Re: [FT] Crew Professionalism and Ship Quality

>a) What do you think the relative professionalism of the crews are -
is the
>NAC better than the ESU etc? Or are all the major powers about the
same and
>the difference lies in the minor powers? Or is it UNSC the best then
the
>NAC followed by NSL/FSE, with ESU a little after them? And as for the
minor
>powers are there some that are exceptionally professional, say NI,
while
>others are pretty poor, relatively speaking - say IF or PAU? Remember
this
>is all relative so all the crews may well be top notch, just some are
a few
>shades better than others (and its that few shades that's gonna count
come
>the pointy end of a laser time)

There are three issues here: a) how good are the crews; b) how good
are the captains; c) how good are the admirals.

As far as crew quality among the Big Four, I'd say NAC is best,
followed closely by NSL, with FSE only meriting "good" and ESU
"adequate".  Even the best of the PAU and IF won't be as good as the
normal NAC crew, although they might beat an average FSE crew.

As far as the minors go, I'd say New Israel will be decent (because
they have incentive to practice) and Alarish is pretty good (because
Alarishi are more familiar with operating in space than normal people,
and because they know the navy is essentially their only line of
defense)--a few crews from either nation might perhaps make it up to
NSL level.  Most minor nations--despite the "we're small but we can
whip anybody our size" syndrome--simply will not be up to Big Four
standards because they won't have the funds to practice or the variety
of institutional combat experience.   Well, maybe up to ESU standards.

In all cases, you won't be able to rate "all NSL crews get an 8 on a
1-10 scale", because individual ship captains will have a lot to do
with their ships' quality.  You might give a leeway of +/- 2 rating
points, perhaps.

On the other hand, the NAC probably doesn't have the best admirals.
Just a lot of them.

If someone can HTML-ize a form where we can take a poll rating the
various nations, where " 1 " means "you'd be better off arming your
merchantmen" and "10" means "an active, experienced crew from a
long-standing professional navy tradition", that would be really
interesting.