HOME | DD
Kelso323 — UN IFOR Screening Escorts
Published: 2013-05-29 22:32:23 +0000 UTC; Views: 3602; Favourites: 39; Downloads: 95
Redirect to original
Description
Space:Above and BeyondCombined Fleet Escort Forces (Pre & Early Wartime Units)
Chig War (2063-?)
Related content
Comments: 11
Kind of picky here, but those ship have a huge crew count for their size and purpose. I highly doubt they need a thousand people to run run a ship like that. I.e.: look at the crew count of a Arleigh Burke-class DDG which the mediums are just twice the size allows for a optimum crew of 158. Taking into account that our modern destroyers are pretty cool and automated it would be a fair assumption that it would be carried over in 2063 Navy. Otherwise, this is great.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Crew counts are from a raw and admittedly inconcise calculation formula based off the Saratoga crew complement, which was admittedly an eye opening figure, but canon.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
But, the Saratoga is a carrier. (I.e. Nimitz-class CVN.) Carriers NEED to have a large crew because of their multipurpose profile: mobile airport, hospital, dentist suite, etc. Escort ships, frankly don't unless we go into the Star Trek/Wars mentality where very ship can have the same capabilities then you'd have every ship be a carrier, every ship a hospital, every ship can be a command ship, every ship a supply ship... Where's the drama in that?
Semper Fi, Kelso.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I suppose one possible rationale (thin logic but plausible within the context of the show) is that every ship also served as a troop transport for ground operations during the planet-hopping campaign.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I’ll buy Troop Ships for housing 10,000 troops Alex… I’m not a military man and I have friends who are (mainly in the army and who come over and eat up all my bread and peanut butter) they got me to into reading Sun Tsu, now while watching Sugar Dirt I wondered how the heck 3-6 Carriers could take 25,000 troops to Demios then march on Ixion with 100,000 troops with out needing reinforcement. According to the crew compliment of the JFK-class SCVN it can only carry 1,920 Marines, yes I included officers in the total. I’ll break it down alittle…
72 Pilots MAG
1,100 Battalion
250 Special Weapons Teams/Heavy Weapons/Force Recon
48 MarDet
Now fast forward to the next episode to when the marines are getting ready for the invasion of Anvil. I hear in the background “(something) artillery battalion loading bay nine”. Unless there’s a mix up somewhere, I don’t think the Toga could fit another battalion of anything in any loading bay.
Even if the U.S. deployed all twelve of the JFK SCVNs they would come up 8,800 troops short just for the Demios operation. Now granted it’s a multi-national operation, if the other participating countries deployed carriers in squadrons of three… then there could have been anywhere between six to eighteen carriers deployed for Demios (Saratoga, Yorktown, Eisenhower, Sun Yat-sen, Grokhas (sp.). Overkill maybe, but it’s still not 25,000 troops.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
To be fair, there are a lot of things that can only be fairly processed through the prism of the era is was written in, meaning a Clinton-era military; shoe-string budgets and a critical watering down of specialized capabilities. If we presume that a pervasive philosophy of "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none" underlies everything (the only reasonable way to explain pilots also acting as infantry) then even combatant warships would have a plethora of lesser roles to fill.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Yeah, every marine is a rifleman first. I've heard. But that 'plethora of lesser roles' is there enough there for a need to have over a thousand on what is frankly a minor combatant? I guess another way to look at it, smaller crews = more available people. More available people = more ships.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
More available people = more ships...but only if Earth's industry is up to the challenge of raw material procurement and has the fully established industrial infrastructure to build and support such a fleet, both are points which are never directly addressed but perhaps hinted as not necessarily the case. Earth's interstellar fleet was fledgling at best, so it is reasonable to assume the supporting industry and infrastructure is likewise in its relative infancy.
Tit-for-tat, we could go on ad nauseam because your points have logic and are well reasoned...however, I tried to create these designs within the constraints of the aired canon, and that seemed to imply Earth putting a helluva lot of eggs into what baskets it was able to pull together under wartime conditions, never ideal for fully-thoughtful development. Moreover, the series did contain another oft forgotten detail that could hint at a reason for crews being large; the Silicates.
If we presume the Silicate rebellion had a similar tone and repercussions as the Cylon War in BSG, albeit on a far lesser scale, it could be argued that crew levels remain high because dependence on too much automation and digital computer systems proved as problematic to Earth fleets in the Silicate uprising as it did for the Colonials during the Cylon War. In a digital war, you may have to go analog...or sometimes back to primitive valves, charts and other machinery only able to be manipulated by actual human hands...
Lastly, the real-world military has evolved a helluva lot over the last 20 years...but S:AAB was a shoestring snapshot of what a funds-starved 1994 military might evolve into...and not necessarily the fictional end result of the direction it is heading now. Hell, let's not forget, the internet was still at the beginning of the process of evolving away from being the exclusive province of the uber-nerds to being mainstream when the show ended...what seems almost inevitable now was still fringe, harebrained or unthinkable then. As a result, consideration for context and socio-political environment S:AAB was born in must rule here, even when faced with superior logic of what we now know to be true. IMHO of course...
Now, if they were to green-light a reboot/re-imagining...please dear god break out the logic...cause having watched the DVDs repeatedly over the last several years, I am all too aware of the wrinkles in need of industrial strength ironing...
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
These were based on ones actually shown on screen,real low-poly models that I got screen caps of and tried to flesh out more.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1