Engineering crew sizes

Gentlesophonts and those from beyond the Black Curtain -

    Well, here are the first results of my whiz through the various
generations of Traveller rulesets looking for engineering crew sizes
and believe me, it wasn't easy ...

I discovered that I actually have copies of CT (3-booklet set and The
Book), Highguard, MT and TNE -- I thought I'd dumped at least one set
of rules. Ah, the nostalgia of looking through the 3-booklet set once
again ...

Anyway, comparing the number of engineers you need depending on which
set of rules you use isn't easy. CT and Highguard use x engineers per
displacement ton, MT uses some benighted formula using control points
and FFS uses a figure based on peak power output. Trying to reduce this
morass to a nice figure per tonnes mass or power output gets a little
bizarre because of the MT formula. As a first cut, here are the
engineering crew requirements for the "standard" starships as specified
in CT, TB (the Traveller Book), MT and FFS.

Ship            CT  TB  MT  FFS
Type S scout    0   0.5 0.5 2(0)
Type A trader   1   1   1   4(2)
Type R merchant 1   1   2   5(3)
Type Y yacht    1   1   1   5(3)
Type C cruiser  4   4   3   5(3)
Type M merchant 3       2   7(5)
Type T cruiser      3   2   7(5)
Type L lab ship     2   1   3(1)
Type K safari       1   1

FFS figures in brackets are the number of non-manoeuvre crew required.
It looks like engineering crew requirements have doubled in FFS.

I'll be producing figures on engineers required per tonne of drive and
per MW produced as soon as I can get them to make sense ;-)

 - Arthur Green
   University College Dublin Computing Services
   Phone: [phone removed]  Fax: [phone removed]  Email: [email removed]