Question

[marauder]

Now do you see why when you select a BS station and hit F9 you get a *classified* for number of crew?

As for warhammer 40K space ships, you do realise that the smallest cruiser is about 3k long, of which about 1 k+ is the powerplant and engines?

Plus the guns have to be dragged into position, along with their blast shutters.

Not to mention the fact that 90% of the techpriests (engineers to everyone else) don't actually know how most of the technology onboard even works.

Hell, to start the plasma reactors they hit them with a hammer while chanting aload of utter gibberish.

And thats before mentioning the fact that the enlisted crew are mostly press-ganged, convicts and other expendable scum. The enlisted crew out-number the techpriests and officers (from petty officer up) roughly 15/20 to 1.

So unfortunately your comparision doesn't really work.

A computer can run the ship, it just has to have alot of help from robots. Plus have you any idea how much power would be spent on life-support for the crew?

All the A/C fans, lights, water pumps, consoles, entertainment equipment, recycling equipment, etc would use alot of power. The bigger the crew the more power gets drained by the life-support.

Say you have 1500 crewers on a ship, that 1500 lights running in the crews rooms alone, say 5 watts per bulb = 7500, and thats before you include all the other rooms on the ship and that theres probably going to be at least 4 lights in them.

It all adds up to a massive amount of power, replace the crew with robots and you don't need to have all that equipement draining the power.

Plus as alot of the capships vary in size your not going to have the same number of crewers on a dreadnought as you are on a rhienland BS.