On the side of having separate shifts, I did some math while at work today and there’s a snag with our crew sizes…
Let’s use a Scout ship as the example because it’s got the minimal size crew.
A scout crew around 60-80 personnel if I remember correctly.
18x Damcon Team members x 3 = 36 gone right off the bat, leaving 24-44 slots remaining.
6 bridge crew members x 3 = 18, so that cuts a HUGE chunk out of the 24, leaving only 6 remaining, but if you go with 80 max crew minus what we’ve got so far you’ve got 26 left.
There are 2 more crucially necessary teams we still have to consider while even ignoring any extra personnel: Medical and Security.
If we had a crew of 60 to begin with, we’ve got 6 “slots” left, split between 3 shifts for each team, essentially we’d have 1x Medical Officer and 1x Security team member per shift. That’s definitely insufficient.
If you started with 80 and got 26 left, you’ve got a LITTLE more room there… Let’s say you can get away with 3 Medical Officers per shift which takes 9 slots. That leaves 17. So you’ve got 2 Security teams of 6 and 1 team of 5 covering those 3 shifts. That’s not a very large security team.
Granted, you could get away with doubling up -some- duties with qualified personnel, but you can see the dilemma I’m presenting here. If we’re going to have 3 shifts operating aboard our ships, we’re going to have to rethink our crew sizes, and increase the size of ship we had in our heads a tad.
Granted, that’s based on an even split of personnel across shifts… If you had smaller teams on “less active” shifts, you could fudge the numbers a bit and keep the same maximum crew number and ship size. Like, say, have only 12 or 6 Damcon Team members working on 2nd and 3rd Shifts which would free up larger teams for Medical and Security during more active periods. And then many of the members from the larger active shift team could be “on call” for the less active shifts, even in an “on call” rotation of sorts. The bridge crew number would have to remain the same, though. There’s no reducing that number on any shift.