Personnel Systems
Crew Quarters
Aboard Federation Starships, crew quarters are designated Types A through N (a room’s classification depends primarily on its size, arrangement, and occupancy, not whether it falls into one of the game categories listed below). Additionally, there are special quarters for VIP’s, diplomatic personnel, certain types of researchers, and the like. On most ships, the decks devoted to quarters are modular, so that occupants can easily move walls and compartments to create different living spaces as needed
Barracks are a type of accommodation that were traditionally used on vessels of the 23rd century and long discarded on modern 24th century vessels, but in recent times such as the Dominion War and other cases, it has been needed to store large amounts of crewmembers and/or troops in small confined spaces for transport to frontline bases and to garrison deep space stations operated by the Federation. Klingons, and several other space-faring species still use barracks to transport personnel, but on Federation vessels it is rare, as most prefer even to use Spartan quarters to barracks. The typical Starfleet arrangement features bunks in racks of three, with three more racks per barrack. Male, female, and transgender crewmembers bunk together.
Spartan Quarters are the barest accommodations. They feature two bunks per room instead of beds, and usually lack Replicators and other ‘creature comforts’. Some of Starfleet’s more military-oriented vessels, such as the Defiant-class Heavy Escort, use mainly Spartan quarters. Normally made to berth 2 crewmembers per quarters, they can be expanded to 4 per quarters to work as makeshift ‘barracks’ in times of emergency or war.
Basic Quarters are minimal standard accommodations. Typically they’re suited for one (maybe two) persons and are filled with enlisted personnel and the lowest ranking officers with the least seniority.
Expanded Quarters are larger, and often more luxurious. They’re often used by families (on ships which allow civilian personnel on board), mid-ranking officers, and the like. They’re often also easily converted to other types of quarters when needed, such as barracks, Spartan, basic or even Cryogenic suspension units.
Luxury Quarters are the top of the line quarters—large, multiple-room suites with lots of amenities. This category includes most senior officers’ quarters, special diplomatic and VIP quarters, and the like.
Unusual Quarters are for crewmembers with special needs—for example, a cetacean crewman who lives in a water tank, or an Elaysian who needs a room equipped for zero gravity. On many ships, about ten percent of basic, expanded, and luxury quarters can be adapted to non-class M environments for crewmen who need standard quarters with only a slightly different environment.
Environmental Systems
“Environmental systems” is a broad term covering the life support systems and related technology, which makes it possible for people to live aboard a starship. Obviously, these systems are crucial; if they’re cut off or damaged, everyone on the ship will die in a short period of time.
Basic Life Support
Basic life support is the standard environmental and breathable gases systems, which all starships must have (this includes the ability to adapt some living quarters for non-Class M environments). Multiple independent safety locks and redundant systems ensure that it is very difficult to disable such systems.
A ship’s breathable atmosphere is conducted throughout the vessel by a network of ventilation ducts; larger ships have two (or more) independent networks. Starfleet standards specify that all ships must have two primary atmospheric processing units for every fifty cubic meters of habitable volume. Other life support systems maintain the temperature and humidity aboard ship.
Reserve Life Support System
In addition to the primary basic life support system, Starfleet vessels are equipped with a reserve system in case the primary systems fail. It functions approximately 50% of the primary system’s capacity for up to 24 hours. It shares the primary systems ventilation network. (Thus, if the primary system’s network is damaged, reserve life support cannot function properly; so emergency life support must be activated.)
Emergency Life Support
If the primary and reserve life support systems fail (due to, for example, extensive damage to the ship), self-contained contingency atmospheric supply and power modules separate from the ships main power systems located at most corridor junctions maintain a breathable environment for 30 minutes, allowing the ships personnel to evacuate to designated emergency shelter areas.
Each shelter has enough air, food, water, and power to preserve the lives of up to 65 persons for 24 hours with no external support, or 36 hours with minimal external support. Each shelter also has two Emergency Pressure Garments, so crewmembers can walk between shelter areas safely.
Gravity
Throughout the habitable areas of any starship, gravity generators are placed below the floor, thus providing a standard sense of “up” and down regardless of the motion or orientation of the ship. Gravity generators—disk shaped devices about 50 cm in diameter and 25 cm high--- create a controlled stream of gravitons similar to a tractor beam.
The primary component of a gravity generator is a suspended super-conducting stator, which creates the gravitational field. If power to the gravity generation system is cut off, the stator continues to provide gravity for approximately 240 minutes even though it receives no power. However, gravity will gradually degrade to about 0.8 g and then, after about 240 minutes fall entirely.
Consumables
Starships carry a lot of consumables—anti-matter, deuterium, replicator raw materials, and the like. (Most ships have the capacity to generate or collect small amounts of vital materials, but that’s an emergency measure and will not sustain the ship for long). Storing this material pending use requires a significant amount of space.
Replicator Systems
Replicators, one of the greatest marvels of modern technology, can create virtually any sort of food or inanimate object, seemingly out of thin air. They actually use a variant of transporter technology to transform raw materials—usually a sterilized organic particulate suspension formulated for ease of use, or recycled waste products—into other objects. This saves a ship the trouble of foods, or countless bins full of spare parts. Instead, crewmembers can simply replicate whatever they want. (Ships still carry supplies pf crucial spare parts for times when the Replicators are not functioning.)
However, replicators are not perfect; they suffer from five major restrictions. First, they can only produce objects stored in the ship’s computer memory banks. If an object or food is not in the computer, or a crewmember doesn’t have a sample to scan in, the Replicators cannot produce it. Second, the larger the item replicated, thus the greater the energy cost. Thus, standard procedure dictates that large items are produced one part at a time, instead of all at once, which can be time consuming. (Industrial Replicators are better suited to producing large objects all at once.) Third, and most importantly, replicators cannot produce items at the quantum level of resolution used by transporters. Therefore, living beings cannot be replicated, nor can certain items (such as some medicines), which require quantum-level resolution. (This relative lack of resolution explains why some people can discern the difference between replicated food and the real thing.) Fourth, some objects simply cannot be replicated for various other reasons. The most notable example is latinum, which explains it popularity as a medium of exchange. Fifth, safety interlocks prevent users from creating dangerous items (such as poisons or explosives) or weapons without special authorization.
Starships have two types of Replicators: food Replicators and industrial Replicators.
Food Replicators
As their name indicates, these Replicators create food and drink. They have a menu of 4,500 food and drink items, but can be programmed to replicate nearly any other dish the user might desire by having a sample of the dish broken down by the replicator. They are located in every quarter, the bridge, recreation facilities, and other appropriate areas of the ship.
Industrial Replicators
Industrial Replicators produce spare parts and other inanimate objects. They range in size from units no larger than food Replicators, to ones with emitter pads 25 meters on a side (planet-based industrial Replicators can be much bigger).
Ordinance Replicators
A variation of the standard industrial Replicators, these relatively new additions to Starfleet’s vessel load-outs are specifically attuned to producing weapons and ordinance needed to create torpedoes, missiles, and other projectile ordinance needed for a starship instead of having the vessel re-supply at a starbase and/or station.
(Costs 20 SU’s for an ordinance replication unit.)
Medical Facilities and Systems
All but the smallest starships have sickbays and medical staffs devoted to preserving the health and well-being of the crew. Starship medical personnel and equipment stand ready to assist any crewmen, regardless of her/his species, with any injury or medical problem.
Sickbay equipment includes workstations, biobeds with diagnostic monitors, an overhead sensor cluster, and generators to create force fields, which are used to contain biohazards and create sterile operating environments. If necessary, doctors can attach surgical support frames (SSF’s) to the biobeds. SSF’s or ‘clamshells,” maintain a sterile treatment environment. They contain sophisticated medical sensors and can perform some basic medical procedures, such as administering drugs, emergency defibrillation and cardiovascular support.
Sickbay facilities typically include the reception area; main patient ward; critical care/triage area; physical therapy room; primary, overflow, and biohazard intensive care units (ICU’s); a trauma stasis unit; surgical suite or suites; offices; laboratory facilities; and observation areas for patients needing special environments (such as zero-gravity), and most recently for new 11 and 12 rating facilities, Meta-phasic therapy alcoves and isolation chambers equipped with highly sophisticated technologies to allow for medical treatments not normally applicable to standard Starfleet systems, or even most starbase facilities, and a specialized nanite bio-renewal interlinks taking advantage of advanced nanite and other nano-technologies to treat patients. Smaller vessels may not have the full range of facilities, or must make do with smaller ones.
(In game addendum rules, the newest and/or most sophisticated and largest starship designs can take advantage of 11 and 12 medical rating facilities, which include advanced technologies such as the Meta-phasic trans-regeneration chambers and nano-renewal equipment. The SU cost follows sequentially as per medical rating chart per class rating applied.)
A ship may have multiple sickbays if its builder desires, at varying levels to reflect the sophistication of their facilities.
EMH’s and LMH’s
Beginning in 2371, Starfleet started to equip it’s most sophisticated ships with a new medical system call the Emergency Medical Hologram. The EMH is a holographic doctor. Its memory contains the sum of the Federations medical knowledge—50 million gigquads of information from 3,000 cultures (including psycho-spiritual beliefs), 2,000 medical texts, 47 physicians’ personal experiences, and five million possible treatments. It can provide routine and complex medical care, up to and including detailed surgery, in the event that a ships doctor is incapacitated.
An EMH system requires sophisticated holo-emitters and sensors in the appropriate areas; Starfleet can only install one on ships with the most sophisticated medical facilities. For an EMH Mark I, emitters are only installed in sickbay, requiring the sick and injured to go there for treatment. In 2375, Starfleet created the EMH Mark II for ships, such as the Prometheus, Frontier, and Camarilla classes, which have holo-emitters throughout the vessel. A Mark II EMH can go wherever on its ship it is needed. In 2376, the Mark III and Mark IV EMH’s, both containing slight improvements over the previous models but with further highly adaptive multi-tronic databases capable of expanding their ‘knowledge’ through simple routine upgrades, became available. Selectable personality templates are also available for these models are available, to allow the convenience of a crew to select a certain type of ‘personality’ for their EMH if they so wish from a moderate database of known and famous physicians.
An EMH, although a computer-created hologram, cannot automatically access a ships computer. That would require more processing capacity than its holomatrix can support. Instead, it accesses the ship’s computers like any other normal crewmember. An EMH cannot feel pain, cry, or bleed. If grabbed, it can become insubstantial and slip from its captors grasp. Although not designed to work for more than 1,500 aggregated hours without substantial maintenance, if left on for larger periods of time it can, in some circumstances, learn and ‘evolve’ beyond the limitations of its programming.
In 2376, the creator of the EMH, Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, created a Long-Term Medical Hologram designed to operate for much longer periods without failure. The LMH Mark I has all the capabilities of an EMH Mark II. The new LMH Mark II has the capabilities of the EMH Mark IV. Both can operate for five times as long as an EMH without significant maintenance.
Recreation Facilities
It’s easy for crewmembers to become bored or distracted during long starship voyages. To help keep crews mentally and physically alert and active, starships have recreation facilities. These range from gymnasiums, to restaurants and lounges, to holo-decks and smaller personnel holo-suits.
Personnel Transportation Systems
Most starships are big enough that walking from one end to another, not to mention climbing stairs between multiple decks, is slow and inconvenient. While ships of size 4 (120 meters and below) can get by with normal walkways (but do not have to), ships of size 5 (Defiant-class and larger) usually need a Turbolift transport system. Turbolift systems consist of Turbolift cars (cylindrical structures made of Duranium), which move down vertical and horizontal shafts at accelerations approaching ten meters per second, squared. By using one, a crewmember can go from one end to the other of even the largest ship in a very short period of time. Computer programs ensure that Turbolift cars do not collide with each other and take the quickest available route to the indicated destination via verbal interfaces.
The crew also needs ways to move behind panels to access systems buried deep in the ships infrastructure. Jefferies tubes, as the standard access tunnels at utilities corridors on starships are known, network the entire ship. They’re small—a full grown adult has to crawl through them—but with enough time and perseverance a crewmember could crawl anywhere on the ship through them.
Fire Suppression System
Although many of the substances used to construct furnishings, systems, and other objects carried aboard or installed in starships meet the standards of inflammability set forth by SFRA 528.5 (b-f), fires can still break out due to damage caused by enemy attacks or similar occurrences. When that occurs, the fire suppression system activates to snuff the flames.
The environmental monitoring sensors located throughout a ship include fire detection sensors. When they detect a fire, Ops and Security are notified by computer. If the fire is a small one, the fire suppression system surrounds it with a force field This snuffs out the flames by cutting off it’s oxygen supply; the force field is maintained until the affected objects cool down to the point of combustibility. For large fires, the system may have to activate larger extinguishing fields or seal off areas of the ship with section isolation doors. In extreme situations, entire sections of the ship can be vented into space, which will snuff the fire out almost instantly.
Cargo Holds
Starships need to carry a lot of equipment and other objects in addition to consumables. Large objects, or objects stored in bulk, are kept in the ships cargo holds.
Escape Pods
In the event that a ship is about to be destroyed or must be abandoned, the crew and passengers make their way to the escape pods. Located along both sides of the hull of the saucer section (or other appropriate areas), escape pods (or, more formally, Autonomous Survival and Recovery Vehicles) are ejected from the ship upon command. They proceed away from the ship at initial speeds of about 40 meters per second, and can use their impulse engines to maneuver with a total delta-v of 3,600 meters per second.
A standard ASRV comes equipped with the following; life support for a total of 86 person-days (this includes breathable gases and consumables), an impulse engine sufficient to propel the pod at .1c for up to 24 hours (thus allowing the pod to land on, and take off from, planetary surfaces), survival gear, acceleration seats, and inertial dampening field, and a subspace radio beacon. They are atmospheric-capable. Additionally, pods may have docking ports, allowing them to join together to form ‘clusters’; this is known as ‘gaggle mode’ flight. Gaggles separate before entering an atmosphere. Escape pods on small ships may not have nearly as many supplies or equipment.