Ship Stats

[Babylon 5 Aide]

Does it strike anyone as funny that the minbari ship (For example) has only 190 some crew when it's said they carry a couple of thousand? And has anyone else thought the size chart is a little off?

 

[hassanisabbah]

There have been other posts regarding the crew figures. My take is that Crew is the minimum for optimimum operation of the vessel at any given time. Add to this the crews to cover each shift, fighter pilots, auxillary crew, marines, medical staff, admin staff, passengers and you could soon reach the 1000 mark (given that you'll need at least two or three crews, plus reserve crew members to cover for sick, killed or injured crew)

 

[August]

Hassan has this essentially correct. The Crew figure is the number of individuals that the ship requires in order to operate efficiently. Most vessels carry a serious number of overage to cover combat losses, shift rotations, and non-critical personnel.

For a real world example, take a look on the net at the minimum crew listings for an aircraft carrier and compare that number to its usual compliment.

-August

 

[Babylon 5 Aide]

So for most crews I can triple the numbers (assuming a 3 watch schedule) to get the total number of people usually aboard?

And any take on the size question? I have consulted some other sources, such as the Babylon 5 technical manual which seem to not correlate with the size catagories.

And anyone have a guess on how big a whitestar would be? We were talking about it this weekend at our gaming session and we were thinking colossal II but since the sizes are off we looked up the size and it actually doesn't match up to what we were comparing it to in the core book.

Has anyone else done up stats on anything that they needed in their games? I'd like to see some if anyone wants to share.

 

[ShadowScout]

So for most crews I can triple the numbers (assuming a 3 watch schedule) to get the total number of people usually aboard?

That'd be the standard crew... but for the main ship only. You then need to add pilots and support crew for the fighters (again several shifts - we can deduct this from the Sharlin - it lists 28 pilots, but has 24 fighters And 4 shuttles - if those 28 pilots were for them, there'd be none left to fly the big ship...), and a load of marines (sure there are - if there are breaching pody, you can expect pirate-style boarding actions to happen during combat in the B5 universe. Not often I presume, since the fighter combat space partol should have easy targets with such pods, but if it was too unlikely noone would build those things, so we Know it happens - and any race with enough intelligence to build warships will realize that eventually, and put their own fighting beings on their ships to have some trained killers at hand for repelling boarders, so the rest of the crew can do what they are trained for -fighting space battles- without too much interference).

Look at the numbers mentioned in the show - we heard in Crusade that about 350 or so men died with the Cerberus, while in S-4 we heard each of the Omegas in Mars orbit had roughly a thousand people on board.

Let's look at the requirements in TCoS - 107 people. Three times that and a few extras equals the number from crusade; add 75 pilots and a few dozend of mechanics for the 'furies, and maybe a hundred marines or two - and you get an nominal crew of about 650 for an Omega. Then assume the ships on mars had extra crew on board, because they were expecting a Really nasty fight (more marines in case they get boarded, extra hands to cover combat losses and help with damage control, maybe a fourth shift to be able to sustain an high level of alertness), and the "about 1000" also makes sense. (Though remember - more crew means more mouths to feed and lungs to fill, so any overcrewing puts a serious dent in the ship's endurance)

As for the minimum crew... remember that's the crew needed to operate the ship at 100% - you Can fly it with less, though then you have to make sacrifices (like no weapons operational, and noone in the engine room to divert power from the weapons to sensors for example, don't even mention damage control...). Of course, that also depends on the techyness and level of automation the ship you fly has - a Hurr ship will need a lot more crew to do stuff then a Hyach ship... simly because the Hyach have much better automation tech. And there are some ships that can practically fly themselves... not that your common PC will EVER see one of those from the inside of course.

And it has been established in another thread already that the sizes are WAAAAAYYYYY off. Those figures were just in a table the Mongoose guys took from another system so they had something to base their ship combats on IIRC. No relation to real B5 ship sizes (hey, an Omega is said to be Collossal-IV, which ends at 1024 feet - that'swhat, 307 meters? Not even ¼ of the Omega's 1400-odd meters...) Ditto the HP - or did anyone Really think an Omage had just the HP of 22 Al-Besters? Sure, it's far from perfect... but it gives an GM at least Some tool to represent space combat, which was the intention I believe (hey, bad system is better then no system, especially since a good GM can gloss over all that anyway).
Some day Mongoose may come out with a better space combat system, with ship sizes that make sense, fighters that can outfly Every big starship and some rules that put the power and damage capabilities of starship weapons into the right perspective... if enough people cry out to Mongoose they want it, and will pay for it, it will come out sooner. So what are you waiting for? :wink:

 

[Babylon 5 Aide]

*CRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY*

Was that good for starters?

How have you gotten past it for your own game? Have you done stats on your own or just ignored everything for ship to ship combat?

 

[ShadowScout]

How have you gotten past it for your own game? Have you done stats on your own or just ignored everything for ship to ship combat?

For my own I use basically Babylon 5 Wars, with a liberal addition of house rules and some heavily modified ship control sheets (those represent the ships as I see them, with some modifications where I felt AoG did wrong and some additions I thought would make sense - weapons to match the miniature where they don't, structure adjusted for ship size, some races even have parts of their arsenal replaced because I just felt they'd "feel" better with all-laser weaponry from their BG fluff... and this also has the added effect that PC's who know B5W never know if I fiddled with the ship or not, and thus can't use "player information" with any chance of accuracy. And MY shadows are nearly invincible to younger races, barring teeps... while in B5W a handful of YR ships will do in a Shadow Cruiser any day, especially under the strange tournament rules Or if the shadow player flies his ships as they were seen in the show - though they're likely to loose at least one of their numbers).
Of course, minor stuff I handle in story-telling ways - one doesn't need to set up a hexmap just because one encounters an alien ship... though sometimes I do that too, just to spook players and give them a hint of how their characters might feel (tensing in a situation where they don't know if their next attempt at communication will set of an alien attack).

 

[Babylon 5 Aide]

I do that too, getting set up for a battle sometimes just so the players start thinking what the heck. Maybe that's what happened during the first meeting with the Minbari and the PC's reacted... Poorly :lol: