Lit Dreadnaughts in Thrawn Trilogy

I think the assertion that Zahn gave those numbers to be difficult is, at best, idiotic. Using examples of people moving a ship from A to B as evidence is also silly.

Each of the gun emplacements has a gun crew. The reactors that power the ship have engineers to manage them. If there's any craft that leave a capital ship for any reason, they need deck officers, crews and the like to maintain them. There's also marines or similar armed troops, etc etc.

Just because terrible, awful media like ROTS show Anakin landing a ship which previously had more than half a dozen droids crewing doesn't mean anything.

 

Exactly, it is one thing to fly a ship with minimal crew, but it is another thing entirely to run a ship with optimum efficiency.

 

Pretty sure any of us could get a Nimitz class carrier under power and change course. Pretty sure none of us could do this, navigate effectively, man the radar and point defense weaponry, monitor the engines, etc etc.

BUT ZAHN LIEK HAETED HIS CHARACTERS THE SMRT CLOEN WRAS SHOWED US YOU JUST NEED A JEDI AND A ARTOO TO DO ITS.

 

I'm not sure Rebels could do justice to the Dreadnaught, TCW couldn't even match up with the RotS ships, much less an EU ship. Or rather they don't care. The Headhunter turned out okay, but I'm not that optimistic a person.

I always liked the Dreadnaught design, as one of those relatively normal warships you could expect in the OT era, but wasn't as powerful as a Star Destroyer and was a distinct design too.

I don't mind Han's stunt, the Katana fleet's remote control was a major part of the legend, and flying a ship isn't that hard. Anakin's stunt in TCW was basically flying a giant battering ram, nothing else. He didn't need to fire weapons, repair anything, refuel starfighters, anything.

Most Enterprises usually have a lot of science and security personnel too, since they're meant to be exploration ships, not frontline warships. No idea how the mass/tonnage compares. Not to mention their tech being more advanced in some ways, and you still see plenty of people running around their engineering departments.

 

Yeah, the difference between the number of people needed to make a ship move in an emergency and the number of people needed to effectively and safely crew a warship is incredibly vast. You need all those people and more to fulfill all kinds of different roles, just a vast array of specialties. Janitors, multiple different kinds of mechanics, people running subsidiary systems, quartermasters, clerks, cooks, barbers (warships are not designed to have to stop at port every week for you to get your hair cut), security personnel, cargo handlers, IT support, intelligence personnel, firefighters, doctors and nurses, a bomb squad, air-traffic controllers, HR personnel.

And then you need at least one, if not two, more shifts of all the same people over again.

It's a mobile, self-sufficient city that has to run 24/7. You don't crew that with fifty-seven people.

 

"Hey baby. Look at that floor. Just look at it. Yeah, I did that."

 

Really, though, you have to put your mind to a more fantasy-themed mindset. Ships of the Line were very crew intensive and that's I believe the timeperiod Zahn's going for.

 

Why would anyone complain about an author making things too difficult for their characters? Isn't that his/her job???

 

Let us not forget, Anakin was crash landing half of the Invisible Hand. He wasn't doing anything but trying to put it down and keep them alive. That thing was in no need of a full crew to do that. And better depicted in ROTS than say... ANH with the turbolasers being fired on the DS... is the logistics of turbolasers on board both Seperatist and Republic ships. Both had at least 4 or 5 crewers, firing, loading etc the guns. We never saw shell casing ejected from a turbolaser before ROTS.

I like that Anakin crash landing the Invisible Hand gives you a decent idea of Luke crash landing that Star Destroyer on Coruscant just before Dark Empire starts, too.

 

But if our heroes don't skate to an effortless, straightforward victory over incompetent idiots, it's monumentally depressing and totally contrived!

 

Everyone forgets about Mot the Barber. The REAL hero of the Enterprise crew.


You think Worf could keep his hair looking this good without a professional's help? Think again.

 

IIRC...the crew size was derived from the West End Games Imperial Sourcebook....I also think that is where a lot of the info writers were using came from.

When we look at what came later with crew sizes in the Acclamator and Venator the Dreadnaught is way over the numbers for ships from the same timeframe. I would think the Dreadnaught would realistically have a crew of around 1000-1500

 

That's one thing I was wondering, whether Zahn created those numbers or quoted earlier numbers.

 

As a rule of thumb, Zahn was told to use WEG numbers. In his own words:

He also mentioned the Dreadnoughts specifically:

(The source of thoses statements is the 20th anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire.)

 

I guess I'm idiotic at best then.

Just so you know, I never said that I expected one person to crew a whole ship, although I suppose that could have been accidentally implied in my second post. Realistically I would have expected a number closer to a few hundred or a few thousand. 16,000 seemed a bit much -- 2,000 as a heavily modified version seemed a lot to me as well for it being such a big deal.

 

Very cool, thanks!

 

I tend to glaze over numbers debates, so I don't have a frame of reference for equivalent crews, but could the amount of automation we'd expect today versus in 1991 change what's considered a reasonable figure between then and now?

Or going back to IU, maybe it's because the Dreadnaughts were so overcrewed that they were chosen as testbeds for the Katana slave circuits. Fix the problem ships first, in other words.

 

That's exactly what Talon Karrde says in the novel: "The Dreadnaughts of that era in particular were ridiculously crew-intensive ships, requiring upwards of sixteen thousand men each. The full-rig slave circuitry on the Katana ships cut that complement down to around two thousand." (Emphasis is mine.)

 

A modern Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, not even counting the flight personnel, has a crew of over 3,000. And it's less than half the size of a Dreadnaught. The Dreadnaughts were supposed to be unusually crew-intensive, but a ship of that size realistically could have a crew of 10,000 without its being at all surprising. Crewing levels under 3,000 for a medium-sized Star Wars capital ship would be unrealistically low without making it up with a significant droid complement.

 

But comparing SW spaceships with real life naval vessels, wouldn't there be a huge droid complement anyway? Numbers wouldn't have been as high before the PT era, but even then you had droid medics, droid protocol/"organisational" units, droid navigators/mechanics... computer interfaces that apparently were installed just for droids.

 

There were four ships I really wanted to see in the prequel era - Dreadnaughts, Victory-class Star Destroyers, Z-95 Headhunters, and Y-wings. (Cloakshape fighters would've been a bonus).

I've got my issues with TCW, but I squeed just the same when it gave us Headhunters and Y-wings.

 

Droids could get you so far, but we tend not to see them much, and probably for the reason that they're not really trusted that much. Like any other machinery, you've got to repair them and have someone making sure the work they're doing is actually done correctly; it all comes back to human supervision.

I'm sure they're there, and they help cut down on crewing requirements some, but one of the recurring facts of the universe is that droids aren't used nearly as often as you'd think, and it's not hard to come up with reasons for that IU.

Though I will say that I'm not convinced that the "crew" numbers we're given couldn't include droids. The ship needs this many janitors; they could be humans or they could be droids. But the reason I singled out droids there is that if the numbers are too low, it's unrealistic unless there are a lot of droids you're not counting. But if you want to make the case that a Star Destroyer's 37,000 crew includes the cargo droids and nurse droids and janitor droids replacing human personnel, I'd be open to that.

 

In Incredible Vehicles - we got droid-crewed ships, with extremely low crew numbers anyway - even when it was clear that droids were included.