Star Fleet Academy- How big is it?

[ray gower]

Everybody knows, because the show tells them so:
Every Star Fleet Officer has to be trained in the Star Fleet Academy at Star Fleet headquarters.
Academy is also responsible for most of the scientific staff and research Star Fleet does.
Every officer does at least one 5 year mission and occaisionally a second one.
At the start of the Dominion War Star Fleet had 8,000 capital ships.

Now, mostly because I am working on a Star Fleet Academy based story, I got to putting some reality to this:
Assuming: An average crew complement of 100 officers and 400 others (not that we ever see anybody below the rank of ensign). Then Star Fleet has an active crew strength of about 4 million, plus support, logistics, management staff etc. which comfortably brings it up to about 10 million men, 2 million of which are officers.

Now given an average service life of about 10 years (which is high for any military organisation) then Academy needs to produce some 200,000 ensigns per year just to maintain Star Fleet.

Given a 4 year Academy course, that means a minimum of 800,000 cadets, except the drop out rate for military academies is usually close to 40% and the Academy is also training scientists etc, which means we need at least 1.5 million cadets.
We need a minimum of 50,000 lecturers, plus their support staff and families, which comfortably brings the population of the Academy up to near the 2 million mark.

We also have to find space for Star Fleet HQ as well, while the population of San Francisco is estimated at 750,000.

To get that lot on the Presidio, Mr Boothby's garden is two 2" flower pots on the Officer Commanding Star Fleet's window sill and only then if OCSF's family lives on the moon.
We must also raise a questioning eyebrow at the obvious point that San Francisco could at any point be flattened by a major earthquake.

Consequently the whole scenario is impossible.

So the question is how many other Star Fleet Academies are there?

 

[Pyan]

Well, the Federation does have over 150 planets in it - if there is an Academy on every one, it brings the numbers down a bit.

 

[kythe]

Many colleges and universities have multiple campuses, and online education is getting more common. I'm sure Starfleet Acadamy would need resources like this, but the only references made to it are on Earth. I wonder if the writers didn't really think things through.

This also makes me wonder how they can be so strict about admittance. Both Captain Picard and Wesley were rejected the first time they applied (though Nog got in the first time - were they starting to slacken the rules a bit by DS9?). Maybe, like some colleges, they are forced to accept only a certain number of applicants due to limitations in resources or available instructors.

 

[The Ace]

Big enough ?

 

[Delvo]

I believe you've overestimated how many officers there are, how short their time lasts, what fraction of them went to the Academy (which is not necessarily the only way to become an officer), and the need for everyone else in Starfleet such as scientists to also be trained at the Academy along with the officers. You've also not considered direct indications from the shows of a place where everybody seems to know the same few quaint little places and not-really-famous people, which couldn't work in a place bigger than ordinary present college campuses.

 

[PTeppic]

I believe you've overestimated how many officers there are, how short their time lasts,

It does seem to be a "job" for life, in a society that has no salaries (which is no mean feat in itself). So even the toilet cleaners have such a glorious job satisfaction that they do it for the love of the job. (Returning to the point) if it's a job for life, one can probably cut by three quarters the number of new recruits needed...

 

[Dave]

Well, the Federation does have over 150 planets in it - if there is an Academy on every one, it brings the numbers down a bit.

We don't see that. We see Academy testing on other planets or aboard ships, such as when Wesley failed his Entrance Exam, but every candidate, including all the aliens, were intent on going to THE one-and-only Star Fleet Academy.

I do think Ray over-estimated the size of the Fleet though. During the Dominion War rules on eligibility to serve would obviously be lowered. Officers would be recalled, age limits relaxed, and merchant sailors conscripted.

I also don't think that Crewmen and Yeoman have been to the Academy. They seemed to be working towards entrance. Ensigns do all seem to have been there, and in TNG at least, everyone does appear to be at least an Ensign. However, I would expect quite a number of the crew to actually be non-commissioned. O'Brien at least began his tour of duty as a Transporter Chief. How much training is required to be a Transporter operator or a Security redshirt? Certainly not 4 years!

The other point is that not all training is at the Academy. We saw Wesley go to Flight School with Nova Squadron. Kirk and others served as Instructors aboard Training Ships. We saw the Enterprise in Generations crewed by Cadets. It would make sense to have some formal class and lab-based training and then to move to more advanced on-the-job training aboard ships.

Maybe you train for one term in San Fransisco and then finish in the other Academies elsewhere suggested by Pyan.

Finally, you neglected to mention the Star Fleet Medical School that is also on the site. After making (I think) a good case for plausibility, a Medical School that supplies Doctors for the whole Federation demolishes my argument completely.

And on the same site, there is also a Nightclub, an Officers Club, a Restaurant and several other buildings. It must be a very crowded place.

And a potential Threat target. Security of the Academy would be impossible. Amazing that only Species 8472 realised this.

 

[Pyan]

Maybe you train for one term in San Fransisco and then finish in the other Academies elsewhere suggested by Pyan.

Or maybe the other way around - you do basic training on your own planet, and the best get to go to California.
Perhaps the Earth SFA is the equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge in the UK, or MIT or Caltech in the USA - a place where only the best go, and there are other training centres we don't hear about for the rank and file, so to speak.

Didn't Nog get in because of the rarity of Ferengi applicants?

 

[ray gower]

Using DITL as source for the 'War' records because they are sad enough to compile the canon, though other sites do confirm this:-
The Federation had about 7800 ships before the war, lost about 5800 of them, but received about 1500 new build.

How they built these is anybodies guess. They are advanced spaceships not liberty cargo ships- We are talking build times in months if not years, even on a war footing.

How they crewed these new ships is also open to question, because of the nature of the long cruises, it is unlikely that Star Fleet have many 'spare crews'.

Average crew is possibly a little tall, probably nearer the 3 or 400 mark, but the mix of officers to other ranks is most certainly not. The smaller the crew, the higher the proportion of officer ranks.

Average service being a little over 10 years is about right. Reading through DITL, Memory Alpha etc, very few captains do a second 5 year tour of duty and the promotion race for the rank would be between 5 and 7 years and very few will make the ultimate grade. Again looking at the references, the selection tests for training as a Captain would disqualify well over 90% of entries and very few would pass the training and the rest would be too broken to do anything with!
Also if they are going to crew all these new ships by banging the reserves, then the reserves must be of service age, i.e. young enough to understand all the new widgets and there must have been a lot of them available.

I agree a fair amount of training would be done aboard ships, either Academy's own training vessels or detached fleet ones, but most of it is just not feasible. You really would not want a 1st year cadet dismantling your warp drive a billion miles from no where!

The Academy does indeed run a number od annexes, but from all the information I can find, they are just that. Groups are dettached there as needed, the flight range near Jupiter would be a good example.

Either way, even if my deductions are off beam even by a large margin, the Academy is a damned big place and rather too large to fit in San Francisco?

So I would have to suspect that there are more than one Federation Academy capable of training officers and crews. We know the Vulcans have an advanced science institute.
So perhaps everybody passes through Star Fleet HQ to receive familiarisation training for their new space runabout- Though with a new ship per day appearing, plus older ships stepping out of refit etc, the number of people involved in that is going to count in the 10's of thousands too!

Found a really nice map of the Presidio http://www.geocities.com/iconoc/Grafix/Presidio.gif
If there is anywhere in the world that does not scream army (which it was) I've yet to meet it, but it is also very east to place all your favourite Academy features, from the Medical school at the bottom left, to the stables Kirk used to ride from.

 

[Darz Rixx]

Maybe they turned San Fransisco into more of a starfleet town, similar to a military camp....

 

[The Ace]

I tend to see the academy as an elite facility, like West Point in the US or the RAF's Cranwell.

Most Starfleet personnel would be enlisted and undergo basic training, although I would expect a fairly high proportion to be promoted on merit.

The rank of Ensign (the lowest commissioned rank), is automatically awarded to Academy graduates. O'Brien is an NCO, promoted through the enlisted ranks through merit.

 

[ray gower]

All RAF Officers pass through Cranwell. It is where they do their basic training, they move on from there to other bases to suit their specialisation. Because the RAF has less than 100,000 officers and men, the intake is small and continuously turning over with perhaps 600 cadets in total with 30 or 40 starting and finishing per month.

The people who hit the Academy e.g. Mr Crusher, appear to be there for both basic and advanced instruction i.e. years!

Never understood why O'Brien accepted the loss of rank and seniority to become an officer, but perhaps he was not good enough to get a WO2?

 

[The Ace]

He's a Chief Petty Officer, the highest non-commissioned rank.

 

[ray gower]

According to Memory Alpha, Star Fleet NCO ranks more or less follow standard Military pattern:

Sergeant- Petty Officer- E6
Staff Sergeant- CPO - E7
WO2- Senior Petty Officer- E8
WO1- Master Senior Petty Officer- E9

When you get to WO2 the ship's Captain requests something to be done. While a Captain would only dare go near WO1 if he has been ordered to attend.

As a CPO, O'Brien would be in command of his section during his shift (the duty officer is a mediator). Stepping back to 2nd Lieutenant because he took the sash (WO's get Lieutenant), he would have to gain the CPO's permission to do anything and he could never rise above lt-cmdr, effectively his current status