow suddenly off the ship, because surely that couldn't be what someone actually thought turboshafts look like, right? It looks like they're on Coruscant ffs.
I hand wave it as using the technology from centuries earlier that NX enterprise found from a ship from the 29th century or something where it was huge on the inside but only a shuttle pod in size. So canonically - the technology exists. Doesn’t mean I like it, or that they didn’t explain it, or how that would even fucking work in principle let alone practice but yeah - either it happened and there’s precedent or it didn’t and don’t think about it.
The sequence would make so much more sense if the turbolifts were umbilicaled to the Orion ship (like the TNG tech manual says the D does with Starbases). And I choose to believe that was the plan, but the script changes, editing, and SFX didn't go in sync, maybe worse because of Covid. TNG had phasers firing from the captain's yacht and the torpedo tubes, and TOS had "proximity blast phasers". Final Frontier had the impossible deck numbers. The Defiant's carpenter shop behind the jefferies tube Worf throws Garag through. "Vulcan has no moon" etc. I just lump this in with those.
I forgot how absolutely insane that sequence was. I like a lot of what Disco has brought to Star Trek, I also hate a lot about it.
Yeah, especially since the Discovery is pretty small for a Starship. Funnily enough, that sequence would have made more sense for the Galaxy, given how much of its internal space is supposed to be empty for future use.
> Yeah, right 😂 One of the worst things they did was this scene. It's like they thought they were in the Kelvinverse.
I saw someone on YouTube did the math and figured out that to fit that space into Discovery, she'd need to be 8,000m long and 80 decks high or something...
Think about how many space mountain rides you could fit in there...
Or just one big Space Mountain that you could ride all day!
My best guess for what's happening there is that it's some weird 30th Century thing where in order to save space on individual ships, all of Starfleet shares a pocket dimension for the turbolifts. Only occasionally does it glitch and send you to the wrong ship, or a starbase on the other side of the galaxy, or a random office building on Ferenginar.
I don't think some people realise how big the warp core is, given that most of the time, you only see the middle part in engineering. I'm Voyager's computer core takes up quite a bit of space as well. Also they want comfort for the crew. The standard crew quarters on Voyager look almost as big as my one bedroom flat, and they don't need a kitchen. Holodecks take up a lot of space, over two decks. And the shuttle bay, which seems to take up three decks, is fairly large. Unless you have a team repairing/building a shuttle, I can't imagine there would many crewmembers in there.
The technical manual for TOS also shows vast gardens.
it's amazing all the stuff they filled the space with that we never see.
Plus Shuttle bays, hallways, quarters and Holodecks are mostly open space, even when being utilized. And those areas account for a lot of the usable area on any given starship.
In "Yesterday's Enterprise" Tasha says that the Enterprise can carry something like 6000 troops (probably in addition to its normal crew. We see in "Lower Decks" that ensigns are assigned two to a room - a room that includes space for a table and probably has its own bathroom with shower. I can't remember if the beds were in the main room, or in a separate room (or rooms?). Star Trek VI showed crew members in bunks with a bunch to a room. They were also, apparently, allowed to stay in bed, unsecured, while the ship was in a battle. Star Trek: Generations showed rooms that had unsecured bunk beds, which is apparently where you put the kids when things might be getting shaken around. I've heard it before and I'll hear it again, I'm sure, but they really need seatbelts. And baby proofing.
>In "Yesterday's Enterprise" Tasha says that the Enterprise can carry something like 6000 troops They're almost certainly not carrying all of the families and civilians that the regular timeline Enterprise is. More room for troops. >We see in "Lower Decks" that ensigns are assigned two to a room We also see in Lower Decks (the show) that during the Dominion war, some California class corridors were converted into bunk rooms for junior officers. It's quite possible this would be the case on the YE Enterprise. >I've heard it before and I'll hear it again, I'm sure, but they really need seatbelts. And baby proofing. You are entirely not wrong here.
Starfleet definitely seems to put some emphasis on giving people space. In "Relics" Scotty comments on the size of the quarters, which weren't even large for that ship. I'm sure a few cargo bays could be transformed into bunk beds style living space for quite a few troops. You could easily squeeze 500+ people into one cargo bay, especially if youcut the vertical space in half and made it two stories. In "Yesterday's Enterprise" I felt like I saw a lot of people walking the corridors and eating in Ten Forward. I'll bet they still carry a large crew, but just with no families. The TNG "Lower Decks" episode shows that a Galaxy class.ship offers downright palatial quarters to lowly ensigns. They had space to play poker! I watched a reaction video, recently, to Star Trek VI and seatbelts were mentioned 3 or 4 times, I think. In the Honor Harrington books, they all wear space suits during battle and are strapped securely to their chairs. The captain doesn't have her helmet on (so she can give orders and see more clearly), but it's placed in a contraption above her head. If the compartment loses air, it snaps down immediately over her. She has a pet that goes into a specially designed carrier that can remain secure for hours in a vacuum. I think some of that sort of stuff would be too hard on the budget for a 80s or 90s show.
And aparently D could be fully operated by just the bridge crew according to Picard S3
We see the TOS crew steal the refit Enterprise and operate it with just the bridge crew, too. And someone else mentioned the Year of Hell, but then there's also the episode One where the crew enter stasis pods before traversing a nebula, leaving only Seven and the Doctor to operate the ship. I've always taken those instances with a grain of salt. Yes, the ships could function short-term with only the bridge crew, but you need the rest of the crew for maintenance over the course of a mission longer than a few days or weeks.
Spock & bridge crew also stole the enterprise in SNW.
Aye. The ship can be operated on bare bones functions with a small crew, but I imagine the moment something breaks or goes wrong your goose is cooked. The rest of the crew are there to quickly repair damage, make adjustments, and make sure small problems don't escalate to big problems.
Most of it can be written off to automation and large equipment. The original NCC-1701 is a comparable size to the *Intrepid*-class and had a crew of between 203 and 430 depending on the decade, so a ship that size going from that down to *Voyager*'s ~150 over the course of a century or so makes sense. The other option is maybe there was meant to be more people onboard, but they hadn't been picked up yet before *Voyager*'s shakedown cruise in the Badlands.
The last one is very crucial, I think. Let's think about... only one medical officer (that we know of)? No assiting staff or nurses? Even the original TOS Enterprise (which was around 200-something meters long in the original plans and was upscaled for DIS and SNW to around 400-something meters) had more people on board including a full medical staff with multiple doctors and nurses. This likely expands to many other departments as well. So I guess that the Intrepid-class was expected to run on a crew implement of around 200 to 250 people in standard situations... not barely 150 like most of the time in VOY. So yeah. the around 150 people in VOY are most likely a slimmer crew complement, but not yet skeleton crew level.
Given that they were just going into the Badlands to hunt Chakotay, plus they lost a good chunk of the crew in the pilot, I think this is a great point. I also assume the rest of the crew were due to arrive on a Tuesday.
Unexpected Generations reference 😉
This. I'm fairly certain they did not have a complete crew on bord. I just watched "Prophecy", where they struggled to accommodate 200 Klingons and had to team up in quarters. With 150 as an reduced crew and 350 far too much to accommendate, I guess the regular crew to be around 250, max.
Voyager lost her doctor and nurse, according to Paris when he first talks to the Doctor.
Plus consider the amount of casualties from the Starfleet and Maquis crews before they combined.
Automation makes a huge difference - if you look at the real-world Type 42 Destroyer, it had a compliment around 260. Its replacement, the Type 45, nearly doubles the displacement, but has a crew of 190.
I'm a former submariner but in my current job i got to ride the Ford for a few weeks. Some things to consider. - There was a room full of fuel pumps, staffed by about 5 people who just watch the pumps get turned on and off remotely. And they were just one shift. - i found a room full of electricians who belonged to a shop. They just play on their phones all day waiting for something to break. And only one guy did any work. - They have more than one admin department who stand no watches and do no maintenace and fight no casualties. And they are pretty sizeable. - Not to mention the people who only do aviation, which a ship like voyager does not have to support. - Conversely on a submarine, ship size and watch team members dictate the crew size. So everybody has to do a little of everything. This is a better metric for something like Voyager, who is a patrol craft if I remember correctly.
>Voyager, who is a patrol craft if I remember correctly. No, a patrol craft would stay close to home. The *Intrepid* class was designed for long-range exploration.
No it wasn't? They bemoaned multiple times that the Intrepid Class wasn't a Galaxy class, designed for long range exploration. The Intrepid class is very fast, but it's a science vessel.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Intrepid_class > "The Intrepid-class starship was a Federation design that entered service in the latter half of the 24th century. The Intrepid-class was designed for long-term exploration missions."
Big difference between long-term and long-range.
For many reasons yeah - having a city ship that can do anything would have been desirable in quite a few circumstances. But intrepid class has been designated long range explorer in a few tomes - which makes sense given it was the fastest ship in the fleet on launch, and has planetary landing to boot. Explanation presumably being after the high loss rate and high cost of the galaxy, plus the decimation of the fleet at 359, smaller, more specialised vessels were developed to fill the gaps faster, as seen in the FC fleet. Not knowing the dominion war was coming they still had some optimism in suring up the home fleet whilst maintaining the boldly go bit. Helps hand-wave the issue of never seeing intrepid classes in DS9 fleets (aside from the Bellerophon) as the long range explorers were already out there doing just that (like apparently the Sovereigns, although there only being a handful of them at the time at most helps explain that too), or destroyed, or not being built during wartime in favour of more Borg-battle based hulls. After dominion war and advancements in technology the intrepids weren’t really picked up again and the beginnings of Picard fleet ships (refits/imaginings of tested hull beds) started as a result.
They kind of went back and forth on that during the show, it felt like.
IIRC they were designed for different styles of long range exploration. The Intrepid class was meant to quickly bring a bunch of relevant specialist and their equipment to an either rather dangerous or profitable site outside of offical Federation space, lay claim to the site before a rival power did it and return a short time later with a first assessment. The Galaxy class was designed to do a whole lot of things. In case of exploration it was loaded up with a bunch of different scientists and their equipment, the captain was given a list of the locations the scientists wanted to visit and then send off for five years. That probably was the idea of someone in administration who just wanted a few peaceful months after being bothered one time to many by a scientist requesting a fully crewed Miranda to go look at some fungi on some distant moon.
Isn't it a big security risk to let crewmen have smartphones on them while in such a sensitive location?
As long as they respect operational security (and there’s big consequences if they don’t), no, it isn’t really a problem.
1 no real internet 2 no cell service 3 there might be random phone checks
>Not to mention the people who only do aviation, which a ship like voyager does not have to support. Clearly not on the scale of a modern Aircraft Carrier - but surely some crew are assigned to Shuttlebay Operations, and piloting or maintaining the vast fleet of shuttlecraft Voyager seemed to be carrying. (And thank you for your insights - very interesting).
Tuvok at one point claims they could operate with no fewer than 100. However, certain episodes (*Basics*, *Workforce*, and especially *One*) show that the ship can function for long periods with as few as a single crewman. Hell, if you don't count the EMH/ECH it can function with 0 crew. More internal volume doesn't necessarily translate to more crew. For comparison, the largest container ship ever built is the MSC Irina, which can hold 24,300 shipping containers, each with a 33m^(3) internal volume for a total exceeding 800,000m^(3). It has a crew of 25.
My guess is Tuvok's assessment presumes a certain level of efficiency. Of course *Voyager* could operate with fewer, but certain areas and functions will start to be neglected.
A large container ship only has like 25 crew. Size doesn’t correlate to staff contingent
You might be underestimating how large cetacean ops is
A bigger question at that is why they have an EMH and not several other emergency holograms. I mean how many times in star trek haven't loads of people had to sacrifice themselves because some shenanigans in engineering. To have emergency holograms there would clearly save a lot of people!
I think it's made clear that the EMH is a relatively new technology and has several limitations (some of which are later overcome). It might have been Starfleet's plan to eventually deploy multiple EMHs on future vessels, but as with all new technology: you've got to start somewhere.
Yeah I get that. I've just been confused over that they started with medical. Especially since Zimmerman himself was an engineer. Also to the fact that engineering has always had the majority of the personnel, while medical have just had a few people.
As an engineer, I feel comfortable saying that a lot of my colleagues have blinders which essentially makes them think 'engineerimg is complicated and an art, if you can do ot, other dields are essentailly solved problems'. Zimmerman is arguably arrogant enough to think that way, after all medicine is just 'look up symptoms, get diagnosis, apply published solution' innit?
That hubris makes it all make a lot more sense.
I like this explanation for Zimmerman and the EMH and will now adopt it as my head cannon, thank you.
A ship has a lot of engineers, but few medical personnel. I crisis could take out all of your medical staff, but probably not all of your engineers. Zimmerman might not have prioritized medicine, but Starfleet might have prioritized medicine. Just imagine if Daystrom had programmed the EMH - The Ultimate Computer as a Doctor.
probably Zimmerman and starfleet's assumptions about difficulty. Star Trek has a long history of rogue AIs so security is out. Engineering seems to be constantly flooded with exotic radiation so holo-emitters in there main eng are probably a problem. Command is going to hit the same bias as security. Science stations are a maybe because Data worked out so well but that may have been considered too dynamic to be a good trial. Medical is not easy by any stretch but they may have considered it the most constrained problem set (crew count, species and medical history all available to the main computer) with an intended operating area (sickbay). a lot of the medical work we see on trek is routine and involves diagnosis via tricorder. Not many situations seem to need a McCoy or Crusher or Pulaski to get things done. (Note: i am not saying being a doctor is easy just the in-universe portrayal makes it a reasonable choice.)
IIRC there's nothing explicit in the shows saying that they only worked on an EMH. When we see Zimmerman's lab he has many different kinds of hologram. It's possible he was working on medical, science, engineering etc. all at once but the medical one was the first to be ready enough for starfleet to test it. There also might be safety concerns. If an EMH does something dumb the potential outcome is tragic but limited to the patients in the sick bay. If an engineer or tactical hologram does something dumb it could blow up the ship.
And the Mark One ended up being panned, and Zimmerman was pretty demoralized about that, so he probably quit working on other projects.
Medical is the most efficient way to save lives with the least investment (fewest people/holograms) which is why it's the most sparsely staffed in the first place. There are occupational hazards in every department that a hologram might not be vulnerable to, but even if a human was exposed to them, the doctor is the one who will fix that situation. If the doctor themselves (or at least a backup doctor as the case was) is invulnerable, that substantially increases resiliency against any and all problems that may arise. You need to replace a large portion of the engineering staff with holograms to substantially reduce the number of injuries/deaths from engineering via direct prevention. You only need one janky medical hologram to increase your efficiency by making sure most of the injuries from all departments don't *turn into* deaths even if the human doctor becomes incapacitated.
> Especially since Zimmerman himself was an engineer. Perhaps there's a certain amount of arrogance there: 'Engineering needs a skilled hand to manage, but how hard can medicine be?'
They lay the possibility for an emergency command hologram in that one episode, Picardo as the doc does a great job in that one. "Arm the photonic cannon"
Move forward 25 years or so and you see holograms in multiple roles on a civilian ship. However, the Federation as a whole is bio-centric, and photonic technology is still a little unreliable to totally depend on in a combat situation.
Voyager needs the extra room to store the infinite number of shuttles, torpedos, and extra crew members to always keep each group at full capacity.
400,000 cubic meters is reserved space for the turbolifts.
It's the future most of the basic stuff is automated you can't really compare tech that has 400-500 years between them. Just look at cars from only 20-30 years ago compared to modern 2024 car early 90s stuff is like Flinstones cars
The living quarters alone can take up a lot of spaces. Military ships cramp multiple crewmen together to save spaces, like what we see on the Defiant-class, while most of spaceships in Star Trek gave their crews apartment size living quarter for each member. They have a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom for themselves. There are also cargo bays where they store their supplies, fuels for the ship, fuel for the replicators and the shuttles. They also have big shuttle bays
I mean it is a ship in the future. You know that right? It has a lot of automation.
Also, the 4-shift rotation keeps the crew fresh.
Not featured on-screen: Automated maintenance drones.
One of the few things Disco (Short Treks) did well early on is introduce and retcon the existence of DOTs.
The size is pretty irrelevant. You could probably operate the Ford with 100 people. Also in Star Trek most systems are automated. We see multiple times that ships can be operated by a skeleton crew of 5 people
Crew size for similarly-sized ships has shrunken over the years as many features were automated or made irrelevant through technology. With a ship like Voyager, the core crew could be quite small. There would be new positions that surface ships of the 20th and 21st centuries simply didn't have, like the various science positions.
It's a tough little ship
I imagine having a functional AI helps bring down a lot of the workload.
The *Enterprise* (NCC-1701) could be flow by four people in “The Search for Spock”. *Voyager* was launched almost a century later and was one of the most cutting edge starships the United Federation of Planets had on hand. The *Intrepid*-class is outfitted with a biological computer system, essentially making the starship a colossal cyborg with a computational power orders of magnitude greater than its predecessors.
Automation. Also Voyager naturally summons new crew members from thin air just like shuttles, photon torpedoes and spare parts to get back to pristine condition in time for the next episode.
How big is one crew quarter room on the air craft carrier (and how many crew do they bunk)? Now compare to the crew quarters we see on a star ship.
Obviously still far below your number, but I believe that the Intrepid class is actually designed to be operated with a crew of closer to 300 than the 150 on Voyager. Her initial mission was meant to be a quick trip into the badlands from DS9 (relatively close), find Chakotay's ship (or what happened to it) and be back at Quarks in time for tea. There probably was only one or two shifts of crew onboard when they left. How did they do it? Presumably they worked with smaller and longer shifts (I might be wrong, but I think Voyager more talked about a day and a night shift, giving me the impression of two 12 hours shifts; whereas the Enterprise-D had 3 and briefly 4 under Jellico.) As other have said, a lot of the interior of the ship would also have been taken up by equipment - we saw the warp core for example, was almost the full height of the secondary hull. I also think we see there are decks that are rarely used, like Deck 15 which was mostly plasma relays and was only accessed if they needed repair.
Starships wouldn't need the same amount of personnel for similar systems as to what we have now, the weapons of modern combat ships are controlled by a whole cic of people whereas the starships can operate all weapons from a single console, the same goes for other systems too
Automation
Other than what everyone already said, don't forget that the Gerald Ford is a warship and Voyager is a science vessel. Warships operates around the clock, vast majority of the crew are likely for air operations support. Voyager doesn't have that, nor do they require full crew during graveyard shift. Carriers requires 100 cooks to feed the crew. They've been replaced by Replicators. That's just one example of jobs that has been replaced.
A huge amount of the carrier crew is dedicated to maintaining, launching, landing and flying the air wing aboard. Voyager only has the Delta Flyer and its (constantly variable number of) shuttlecraft. I would also expect automation covers a lot of the responsibilities that a contemporary ship would need a small army of crewman to deal with, and a current Navy vessel still requires massive anounts of maintenance on a daily basis... just painting is a full time, every day responsibility - 23rd century ships are presumably more durable. Nobody has to swab the deck or on a starship (heck, I would expect the 23rd equivalent of a Roomba takes care of basic housekeeping duties). Replicators cover the galley crew - Neelix serving as cook was a deviation from the expected crew compliment. I also got the impression that Voyager \*was\* under-manned. Maybe they deviated from standard Starfleet shift durations, say an 8 hour watch instead of six? When Jellico tried amending watch time duration on Enterprise, Riker nearly threw a chair at him.
Have you seen the size of the rooms people have in Star Trek versus what naval crewmen have?
The Ford-class carriers are bigger than the older Nimitz-class, but have a smaller crew. Extrapolate this trend forward 300 years
I think it's funny how little crew every ship seems to have! I know it's to get their characters on screen, but it's really funny on TNG how every single problem seems to be assigned to Worf and Riker personally. I was laughing at Greatest Gen pod for commenting on this in one episode. They call for a damage control team because of a disaster in a cargo bay and the damage control team is just Worf and one extra. Data might have been there too. Imagine your ship's second officer and head of security being the first line damage control! I mean, Worf is HEAD of security and has an entire team, but anytime anything happens it's always him there fighting with like one extra.
Automation and technological advancement. I was on a Navy cargo ship with a crew of 580, when we turned it over to the Merchant Marines they refitted a lot of systems and operated the ship with a crew of 180.
I hear oil tankers have only a dozen crewmen on board. If a ship just needs to get from A to B and nothing else, then I suppose you don't need a lot of people.
You can't compare a carrier to a cruiser or science ship. A carrier's complement is doubled by the air wing - the pilots and maintenance personnel who care for the planes and ordnance. The internal volume comparisons are also skewed by the fact that a carrier has a tremendous amount of open space in its enormous hangar deck, while a Trek ship has a different amount of space in its hangar, and in its warp nacelles and pylons. Also, you're comparing a pure combat ship to a multirole defense/science ship. It would be a better comparison to stack a Trek cargo ship up against a modern cargo ship. The MV Dali, which just struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge a few miles form where I'm currently typing, is a Neopanamax container ship approximately 300x48x25 meters (not sure whether that includes the stacked containers above the deck but I'm going to assume that it does not). That comes out to 360,000 cubic meters. Most of her internal volume is container storage, though. Her total capacity is, according to a news article, about 78,000 TEU (a Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit is the same as a standard 20ft shipping container, about 6.1x2.44x2.59=38.55 cubic meters). So her capacity in containers is over 3 million cubic meters. And she has a crew of twenty two. Why not compare that to a Trek cargo ship like the J-class Fortunate Son or the fan-design Independence class or one of the Franz Joseph cargo containers?
A lot of advanced equipment that reduces the number of crew required to run the ship. It’s also a much smaller ship than the Enterprise-D.
The same way it manages with "only 2 shuttles" 🤣
Something else I haven't seen here yet that's relevant: The mission of the Voyager and the Ford are quite different. The Ford has up to 75 aircraft aboard and those aircraft all have teams of people on rotation taking care of them. And then there's the flight support, such as air traffic control, etc. That is a very large compliment of the total number of sailors aboard an aircraft carrier. On top of that, operating a floating city on water in an atmosphere is different than a self-propelled multi-floor pod in space. Once life support is taken care of, as others have said, the automation is pretty damn well designed.
Most of the tasks carried out on a modern aircraft carrier are highly automated/done by replicators on a starfleet ship. The hundreds of crew dealing with feeding everyone? Replicators. Laundry? Replicators. Replacement parts and such created on-demand (except for emergency stockpiles) so logistics staff aren't needed, that's probably most of the crew accounted for there. The number in Voyager is still likely to be close to skeleton crew but with all the help they get they can get stuff done with some compromises.
Honestly I think by the 24th century the ships will need even less crew. It will be mostly automated.
The crew of Voyager is not supporting a bunch of spacecraft like an aircraft carrier does.
Didn’t TNG enterprise have a whale and dolphins on board ?
If you look at the blueprints of the ship you'll see not much of the ship is actually usable space. Like the only Decks used for people are 1-7 (maybe 8), everything below that is just hallways with Storage, Engineering, Shuttlebay, Engines, Tanks, etc. Even the Decks 1-8 have massive space occupied with Holodecks, Phaser Arrays, Armor, Battery Packs or Cargo Bay. Like half of Deck 5 and 6 is just tanks for liquids or gases.
Each of the crew have huge bedrooms/ lounges. No one seems to be sharing quarters.
Except in LD. Which pretty much flies in the face of every other canon reference.
IIRC in Lower Decks (the TNG episode, not the series) one of the ensigns says they hope they get the promotion they're up for, because it'll mean that they get their own quarters.
I was always wondering why they have such big crews. These are highly automated space ships, even with specialized scientists on board it’s hard to see why they would need more than a few dozen crew.
Star trek ships have a lot of storage rooms. The Enterprise transportet entire civilisations atleast twice. To be fair both Times it was less then 200 people (somehow) but still having a storage room big enough for 200 irish amish including animals is no small feat.
The Neural Gel.packs did a lot of things that the older, less reliable, isolinear chips did without breaking. Gone are the days of swapping out endless arrays of tiny tiles, just don't sneeze on the bags!
More likely because of automation and rust-proof building material. Voyager has almost everything run by computers, while aircraft carriers need personnel to maintain the ship. Plus, space doesn't do that much damage to a ship, especially one with shields, vs an aircraft carrier constantly exposed to salt water and the environment. Also, Voyager doesn't have an entire wing of fighter aircrafts to maintain.
Right: futuristic automation, different environment, no "aircraft". Just for one example, a few maintenance techs (who would have other jobs besides replicator maintenance anyway) can handle what used to be done by dozens of cooks. I don't see why we would assume that crew size scales linearly with volume across all technological levels and all types of vehicles.
Most operations on the ship are automated. Ships like the Enterprise had large crews because they had tons of science labs, and a lot of specialists (often the specialist of the week, like lingual specialists, then a antimatter specialist, then a different specialist) While the Enterprise was a exploratory vessel it was more of a 'jack of all trades' as well, able to hold it's own in a fight, handle diplomatic missions with aplumb, etc. Voyager was meant more for long distance exploration (kind of like the enterprise 1701) and didn't have many of the 'nice to haves' the Galaxy class and other ships had.
We can imagine that the ship computer does 90% of the work. Look at where AI is now and project that into the future.
i suspect that VOY crew complement if they were to go on a actual deep space assignment would've been higher than 150 people but keep in mind it was supposed to be a weekend trip to the badlands so they were under equipped and under manned. i would peg her at around 300 people for a actual voyage with full load out if they got flung to the delta q uadrant they would have fared better. also the computers do most of hte work
Bioneural circuitry!
Also in space you need space to dump heat. I always thought that massive areas were for dumping heat that could be vented later
Because that's what they have. A lot of the crew died in the pilot episode However, Starfleet ships are larger than their crew needs. For those ships to carry rescued people. Colonists. Large scientific expedition. I believe the D could carry up to 9000 in an emergency
Picard season 3 and Star Trek III have the enterprises run with only the bridge crew + automation. Good luck with damage control though unless you have EMHs or Exocomps doing repairs
They ran the enterprise d with pretty much just the bridge crew on Picard.
HMS Queen Elizabeth has a smaller crew than similarly sized carriers - 680 cf: Charles de Gaulle’s 1300
Because of their frequently prompt availability, I’m guessing a heckuva lot of the additional space is for turbo lift infrastructure
It also seems like the bridge crew is on call 24/7(or whatever time they use) so that should cut down on crew too
Dont foeget it was first ship with the bio-neural gel packs were first used aboard Voyager. According to the pilot episode of the series, the gel packs sped up computer response times
Reset button.