On a dropship/jumpship/warship I'm trying to think of a good official title or term for the officers/crew/department in charge of sensors. Radar, neutrino scanners, passive and active scanners of all kinds, thermal imaging, even optical telescopes pop up on some spacecraft. If it helps to be more specific this would be aboard a warship, so big department with all the fancy toys.
For some reason I hate the term "sensors" and I'm not sure I've ever seen it used in BT as a title or department. If that turns out to be legit by canon source I'll accept it, but until then to me it's a little too sci-fi generic.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Generally, the guy overseeing the various operators would be your "Operations Officer" on a larger vessel (jumpships, large dropship, or warship), because those roles can either be compressed into a single guy on a small ship, or spread out over a whole department on something like, say, a McKenna.
why do I say that? because those roles also have secondary duties-or serve as secondary duties to other roles. For example, a Gunnery officer would need to know where the enemy is to direct weapons fire (range, position, velocity, course) while a Navigation officer needs to know if there's a big rock in the way, or other traffic at the jump point (and where that traffic is in relation to his own vessel, how fast, what vector...)
A Comms operator can triangulate a signal to determine where someone they're listening to is...
and so on.
The guy whose job is to tie all that together and give the Captain a complete picture to make decisions with? is your Operations officer (or equivalent).
Remember, the Captain's job, is to make decisions, his staff officers are there to give him as accurate a picture as possible in order to
make those decisions.(his other job, and one might argue most important job, is to look and sound confident like he knows what he's doing...especially when he doesn't.)
