What abilities might each member of a 4-person planetary recon craft have?
Scenario:
A generation ship travels to a star system that has at least one planet that's believed to be potentially habitable and, therefore, a possible location for a colony. After sending some probes that return encouraging data, a manned spacecraft is launched from the generation ship to do a short (2-3 day) recon survey of the planet to scout for potential colonization locations. The recon craft has a crew of four.
Question:
What roles and technical/scientific abilities would you want the crew members to have?
The assumption here is that each crew member would have more than one area of expertise. For example, the pilot might also be a mechanical engineer, while another might be an exobiologist and some other kind of scientist. I'd assume that one would be a medical officer in addition to one or more other roles. Would one have computer/IT abilities as one of their roles? Would there be a second member who also could serve as pilot in case of something happening to the main pilot? Would one have hydrology as one of their specializations? How many types of engineers would the crew need to encompass? Would one of them (all of them?) need to be armed and combat trained?
So please state what you think would be the most useful and likely division of labor between the crew members.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/60559. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I like Sepratrixes answer as it interprets the old style question framework by OP.
As a start the first thing would have been to research what the Mars colonist teams have planned and then make allowance for the fact that that is a long term exploration. Compare this with the moon landing teams and what they got up to. Piloting and sample collection.
There is no real need for military/strong-arm personnel unless they are expecting "stobor" or Klingons and then it is better to move to next planet.
The first explorers are expendable, there will be more sent if these fail. Their value is in exploration and they need to be good at this, basically sample taking and piloting of the scout ship are what they have to be good at. The next batch may have a little more specialisation but strength and skill at deploying and operating sampling and short and long term monitoring equipment are all that is needed.
So piloting, first aid and field sample collecting from all 4. Hopefully one manages to pilot the samples back to the mother ship.
EDIT:
I see the answer by o.m. is also close to mine and I agree with much of it. Sample collection is the key, not deep analysis or interaction with the environment.
This all presupposes a need for sample collection. The correct answer is to have the samples collected and analysed by advance high acceleration robot probes and a robot supported perimeter already in place if the place can support humans, then send in some interesting crew to explore further afield. Tough guys with fast reflexes and survival training would be the requirement there with lots of drones and robot support exploring day and night.
FURTHER EDIT:
On reflection the forward team does not need to exist. Robot probes have checked if the air is breathable, if so the colonists will land and make the best of it. Generation ships are generally not made to cope with many wishful destinations unless we have FTL probes to make a long string of possible destinations. If there is air then there is some form of photosynthesis and it is somewhere in the Goldilocks band, better than this the colonists cannot hope for.
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