Rolands actually have plenty of room for Marines

So I've been rereading the books, and as I hit MoH the numbers suddenly caught my eyes and I ran some numbers.


Okay, MoH Battle of Spindle happens. Mike has Nike battlecruisers, and we had the POV of a Marine Sergeant Major (the one attached to Mike's own flagship as it happens).

MoH, Ch23 wrote: good news was that a Nike-class battlecruiser carried a three hundred-man Marine detachment, twice the size of a Saganami-C's. The bad news was that that still gave HMS Rigel only two companies

A Nike-class battlecruiser only has a total crew of 750 people, thanks to all the warfighting automation. That works out to almost exactly 40% of the Nike crew being Marines, not Navy. This is doable because unlike most Navies, the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps trains their Marines to also be navy qualified, so they actually can replace naval ratings. Unlike the original Grayson Marines, which were actually just Army units, although that was at the time of HH2, and very well could have started changing by the time Honor was made a Grayson Admiral and her vacation on Hades.


But that's another issue, although somewhat related. Next up, the Rolands, which are already the size of most people's light cruisers and has a crew of sixty-two, none of them Marines.


Of the two classes, Destroyers need Marines because they're the ones more frequently found doing anti-piracy patrols, or as we repeatedly saw during the Manty-Solly war, chasing after hulked wrecks and doing post-battle SAR, or in places like Saltash we saw Zavala and Abigail Hearns having to do boarding actions.



Now, a Roland is actually big enough, that it could actually squeeze a full two squads of Marines per Roland. According to the Honorverse wiki, an RMMC squad is 13 Marines in total, consisting of a Sergeant, two Corporals, 6 riflemen and 4 heavy weapons. Two squads would be 26 Marines, which would be 41% of a Roland's crew, and a Roland has 20 CM tubes and 30 pdlcs to park those Marines on, instead of naval ratings. These are exactly the same positions that the 150-man companies occupy on the larger Nike-class battlecruisers.


Obviously a Roland isn't a Nike, or even a Saganami-C, so unlike the larger cruisers, these notional squads wouldn't have any power-armor at all. Even HMS Hexapuma had one full squad of power-armor for its Marines, but Rolands being smaller and if so changed only have two squads to begin with, so neither would have powered armor at all, just their armoured skinsuits.



But since Destroyers operate more in flotilla's, you actually could almost parcel out a standard Marine company over a Roland squadron. For example, let's use the late Commodore Chatterjee's squadron. He had 8 Rolands, for every three Rolands, you'd have 6 squads of Marines, which is actually two standard Rifle Platoons. And a standard Marine company has 3 platoons, so if a Roland squadron had 9 ships, between them they'd have the same amount of Marines as a single Saganami-C, or half the number of a Nike-class battlecruiser.

And that actually works well, because the Manticoran Marine Corps would be detailing entire battalions to a single Battlecruiser as they normally do. A single company to a heavy cruiser as they normally do. And then rather than splitting up a company for the Rolands, they just assign an entire company for the squadron overall, which is effectively the same as assigning to a ship or station. It'd be no different, except that you have 2/3 of a platoon per ship.



And as per my aside comment, I haven't seen any evidence for, or against Grayson having changed themselves to follow the Manticoran lead. It's possible they fully split the Grayson Army and Grayson Marines into distinct roles, and the Grayson Marines now train like Manticorans do, to replace Naval ratings rather than effectively being locked in quarters during a ship-battle. Regular Grayson troops did absolutely nothing aboard ship when Honor was there as a mere Captain with Courvosier, and I think they would have realized how much smarter it was to start cross-training. But I haven't seen confirmation about that, so I'm not sure they actually have or not.

I have never participated in this thread or its siblings, but it is very amusing. It is beginning to have a lengthy life reminiscent of the many Captured SL ships threads. But I always wanted to ask one question, which might have already been discussed because this subject has a very long shelf-life.

Anyway, the Rolands are not the largest ships and obviously they enjoy heavy automation considering the crew size of 62? Is that right??? Could heavy or much heavier automation eat into available space?

Also, estimates of how many Marines a Roland could carry is amusing in another way. If 26 Marines are stuffed aboard a Roland, the Marines could take over the ship if they ever mutiny. Say, like, if the enemy is successful at turning the Marines or sneaking in their own people. And why would fifty percent of the other personnel stuffed aboard not be 100% navy ratings? At any rate, fifty percent of the naval ratings added aboard ship being Marines is a high percentage of the crew who are not optimized for duty aboard ship. Seems odd to me.

Do pardon this novice's intrusion in this thread.

penny wrote:I have never participated in this thread or its siblings, but it is very amusing. It is beginning to have a lengthy life reminiscent of the many Captured SL ships threads. But I always wanted to ask one question, which might have already been discussed because this subject has a very long shelf-life.

Anyway, the Rolands are not the largest ships and obviously they enjoy heavy automation considering the crew size of 62? Is that right??? Could heavy or much heavier automation eat into available space?

Also, estimates of how many Marines a Roland could carry is amusing in another way. If 26 Marines are stuffed aboard a Roland, the Marines could take over the ship if they ever mutiny. Say, like, if the enemy is successful at turning the Marines or sneaking in their own people. And why would fifty percent of the other personnel stuffed aboard not be 100% navy ratings? At any rate, fifty percent of the naval ratings added aboard ship being Marines is a high percentage of the crew who are not optimized for duty aboard ship. Seems odd to me.

Do pardon this novice's intrusion in this thread.

As per my original point, the Nike-class battlecruisers have 40% of their crew being Marines, out of 750 "crew" there are 450 Naval personnel and 300 Marines. If they added upto 26 Marines onto a Roland which has 62 total crew, it'd become 36 Naval and 26 Marines. Still EXACTLY the same ratio of Navy to Marines as a Nike-class battlecruiser, just smaller because Rolands are smaller than Nike's.


Marines typically man the weapons and defenses when at battlestations, and that is EXACTLY the same posts they do aboard the larger Saganami-C class heavy cruisers, and Nike-class battlecruisers. So I'm now having extreme confusion why suddenly it was a bad thing to do with Rolands?


And not just was it a bad thing to do with Rolands apparently, but the Manticoran Navy decided they'd rather design and build the Wolfhound-class rather than look at Rolands and go "yup, we can fit a squad or two of Marines in there."


Now the only possible point I can think against, is because you're assigning only 2 squads, which is smaller than a platoon, it's "harder to keep the Marine identity" or some such nonsense. Which is blown away, because both Terekhov and Honor dropped smaller units of marines in their careers.

Honor dropped off 1 squad of her marines off at the Terminus in the very start of her career at Basilisk, and kept the rest aboard Fearless until she hot-dropped them on the drugged up Stilties. Of course this was 1900-ish and she had a full company on CL Fearless.

But Terekhov also had a full company aboard Hexapuma. 3 full platoons, or 6 squads worth of Marines and he left most of them on Kornati to deal with the FAK when he went tearing back to Montana to go drop the information bomb on Stephen Westman.


So clearly the Marines are already used to having a squad or two, or even entire platoons divvied up and separated from "the rest of their unit." So why is that suddenly an impossible barrier to having those same squads divvied up over multiple destroyers?


Again, let's use DesRon 301 as an example. Chatterjee goes to New Tuscany with 4 Destroyers and detaches Tristram to watch the backdoor. Those 3 destroyers between them could have carried 2 squads apiece for a total of 6 squads which is approximately the same as 2 platoons of Marines, and aboard one of those 3 (now-dead) Destroyers would be a Marine Lieutenant.


Tristram goes back to Henke and we get Byng killed, Zavala inherits command of DesRon 301 and shuffles the squadron to have a division of 3 and a division of 2. That's another full platoon worth of Marines, and 4 squads worth. Which if you total it up with the dead Destroyers, is 3 platoons and 4 squads.... which just so happens to work out to more or less a full Marine rifle company, with an HQ 'squad' and a single heavy weapons squad.


All the math checks out, consistently. The Manticoran Marine corps looks at a destroyer squadron and assigns a full company, which gets parceled out to the Rolands, 2 squads at a time. The Divisional flagships gets the Sergeants, and Lieutenants, the lead destroyer of the Squadron gets the Marine Captain (with courtesy promotion to Major), and the company Sergeant Major is aboard the second-leading ship. Again using the good example of DesRon 301, Chatterjee could/should have had his Marine Captain, aboard, maybe the heavy weapons squad, and the company HQ squad. Zavala's original Roland would have had the company Sergeant-Major and a Lieutenant, and scatter the remaining 3 Lieutenants and 3 Platoon Sergeants across other ships, so statistically at least 1 of each would also have been aboard Chatterjee's doomed division, and this notional Marine company would still be 'intact enough' to continue while serving aboard Rolands.


No different than when HMS Hexapuma was blown to shit at Monica, they lost a bunch of Marines to combat but they stayed functional. DesRon 301 got blown to shit, and lost 3 out of 8 ships, which is just under 40% dead which isn't much different to the casualties of Monica which was 50% dead across 10 ships.



The math just isn't mathing why Rolands somehow couldn't have Marine crew aboard. Even with Grand Army, and post-Solarian War, there is absolutely no reason why Rolands should be the only ship without any Marines and only the heavy cruisers and battlecruisers or larger have them.

Somtaaw wrote:As per my original point, the Nike-class battlecruisers have 40% of their crew being Marines, out of 750 "crew" there are 450 Naval personnel and 300 Marines. If they added upto 26 Marines onto a Roland which has 62 total crew, it'd become 36 Naval and 26 Marines. Still EXACTLY the same ratio of Navy to Marines as a Nike-class battlecruiser, just smaller because Rolands are smaller than Nike's.


Marines typically man the weapons and defenses when at battlestations, and that is EXACTLY the same posts they do aboard the larger Saganami-C class heavy cruisers, and Nike-class battlecruisers. So I'm now having extreme confusion why suddenly it was a bad thing to do with Rolands?


And not just was it a bad thing to do with Rolands apparently, but the Manticoran Navy decided they'd rather design and build the Wolfhound-class rather than look at Rolands and go "yup, we can fit a squad or two of Marines in there."

Wolfhounds also have some other advantages over Rolands in general detached work. Their smaller SDMs mean they can carry significantly more missiles -- which is kind of important when you need to waste some on warning shots. (And given how Roland's squeeze their Mk16s in it would be quite tricky to increase their magazines to hold more. Wolfhounds also have a bigger crew, 87, better allowing them to detach prize crews to bring back, say, captured pirate ships or recovered/impounded freighters (though it should have been easy to build a Roland variant for a slightly larger crew). They're also cheaper than a Roland so you can afford to build and run more of them, allowing you to cover more of the tasks you need destroyers for.

However back to your main point, while you're absolutely right about how Marines are used on the larger/older ships there are a few things that the Roland design might be missing. Normally Marines have their own separate berthing area. If the Roland design doesn't include that then assigning Marines to a Roland would require the MRN and RMMC to adjust to sticking them into general crew berthing (which doesn't seem like it should be a major problem; even given the history of reasonably good natured hazing between many in those two groups - but it'd be at minimum accepting a change in institutional norms). Marines also spend more time training for ground assault/boarding actions -- that might mean wanting shipboard facilities for anything from longer rifle ranges, rather than short pistol ranges to armory room for more and heavier weapons. Also time they're spending focused on that is time than they can't devote to maintaining the ship -- the naval crew that mans the weapons mounts on a Roland might have significant duties outside of battle stations keeping the ship running. The amount of maintenance and repair work doesn't scale linearly with ship size, and so the same percentage of a larger ship's company might be better able to cover the maintenance work than that of a smaller ship's company.

If you want Marines as permanent attachments and part of a Roland's crew that might require accepting a slightly larger crew to make sure that all the non-battlestation tasks the current crew covers can still be covered despite the Marines not being able to devote as much time to devote to (and possibly not having the same training to even do) those tasks.

That might be hard to do on Rolands as they currently exist. But it seems like it should be quite straightforward to either make a flight II Roland or a retrofit, that's got the Marine fittings and, if necessary, accommodations for a slightly larger mixed crew. (You could strip out the flag quarters to get back some of the room for that).

Of course none of those potential issues with assigning Marines to replace part of the crew would really be in play if you needed to stick some Marines on a Roland as a temporary expedient. In that case you can accept that they won't be able to train as much/well as they'd like, and the crew can still do all the crew things, and as that temporary expedient you can just have them camp in the flag quarters.

Jonathan_S wrote:Marines also spend more time training for ground assault/boarding actions -- that might mean wanting shipboard facilities for anything from longer rifle ranges, rather than short pistol ranges to armory room for more and heavier weapons. Also time they're spending focused on that is time than they can't devote to maintaining the ship -- the naval crew that mans the weapons mounts on a Roland might have significant duties outside of battle stations keeping the ship running. The amount of maintenance and repair work doesn't scale linearly with ship size, and so the same percentage of a larger ship's company might be better able to cover the maintenance work than that of a smaller ship's company.

If you want Marines as permanent attachments and part of a Roland's crew that might require accepting a slightly larger crew to make sure that all the non-battlestation tasks the current crew covers can still be covered despite the Marines not being able to devote as much time to devote to (and possibly not having the same training to even do) those tasks.

That might be hard to do on Rolands as they currently exist. But it seems like it should be quite straightforward to either make a flight II Roland or a retrofit, that's got the Marine fittings and, if necessary, accommodations for a slightly larger mixed crew. (You could strip out the flag quarters to get back some of the room for that).

Of course none of those potential issues with assigning Marines to replace part of the crew would really be in play if you needed to stick some Marines on a Roland as a temporary expedient. In that case you can accept that they won't be able to train as much/well as they'd like, and the crew can still do all the crew things, and as that temporary expedient you can just have them camp in the flag quarters.

Hmm, I did forget to consider the non-battlestation duties the naval ratings would perform that Marines likely do not. Things like the 'manual airlock seal maintenance' that Sollies apparently don't do. However, that can also be easily solved by only using one squad of Marines instead of two. If Manticore/GA stick to the usual 8 ship squadron size and don't revert to DD flotilla's being larger, this averages out to ~16 Marines per Roland. Which also happens to be almost, but not quite, the size of one Marine squad of 13.


Two squads just happens to be the one that mathematically matches larger ships crew ratios, and works out slightly better in best squeezing a full company onto 8 Rolands. Also features more flexibility from both a Navy and Marine perspective. Two squads per Roland means you only need two Rolands to make up a full platoon of Marines, and have one full squad in Reserve, and also makes it easier to split off the navy corpsman component, because a Marine platoon has two Navy corpsman assigned.

Running a two ship division with two squads apiece would very nearly reverse time back to Battle of Hancock era. It's only been since the Janacek Admiralty where the RMN (officially) reduced their divisions became three-ships and their squadrons to six-ships, so they became stronger on a divisional level but weaker at a squadron level when compared to Haven, Andermani and the Sollies, all of whom still operate on a two- and eight-ship basis respectively.

This should also save overall crew, because Roland's already have SBA's for their present navy-only crew, they absolutely must have at least one and probably three so they can have one SBA on-duty across an entire ~24 hour day. Although I think they actually run four watches so they might have four SBA's already in addition to the full surgeon who is the lead Medical officer aboard ship. The Marine company wouldn't need to bring an additional 8, which would put one extra SBA on board each of the 8 Roland's in a squadron. And that's in keeping with how the SBA's worked with Marines at both Basilisk and Blackbird, they all came from Honor's ships and were no longer available for shipduty because they would be groundside with Marines.


Overall coin flip really, two squads could fit aboard a Roland easily enough, but as you noted what I missed and it depends on the very much unmentioned and sparsely detailed non-combat daily naval duties and maintenance for how easily they can serve on a Roland. But they can definitely fit one squad without notably reducing the non-combat duties, and as you mentioned they could easily carry 1-2 more squads on a temporary expedient basis if necessary, just using empty flag bridges. They somehow packed an entire battalion of Marines onboard the CLAC that Terekhov took to Mobius, and that was 600 Marines and 30-some navy SBA's.

Except Terekhov could actually have carried most of that second battalion just on his cruisers and destroyers. Each Sag-C carries one full company by default, so bringing one division of four cruisers, he has four-thirds of a battalion just from his normally assigned Marines. The 5 surviving Rolands of DesRon 301 could have carried 2 squads each on a temporary basis putting Terekhov upto five-sixths of two battalions, and his 4 cruisers could have split up the remaining 3 platoons (6 squads) between them easily enough without even beginning to strain his life-support. There was actually zero reason to slice off a single CLAC for the Mobius mission as it didn't actually help at all, and arguably only slowed them down. The Sollies were slightly intimidated by a waller's presence, but when it really came down to it they were outmatched by the cruiser and destroyers already so they didn't need much encouragement to abandon ship, CLAC "waller" or not.



Coming back on point though, your point about the Armory and Range issues is moot point. They apparently already have rather well-stocked ones, based on what Abigail (or rather Mateo) brought aboard Saltash station. They had sidearms for everybody, both pulse rifles & fletchette rifles, they even brought tribarrels, grenade launchers and I believe I also remember a missile launcher being used at least once. Those are all standard weapons that Marines utilize themselves, so if the Navy pukes from Tristram could cough up that kind of firepower, and also be proficient enough for a Marine-turned-Armsman to call them acceptable, Roland's absolutely must already have functional and secure armories, and a range good enough to practice with, and not just a dinky pistol range.

The only difference is the Marines would be using that range far more often, they somehow manage to share on the larger cruisers who also have ~40% of their crews being Marines so it's already being done. Because I sincerely doubt even a Nike-class battlecruiser, despite being borderline battleship tonnage, carries more than one gunnery range. That'd be an awful lot of unnecessarily empty space, just so their navy and marines can practice weapons without sharing a range together. Even pre-podnought SD's didn't afaik, like the former Peep ship Honor captained in Yeltsn.



So about the only relatively major issue, a Roland Flight II or a future Destroyer design before 'the next generation' matures, really needs to change from current Roland's is a distinct berthing area. They don't even have to touch the flag decks at all, that can be kept as possible field-expedient extra space, which easily allows them to expand from two squads of Marines in their own berthing, to three squads using an empty flag bridge, which is a full platoon per Roland. And if they then utilize hotbunking, they could double that to upto six squads, which is two full platoons worth, although that will put a crunch on the life support because that's a total of 88 Marines, plus the normal 36-ish Navy crew for a total of 124 people, on board a Roland which is designed for 62 (plus battle damage). Good for short and fast deployments, like say the Montana to Mobius quickie, or acting in a SAR manner after a larger battle, but not something you would do for an extended time.

Doubtlessly others more into detail will correct me, but I had the impression that Rolands were like super efficient Swiss watches. More automation, less crew, but better utilisation of space to fit more missiles and gear into them? Thus no spare space. Historically in OTL, it was cruisers who carried marines and provisions for longer cruises (hence the name) while destroyers were brawlers, all teeth and not much else, even if a similar size as a light cruizer.

Daryl wrote:Doubtlessly others more into detail will correct me, but I had the impression that Rolands were like super efficient Swiss watches. More automation, less crew, but better utilisation of space to fit more missiles and gear into them? Thus no spare space. Historically in OTL, it was cruisers who carried marines and provisions for longer cruises (hence the name) while destroyers were brawlers, all teeth and not much else, even if a similar size as a light cruizer.

That is what I suggested in my post. More automation, less space but lots of teeth. A brawler. The Rolands remind me of the Defiant Class warship in Star Trek. It is also very heavy on armament and a similar crew size of 52. But the Defiant is a beast ...


4 phaser cannons,
~3 Phaser emitters,
≈4 forward and ≈2 aft photon/quantum torpedo launchers

Sorry, I got carried away; because the Rolands give me a rise.

Daryl wrote:Doubtlessly others more into detail will correct me, but I had the impression that Rolands were like super efficient Swiss watches. More automation, less crew, but better utilisation of space to fit more missiles and gear into them? Thus no spare space. Historically in OTL, it was cruisers who carried marines and provisions for longer cruises (hence the name) while destroyers were brawlers, all teeth and not much else, even if a similar size as a light cruizer.

You are correct on the Roland's automation and size - a smaller % of the ship was dedicated to personnel and their berthings than a traditional ship. But this has a tradeoff - for a ship like this with a small crew, a much smaller % of the crew is made up of general ratings - the majority is made of seasoned specialists. An independent cruising ship like a destroyer still requires nav specialists, grav specialists, missile specialists, etc - even more so because that knowledge isn't spread over a dozen men, it's focused into 1-3 men. And the ship still needs manned 24/7 with competent crews in almost every role, on every shift, capable of doing their jobs with out the supervision of the sr. officer of their speciality. (roles like sick bay, small craft crews, and boarding parties don't require full 24/7 support, but such crews will need to have flexible hours depending on the situation, and will be less responsive in an emergency.) So a Roland crew would have a heavy ratio of chiefs and officers to general ratings, and few greenhorns amongst the ratings.

On traditional ships with large marine contingents, the marines assisted in the roles general ratings would - low level maintenance, damage control, fire fighting, gunnery crews, small ship piloting, and boarding parties. Yes, marines could replace such ratings, but not on a 1:1 basis - they need time to do their Marine duties and training as well, so if you need 10 ratings for a Roland to perform properly, you may need to embark 20 or 30 Marines to perform the ship's required workload AND have competent Marines.

So I'm still on the side of the need to have the flag spaces be modular to fit a squad+ of marines. And that future builds have a dedicated marine space.

Theemile wrote:

Daryl wrote:Doubtlessly others more into detail will correct me, but I had the impression that Rolands were like super efficient Swiss watches. More automation, less crew, but better utilisation of space to fit more missiles and gear into them? Thus no spare space. Historically in OTL, it was cruisers who carried marines and provisions for longer cruises (hence the name) while destroyers were brawlers, all teeth and not much else, even if a similar size as a light cruizer.

You are correct on the Roland's automation and size - a smaller % of the ship was dedicated to personnel and their berthings than a traditional ship. But this has a tradeoff - for a ship like this with a small crew, a much smaller % of the crew is made up of general ratings - the majority is made of seasoned specialists. An independent cruising ship like a destroyer still requires nav specialists, grav specialists, missile specialists, etc - even more so because that knowledge isn't spread over a dozen men, it's focused into 1-3 men. And the ship still needs manned 24/7 with competent crews in almost every role, on every shift, capable of doing their jobs with out the supervision of the sr. officer of their speciality. (roles like sick bay, small craft crews, and boarding parties don't require full 24/7 support, but such crews will need to have flexible hours depending on the situation, and will be less responsive in an emergency.) So a Roland crew would have a heavy ratio of chiefs and officers to general ratings, and few greenhorns amongst the ratings.

On traditional ships with large marine contingents, the marines assisted in the roles general ratings would - low level maintenance, damage control, fire fighting, gunnery crews, small ship piloting, and boarding parties. Yes, marines could replace such ratings, but not on a 1:1 basis - they need time to do their Marine duties and training as well, so if you need 10 ratings for a Roland to perform properly, you may need to embark 20 or 30 Marines to perform the ship's required workload AND have competent Marines.

So I'm still on the side of the need to have the flag spaces be modular to fit a squad+ of marines. And that future builds have a dedicated marine space.

Have to disagree. DesRon 301 literally proved this. They had an extraordinarily green crew, and they were manned BEFORE the Battle of Manticore blew huge ass holes in BuPers plans. We saw more than a few simulator runs of Hearns+Kaplan aboard Tristram and they're relying extremely heavily on very junior ratings. All of Abigails assistants seemed to be PO2's, that's the second lowest NCO you can possibly have and then it jumps directly to Lieutenant Senior Grade Hearns. And we can assume if Tactical is that skewed in ranking, which is Manticore's preferred training branch, no other department is going to have a better ratio of officers-NCOs-enlisted.

That heavily suggests most of the crew were primarily enlisted. We know that 62 is the total crew of a Roland, and we have the Captain for a skipper, with a full Commander for an XO. They do not have a Lieutenant Commander, because Tactical is supposed to be the senior department and they only had Senior Grade Lieutenant Abigail Hearns, who as above relied primarily on PO2's to staff her department. And again, this was pre-BoMa so despite the rush to get Tristram and the other Rolands headed back to Talbott under Terekhov's new squadron, they had the manpower available. And Abigail did not even have a Warrant controlling her EW section, unlike Scottie Tremaine who had Harkness DESPITE the fact that Scottie only got his cruiser after BoMa and even BuPers was like "yes you should have a commissioned officer there, but since it's you Captain Tremaine, you can have MCWO Harkness as your EWO."


That works out to something like Roland crew being:

• Captain
• Commander
• perhaps 6 Lieutenants, four of whom were confirmed SG and maybe a couple JGs
• around 20 PO2's. Based on Tactical being the senior/best staffed departent having had 5 or 6, we can assume the other's had similar counts.

That only leaves a little more than 30-ish crew, and because they seem to rely mostly on PO2s, you have exactly 4 ranks left for the remaining crew. Non-commissioned Petty Officer 3rd class, and then 3 ranks of general enlisted ratings, Spacers 1st through 3rd.

That works out to over 50% of the crew being the absolutely lowest of the low. Which also means it's incredibly probable that Marines could replace them, because that's general maintenance, grunt labour, 'hey you' details.


The crew ratio actually almost doesn't even function based on confirmed numbers of ranks. They barely have enough commissioned officers to stand the watch cycle we got from SI1 and knowing the troubles Hexapuma had. The TACO and ATO take two of the four available watches with I believe it was Communications and Navigation taking the other two, while Engineering was assumed too busy for watch. A Roland barely has enough (confirmed) Lieutenants to put a Senior Grade on the bridge for every watch, and they have exactly one known Lieutenant Senior-grade Engineer (the one that stepped on Wanda O'Reilly because she was in a snit over thinking Abigail was getting preferential treatment).

Somtaaw wrote:<snip>

The crew ratio actually almost doesn't even function based on confirmed numbers of ranks. They barely have enough commissioned officers to stand the watch cycle we got from SI1 and knowing the troubles Hexapuma had. The TACO and ATO take two of the four available watches with I believe it was Communications and Navigation taking the other two, while Engineering was assumed too busy for watch. A Roland barely has enough (confirmed) Lieutenants to put a Senior Grade on the bridge for every watch, and they have exactly one known Lieutenant Senior-grade Engineer (the one that stepped on Wanda O'Reilly because she was in a snit over thinking Abigail was getting preferential treatment).

You're right - based on the text - but that's crazy. I recind my post.