We really don’t know. There are some trends when it comes to attendance, and we’re slowly figuring them out.
For starters, a very important thing is to predict absences. Our current structure needs five ships of five people (25 total), and most ships have an absence per week. So we need to know how many of those 30-some we had are active, and how many of the 25 people on assignment are actually here. It might be better, for example, to replace crew members or have more ships of 6. Or we could deliverately avoid a ship of 6 and comission a permanent ship of 4. But then we need to sort out a command roster, and that also means promoting someone or replacing an XO. And that means we need data on which senior officers (or lts, or lt-srs) are active enough to be considered.
So, yeah. We’d love a new ship, but we need to be certain these numbers are going to be a permanent thing