Comments on "Ships of the Galaxy"

[lastbesthope]

Well it is an idea to have spare hangar capacity for when visitors come around.

LBH

 

[emperorpenguin]

an Omega should carry 35 or 36 starfuries according to the show

 

[Gabriel_Luna]

Something that just occurred to me is that they might simply be understaffed. Remember this is only 10 years after the Minbari blew up nearly everything that could fly with an Earth insignia. We don't have any hard numbers, but who knows, it might just be that Earth just doesn't have enough Starfuries to make sure each and every ship has a full compliment. Your average ship might carry a half-size flight group, while a ship headed into battle might end up with more on board (hence the 35-36 size).

I suspect, with this RPG's editing record, that it really is a mistake in the book. But if you want an in character justification, that one would work as well as any other.

 

[zwerg]

an Omega should carry 35 or 36 starfuries according to the show

Which would make for about 9 hanger spaces for Starfuries and 1-2 for shuttles (for a total of 36 and 2-4 respectively) for a total of 10-11 Hangar Spaces. That sounds more reasonable.

At that point I could see having Hangar space for 48 Starfuries with 12 spaces acting as repair and storage bays but not launch bays. That would restore the number of Hangar Spaces closer to the original number and allow for up to 4 shuttles or two plus a captains gig or such. In any case there should be at least one pilot per ship in active use.

Officers may also be pilots, but there would also need to be support crew (think Babylon 5). Each fighter would probably need, besides pilots, mechanics (ship, weapons, different vehicle specialties, etc), flight crew, and so forth. Speaking of support crew did you know that the air wing for the USS George H.W.Bush is 2,480 for only 90 craft?

 

[zwerg]

Something that just occurred to me is that they might simply be understaffed. Remember this is only 10 years after the Minbari blew up nearly everything that could fly with an Earth insignia. We don't have any hard numbers, but who knows, it might just be that Earth just doesn't have enough Starfuries to make sure each and every ship has a full compliment. Your average ship might carry a half-size flight group, while a ship headed into battle might end up with more on board (hence the 35-36 size).

Well, the Avoiki (which is listed as "Huge" and has no fighters) has a crew of 30 crewmen (41 total people) which seems inordinately small even to cover damage control let alone man all the weapons, etc, and a corporate freighter has 6 (11). Given that size increases in three dimensions and that Hangar Space almost keeps pace with this (doubles each size increase, but the number of Structural spaces seems to double each level as well) then crew should be increasing 4-fold per increase which we do see from the Avoiki to the Omega (although IMHO both should be 2x if not 4x as large as described in crewmen). Therefore, based on that, the crew is so "skeleton" that they only have enough personel to man the ship and none to spare to do maintanence and such on the Starfuries :smirk: (Modern Carriers run about 6000 people, with just under half being wing and just over being ship's crew, and that is for a 102Kton displacement ship less than 333m in length, compared to an Omega 1,714.3m long ... ).

I suspect, with this RPG's editing record, that it really is a mistake in the book. But if you want an in character justification, that one would work as well as any other.

I agree that it works as a justification and I also agree that the editing is wrong ... errors and ?huh?'s seem pandemic in the ship section of the book.