Manpower VS Hardware

[Col Toda]

Warships are massively expensive assets . A battleship is a staggeringly resource heavy item . But like all jump capable ships subject to be lost in a unlucky missjump accident or due bugging out with KF damage . With that kind of investment on the line any warship ought to have picked elite crewmen to lower the possibility as much as possible . Though resource heavy as a warship is ; is the real reason so few are out there is the caliber of crew a sane navy would trust to such a pricy asset is likewise rarified . If you build more warships than the best crew can man than any loss due to incompetence is completely unacceptable.  I presume any warship crewman  would have 15 years in for life experience on normal jump ships and combat drop ships before setting foot on a warship and 5 years on a corvette or destroyer befor going on a cruiser or battleship . As most fluff text seems the resources training for a Navy tends to happen as few as one but no more than 3 institutions in an affiliation is the resources to devlelop the Man power a navy needs the biggest obstacle ? Is having crew you can trust not to miss jump or just too green to trust a warship to an unaired unmentioned problem ? This board talks alot about the hardware a lot and the insane price of it . They have not seem to address that Qualified manpower may be the biggest limiting factor. 

[Fallen_Raven]

The fact is that there literally aren't enough places able to manufacture Warships. Most nations don't have more than one shipyard able to make KF cores at all, much less the compact cores used in Warships. It doesn't matter if you had one qualified crew or a million, building ships is the bottleneck.

[Hellraiser]

The fact is that there literally aren't enough places able to manufacture Warships. Most nations don't have more than one shipyard able to make KF cores at all, much less the compact cores used in Warships. It doesn't matter if you had one qualified crew or a million, building ships is the bottleneck.

I wouldn't say only 1.

Maybe the CC has only 1, IDR

The LC had 2 KF yards, 1 JS + 1 JS/WS

The FWL, FS, and DC were all looking at 3+ yards for JS/WS.

That said its still a small # of WS as you said & the JS & DS duties of a WS crewman probably don't overlap a ton for EVERY crewman.

I think early WS crews were stripped from JS & DS both & given some early cross training & then stuck on board a prototype WS in 3058 to start doing dry runs with it.

In the end only the FWL Navy comes close to being able to put much of strain on crew levels when they can always just pull more from the JS/DS fleets in small #s to fill out a crew or 2 given the small # of total ships being produced.

[Daryk]

The only crewman that will help you avoid a misjump is the navigator.  There should be plenty more of those than ships.

[Sir Chaos]

The only crewman that will help you avoid a misjump is the navigator.  There should be plenty more of those than ships.

Engineers, too - to keep the necessary equipment in good shape.

[maxcarrion]

I think the idea that every crewman on a cruiser/battleship be 38+ years old (18+15+5 = 38) to be a massive false economy as well as a foolish concentration of inappropriate experience the ship will lack the young, fit, enthusiastic capabilities of the young while gaining people who know how to do things on a different ship but not on this one for a relatively short time before they retire.

If anything a lot of capital ship personnel should come straight out of academy and then learn on the job under experienced personnel so that by the time they're hitting 40 and taking on the 18 year olds out of academy they know every bolt, every rivet, every quirk of the ship they've spent the last 20 years on and be able to describe every wire behind the panel that the new 18 year old mechanic has just ripped off, over the radio, even the bodge that isn't on the schematics but was thrown in 6 years ago to bypass some battle damage.

[marcussmythe]

There are very few shipyards on Earth capable of building Supercarriers, and each one represents a massive investment of national treasure, power, and prestige.

Compared to the cost of aquistion and operation, crew training and salaries are relatively small.

How old is the typical crewman?  Why?  If you only put those with experience on warships - where do people get the experience to crew warships?

[Daryk]

Crew training and salaries aren't the only personnel costs, though.  Over the life of the ship, people are still the most expensive part.  Granted, that's with today's comparatively (to BattleTech) HUGE crews.  Carriers today have over 5,000 personnel aboard on deployment.  And the biggest of those are around a mere 100,000 tons.  A 100,000 ton BattleTech Warship would be hard pressed to need more than 500 to operate it.