This has turned out to be a little more complex than I anticipated
The following changes will make crew accommodation a much more significant factor in ship design and require the ship designer to consider the amount of time the ship is likely to be deployed in deep space. Ships deployed on long missions without suitable accommodation to keep the crew happy will suffer from low crew morale, which in turn will affect the performance of the ship. Crews forced to work in overcrowded conditions will be equally unhappy.
The basic requirement for crew accommodation is now 1 ton per crewman, or 50 crewman per HS. This is 4x more space than is allowed for a colonist in cryogenic suspension and 1/10th of the space allowed for a passenger in a cruise liner (Luxury Passenger Accommodation). This will suffice for ships who intend to spend no longer than a month away from port. For longer voyages, the ship will need additional living space for the crew. This is based on a per-man requirement but much of the additional space would probably be shared recreational space. As this is a significant increase in crew quarters requirements, I intend to revisit the crew requirements for all modules.
The top left of the Class Window now allows you to enter a Deployment Time in months, which is used as a basis for suitable crew accommodations. This number can be fractional and/or less than 1 but must be greater than zero. The amount of crew accommodations required is equal to the base amount multiplied by the cube root of the deployment time in months. So for a 3 month deployment, the requirement is 1.442 tons per man. For 12 months it is 2.289 tons and for 48 months it is 3.634 tons. For a deployment time of 0.033 months (about a day) the requirement is 0.321 tons per man. The design window will now automatically allocate crew quarters to meet this requirement, using a combination of 1 HS and 0.2 HS systems (I may add a larger one too). You can add more crew quarters than you need to create spare capacity (more on that later) but you can't reduce it below the minimum required.
If the Deployment Time is less than 0.5 months, the required crew is halved. If the Deployment Time is less than 0.1 months, the required crew is reduced by 2/3rd.
The following screenshots show 3, 12 and 48 month options for a ship with a crew of 275. Tons per Man shows the multiplier for the deployment time. Capacity per HS shows hows many crewman will be supported by 1 HS of crew quarters. Accom HS Req is the number of hull spaces required for the crew and Accom HS Avail shows how many have been added to the design. In the case of the 3 month option there are actually 277 berths on the ship so 2 are spare berths. I'll get back to cryo berths later.
During every 5-day increment, every ship is checked for any problems with crew morale (I'm using morale as a catch-all for unhappiness, tiredness, etc.). The length of the deployment since the "Last Shore Leave" date is checked. If the number of months since the Last Shore Leave is greater than the designed Deployment Time of the ship, then morale will be less than 100%. Crew Morale is set to Ship Deployment Time / Months since Last Shore Leave. For example, if a ship has been out for 15 months and the deployment time of the class is 12 months, morale will fall to 12/15 = 80%.
Nice and simple until you get to carriers
. Many fighters and other small craft will have intended deployment time of only a few days compared to months or years for their parent carrier. Moreover, the crew of those fighters are likely to spend a lot more time on the carrier than on the fighter itself. For added complexity, there is no guarantee that the crew of the fighter have been out in space for the same amount of time as the crew of the carrier.
Under the new rules, the parent carrier now needs to provide accommodations for the crews of any parasite craft. That is provided for by Spare Berths. You will need to add enough extra crew quarters to provide space for the flight crews. If a ship has a hangar, this is shown on the class summary as "Flight Crew Berths" rather than "Spare Berths". A parasite craft tracks its own Last Shore Leave date but while on the carrier it uses the designed Deployment Time of that carrier. So assume a fighter that last had shore leave six months ago is transferred to a carrier that has been out in space for 4 years - a year past its Deployment Time of 36 months. The crew of the carrier is not happy, having been out in space a year longer than they expected. The crew of the fighter is fine. They have only been out in space 6 months and the carrier has nice spacious accommodations.
When a fighter is out in space (and may or may not have been launched from a carrier), it tracks both the "Months since Last Shore Leave" and "Months since Last Launch". If the last launch was later than last shore leave (which may not always be the case) then that is used for purposes of its current trip. For example, the crew of a fighter has been in space overall for four years but only on its current mission for several hours. During the morale check, it compares the last launch date against the accommodations actually on board the fighter, which will be far less generous than those on the carrier.
However, it is possible that the morale for (Months since Last Launch / Fighter Deployment Time) would result in a higher morale than (Months since Last Shore Leave/ Carrier Deployment Time). As the crew would still be suffering from the effects of being out in space so long on board the carrier, their morale can never be higher than it was when they launched. I know that sounds a little complicated. In summary, what you need to bear in mind is that when you launch a fighter, you need to worry about the length of its deployment from the carrier. That will have an effect on the morale of its crew based on the time since launch and the accommodation on the fighter. However, if the crew was unhappy when they launched, they aren't going to get any happier during the mission.
To improve morale, a ship needs to spend time on orbit of a planet with at a population of at least 10,000. This should be enough to provide bars, nightclubs, brothels, art galleries, etc.. Note that maintenance facilities are not required. You just need people. While in orbit, the Last Shore Leave date will increase at the rate of 10x actual time. Once the Last Shore Leave date moves closer to the present day than the Deployment Time of the crew's ship, their morale will be back to 100%. Of course, if you can get the Last Shore Leave back to the present, the crew is ready for another long mission. Otherwise, it is more of a break during the existing mission. It's worth noting that the small colonies you set up to support the naval forces on the front lines may one day grow into something much larger as civilian traffic moves into the area.
In addition to long deployment times, the crews will lose morale due to overcrowding. Each 5-day, the total number of crew on the ship, plus the crew of any parasite craft, plus any survivors you have picked up plus any survivors on the parasites, is compared to the number of available berths. If there are more personnel than berths then morale will fall. Crew Morale is multiplied by (Berths / TotalPersonnel). So overcrowding and staying out too long are a really bad combination.
The above ends the current situation where a FAC can pickup a couple of thousand survivors. To enable ships to pick up survivors without causing massive overcrowding, I have added a couple of new systems. The "Cryogenic Transport - Emergency" and "Cryogenic Transport - Small". They are 1 HS and 5 HS respectively with capacities of 200 and 1000. While they can be used as normal colonist tranportation, their intended function is to allow ships to carry small cryogenic facilities to allow them to pick up survivors without causing overcrowding or compromising their life support systems. The 1 HS version might be a standard fitting on a cruiser and the larger might be used by "hospital ships". When a ship is transporting survivors, the number of available cryogenic berths is deducted from the number of survivors before considering total personnel numbers in the overcrowding calculation. Any survivors on parasites with available cryogenic facilities will also be excluded from total personnel.
Low morale affects both crew training and fleet training. Whenever a check is required that involves either rating, it is first multiplied by the morale percentage. This means that a ship with low morale will be slow to respond to orders and will not function well in combat. I'll provide a few more details on this in a future post as this post is mainly about how we get to low morale rather than the effects.
As well as the morale effects of overcrowding, it is possible the ship's life support systems may be overloaded. Even though some ships will have extensive crew accommodations, most of that will be recreational facilities. The life support element of those systems is based on the expected crew numbers plus a 20% safety margin. If overcrowding exceeds 20%, there is a chance that life support systems may start to fail. During each 5-day in which Total Personnel/Berths is greater than 1.2 (i.e. more than 20% overcrowded), each crew quarters system is checked for failure. If failures occur they will be automatically fixed by the ship's onboard maintenance supplies until those run out.
The percentage chance of failure for each crew quarters is equal to: ((Total Personnel/Berths)-1) x 10
For example, if a ship has 40% overcrowding, the chance of failure for each crew quarters is (1.4 - 1) * 10 = 4%. While that doesn't seem very high, if there are a lot of crew quarters on the ship, one or two may fail. Once maintenance supplies run out, even small failures will result in even more overcrowding and the effect may snowball.
If a ship has no life support remaining, either due to battle damage or maintenance failures, emergency systems will keep the crew alive for one week. After that point, the crew will be forced to abandon ship. I'll cover reclaiming the ship (Have you restored life support yet, Rodney?) and what happens to colonists, troops, etc in a future post in this thread (as I haven't decided yet
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I will include an option to turn off crew morale / life support overload checks in the same way as turning off overhauls but I think leaving it on adds an interesting extra dimension to the game.
Steve
