Fleet Procedures

This page is for things Fleet does.

See also Fleet Manual.

Fleet-wide

Time Tracking

Fleet runs on Alliance Mean Time, which is based on Selnor's day cycle of 25 hours. Ships' logs are dated in AMT.

Watches

Ships of 75 personnel, and stationary facilities of 50 people or more, or more have the multiple watch rotations.

• The Command Watch Rotation involves all command-track personnel, and is scheduled across four watches: alpha, beta, delta, and gamma; these watches are each six and a quarter hours long.
  • Alpha-Command starts, nonsensically, at Mark 7 (7 AM) and ends at Mark 13:15 (1:15 PM).
  • Beta-Command begins at Mark 13:15 (1:15 PM) and extends to 19:30 (7:30 PM)
  • Delta-Command begins at Mark 19:30 (7:30 PM) and extends to 25:45 (Skip:45 AM); this watch is known as 'night shift'
  • Gamma-Command begins at Mark 25:45 (Skip:45 AM) and extends to Mark 7 (7 AM); this watch is known by several names: 'the graveyard shift', 'the deadeye shift', and 'the long haul'.
• The Standard Watch Rotation is followed by specialists and non-command-track personnel. Each shift is eight hours long, and there are only three:
  • Alpha-Standard: Begins at Mark 7 (7 am) and ends at Mark 15 (3 PM)
  • Beta-Standard: Begins at Mark 15 (3 PM) and ends at Mark 23 (11 PM).
  • Skip: This one-hour break between Beta and Gamma-Standard fills in the one hour gap in the rotation caused by the eight-hour duration. It lasts from Mark 23 to Mark 24. Jokers call it the 'no-man's hour' because you can never find anyone to answer your questions during it.
  • Gamma-Standard: Begins at Mark 24 (midnight) and ends at Mark 7 (7 AM). This is the specialist "night shift" and is the least populous.

Ships of less than 75 personnel, and stationery facilities of 50 people or less, have the following watch rotations:

Command vs Specialist Tracks

Command track officers are heading for administrative positions (Admiral, Captain, First Commander). They rotate throughout departments as they rank up. Specialists stay in their department for the duration of their careers. "There was already some friction between career specialists and the command officers phasing in and out of their areas of responsibility." For most members of Fleet, "Jobs aboard a starship were just that: jobs. Most people were perfectly content to remain in the departments they’d chosen, doing the work they’d specialized in, on the ship they’d been assigned to."

Command-track members will be monitored by Personnel regarding whether they should be moved up or moved along to progress in their career track. While they are not required to do so, Personnel puts effort into ensuring that they are genuinely satisfied to remain at their level (and that they understand that their pay will remain the same unless and until they move up). "...Personnel had definite notions about how long its command track personnel were supposed to stay in rank before advancing. If Taylitha wanted to stay, she could. But she’d have to convince them she was sure." "Promotions within departments usually kept you on your assigned berth...but move outside of it, and Fleet would attempt to assign you to wherever your new rank and specialty was needed. One need not accept. Esprit de corps was held in high esteem by Fleet Central’s Personnel Office, or so they constantly told [Taylitha] in the literature they sent all the first commanders in Fleet."

Captains' Retreats

These are run biennially by the Medical & Psychiatry Division as a way to check on the mental health of the senior officers. The Division invites members of the admiralty to give training, support, and leadership guidance. The retreat is considered a way for captains to keep track of their cohort, learn things from their superiors, and let Medical get a feel for whether they need any help. It usually lasts about two weeks. During that period, ensigns will be dropped for their leadership retreats, and the ship itself will be refitted/resupplied.

Wherever the captains are dropped off, their shuttles are expected to wait for them in case they need to return to their ships in the event of an emergency. These shuttles are the only channels permitted captains during their retreats, because retreats are held under comm blackout to encourage their participants to remain focused on the moment, and to cut down on external distractions.

Ensign's Leadership Retreats

Only for command-track ensigns. Takes place during the same period as the captain's retreats, but ends one week early so they can return to help with refits.

Specialist Turnover

Specialist turnover was "one of the many compromises Fleet's traditionalist had made with the militant faction that insisted letting people "rot" in the same ship their entire career wasn't doing Fleet any favors. Rather than moving personnel in and out of the roster as they advanced, the way the human Navy did, Fleet waited until a large enough number of specialists had enough logged time in their positions, and had indicated a willingness to shift assignments, and then did an entire raft of them at once. They claimed this was less disruptive than the human way of doing things; Taylitha wasn't sure she agreed. She wasn't the only one either, because like most compromises this one pleased no one."

Physicals

• telegem implantation
• full-body scan, updated every year, includes a skin map used to check for growths or cancers, or on the progress of healing injuries.

Divisions and Job Duties

Current Fleet ratio of soldier to staff is 1:6. Fleet members are expected to chart their own course up the ranks, whether their ultimate goal is captaincy, scientific research, or being the ship's chef.

Divisions

• Command
• Logistics & Personnel
  • Finance
  • HR
  • Records
• Medical & Psychiatry
  • Recreation
  • Food
  • Health/Gym/Personal Training/etc
  • Religious Corps
• Engineering & Maintenance
  • EVA Inspection
  • Alternate Environmental (water environment, vacuum, etc)
  • Robotics
  • Hydroponics
• Science & Systems
  • IT
• Communications and Protocol
  • Ambassadorial
• Navigation & Galactic Mapping
  • Exploration
• Tactics & Arms
  • Security

Admiralty also includes:

• Recruiting & Teaching
• Research & Development
• Intelligence
• Building/Fleet Assets
• Assignments (who goes where, when)
• Public Relations
• Strategic Council

Job Duties

Captain

• first contact
• interface with foreign or allied governments
• battle stuff if necessary

First Commander

• personal management
• logistics
• budgets

The First Commander oversees the NOTC and all officer training, handles all the promotion and transfer paperwork, and manages inventory. She has access to all non-classified personnel reports of people her rank and under.

Second Commander

• Head of the science department

Chief Medical Officer

Laelkii, also awesome.

Ship Procedures

Reports and Logs

After Action Reports

These are a thing.

Efficiency Reports

Part of officer evaluations, these are written by senior officers about their juniors and used as guides for improvement/training/promotion.

Project Management Task List

Used by officers in the same department to keep track of things across different shifts.

Project Logs

Text versions of logged activity are available to everyone, but realtime viseos of people at work are locked to commander-level access or greater, unless the requestor is in the department, and then it's lieutenant commander.

Special Positions

Not sure whether to put these here or in the Fleet manuals, so...

• Alien Liaison: person in charge of overseeing communication with Flitzbe and/or water environment aliens.
• NOTC: ("not-see"). New Officer Training Coordinator. Warcruisers are large enough to have NOTC teams, and the person in charge will be known as the Senior NOTC.

Patrol Patterns

Standard patrol patterns follow routes used most commonly by merchant ships in a specific sector, and hit all the Well repeaters and buoys in zone (in order to check that they are operational).

Beacon Testing

An important part of routine maintenance of settled space undertaken by Fleet ships. Beacons, relays, buoys, and repeaters are all pinged to check their response time, and then their internal records are checked against those in a ship's database. Discrepancies are reported. Because the hardware can be manufactured by private firms, local government agencies, naval contractors, or Fleet itself, the formats for maintenance records can be different and need to be matched before they can be decoded and read. "The tech's the same, but none of the rest of it is standardized: not the maintenance schedules, or the programming that issues the alerts when they need repair, replacement, or upgrade." Fleet-issued hardware encrypts the maintenance records and requires a valid handshake to unlock it.

Mapping

Fleet ships perform mapping expeditions both to map new space and to check existing starcharts. Mapping outposts are extremely bare-bones, without shops, a bar, or a 3deo.

Logistics

Depots

Supplies are maintained in various depots throughout the Alliance, and I obviously thought about this and probably based it on Naval supply classes because Taylitha says this in response to a question about spare uniforms (Class II) being shipped from Alpha's depot: "the depot on Alpha's stopped serving this part of the frontier. They built a new facility in Sector Fe specializing in troop resupply classes, and everything spinward of Alpha is receiving from there now."

Shipments

Fleet cargos are sealed with Fleet-specific tape. The bins have chips with shipping data on them. They also auto-lock themselves when closed.

Miscellaneous

• Messages from Fleet Command arrive tagged in bright red. Flat messages "rarely arrived without prompting and always heralded a new mound of paperwork. A single FC flat could generate four or five separate paper trails."