Fleet Procedures
This page is for things Fleet does.
See also Fleet Manual.
Fleet-wide
Ranks
Fleet has six ranks: [1]
- ensign
- lieutenant
- lieutenant commander
- commander
- captain
- admiral
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.
Pay
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." [2] 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."[3]
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."[4] "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."[3]
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.[5][6]
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.[5] 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.[7]
Ensign's Leadership Retreats
Only for command-track ensigns. [5] 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." [8]
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. [9]
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.[10]
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
- Fleet Design and Engineering Board (plans and designs new ship types)
- Assignments (who goes where, when)
- Public Relations
- Strategic Council
Job Duties
Admiral
Every starbase's military base has an admiral overseeing its operations. Since each starbase serves as a home yard for the starships of Fleet, this admiral oversees a group of (also) admirals, who are in charge of assigning ships to various missions and keeping track of their activities.
Captain
First Commander
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. [11]
Second Commander
- Head of the science department[12]
Chief Medical Officer
Laelkii, also awesome.
Ship Procedures
Food
All Fleet personnel are allotted an energy budget (intended for food) based on the size of their ship's power plant and their rank. This is called their 'portion', and is standardized in the Fleet Manual, though each ship can adjust it if they feel their mission has special power needs (or doesn't). This adjustment is almost always assessed by the first commander.
Each member of Fleet can draw against their portion to use the genie to create whatever they want to eat. If they want something in excess of their portion, they need to arrange for it, either by bringing foodstuffs aboard with them (at which point it counts against their mass allotment), or by trading with other people. Cost of each specific item is listed in energy hours, but someone started calling a single meal's worth of energy cost a 'ration', which became 'rats' (pronounced 'rashes'). So, the typical small meal costs a rat. Smaller items are inevitably counted in 'cafs' (after 'caffeine': a cup of coffee was the initial metric for a caf).
There are two methods for distributing rations: a ship can go with a buffet-option, where the galley uses up the energy budget and the whole crew eats from the galley, or it can go single-eater, where every member of the crew is responsible for her own feeding out of her energy budget. Hybrid options are popular for larger ships, where some portion of the energy budget is allotted to the galley and the crew can go there for extra food, in addition to whatever they make themselves.
Higher level officers have a larger energy budget; command officers have a luxurious budget, since it's assumed they'll be entertaining. Many captains donate their extra portion to the ship, and it's possible for the galley to be entirely funded by the captain's excess if she decides; ships with captain-funded galleys are 'gold-plated', and a gold-plated ship earns a great deal of goodwill from its crew.
Reports and Logs
After Action Reports
These are a thing. [11]
Efficiency Reports
Part of officer evaluations, these are written by senior officers about their juniors and used as guides for improvement/training/promotion. [11]
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).[13]
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."[14] 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.[15]
Medicine
Only larger ships can carry Chiefs of Medical, who are empowered (in their area) to make decisions that cannot be countermanded by the captain. On smaller vessels, the captain has control over the medplex and medical decisions.[16] Smaller vessels also do not carry drug inventory ("there would be no way to cycle them fast enough to prevent their expiration.") Healers and their assists request medication from the genie on an as-needed basis.[16] Larger vessels will have specialized storage compartments for stocks of both devices and drugs, since genie-production of necessary supplies is a bottleneck that might fail to serve their larger crew complements in emergencies.
Deaths
- It was Fleet procedure to “relax” the muscles of the deceased into a more neutral expression if the offcer was due for a public ceremony, or a return to the family. Because suicide was considered potential evidence of criminal activity, Keys would have been prevented from changing anything about him, even where they’d found him."[16]
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." [17]
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."[18]
See Also
References
- ↑ Author's say-so on a Locals post, 15 Nov 2021
- ↑ Who is Willing, Chapter 2
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Either Side of the Strand, Chapter 7
- ↑ Either Side of the Strand, Chapter 5
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Faith in the Service, Chapter 1
- ↑ Either Side of the Strand, Chapter 6
- ↑ Faith in the Service, Chapter 3
- ↑ Faith in the Service, Chapter 4
- ↑ Faith in the Service, Chapter 9
- ↑ Second, Chapter 2
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Faith in the Service , Chapter 8
- ↑ Either Side of the Strand, Chapter 2
- ↑ Who is Willing, Chapter 3
- ↑ Who is Willing, Chapter 5
- ↑ Sword of the Alliance, Chapter 1
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 To Discover and Preserve, "The Mayer Directive"
- ↑ Faith in the Service, Chapter 6
- ↑ Either Side of the Strand, Chapter 4