by Ben Robinson
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The primary purpose of the tactical station is to control the ship’s weapons and shields. The station displays show the condition of the ship’s disruptors, indicating the exact power levels that are available, and status of the photon torpedo launcher and bays. Typically, on Klingon ships the weapons officer takes direct manual control of the weapons and fires them ‘by eye’ rather than relying on computer-guided systems. However, the station has a direct connection to the helm station, which provides telemetry showing the weapons officer where the ship is in any given maneuver and recommending when the weapons should be activated. The tactical officer is also responsible for making recommendations to the captain but the strict hierarchy on a Bird-of-Prey means that he or she is normally the ‘trigger man’ carrying out the captain’s or first officer’s orders. In fact, during combat weapons control is often transferred to the free-standing consoles behind the captain, which are operated by the first officer.
FIRST OFFICER STATION
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The first officer typically operates two free-standing consoles behind the captain’s chair. These consoles don’t have a dedicated function but are designed to take direct control of any, and all, the other bridge consoles. During normal flight operations, the first officer monitors the condition of all the other stations, ensuring that the ship is running smoothly and the other officers are performing their duties. During combat, the first officer often takes direct control of either the helm or the weapons stations. The consoles have a dedicated connection to the main computer and provide a backup if any of the stations are damaged.
BULKHEADS
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The bulkheads around the bridge contain dedicated computer subprocessors, which provide immediate calculating power for the bridge stations.
Optical data trunks connect the individual stations to the sensor arrays, with a wide-branching data trunk connecting the stations to one another, allowing data to be pooled and transferred between the stations. In addition a secondary data trunk connects all the stations to the main computer.
The engineering console, to the captain’s right, has direct control of all the ship’s systems.
The first officer mans a series of consoles that can take control of any of the ship’s functions.
CREW
The standard Bird-of-Prey has a crew of 36, of whom eight are officers. The remaining crew consists of between 24 and 26 warriors and between two and four servants. It is common for women to serve on ships, though they normally only make up a small percentage of the crew.
The officers are the most senior members of the crew, and each of them is responsible for a department, which always consists of two warriors who act as deputies to the officer, performing the department’s duties when the officer is off duty. The departments are: command, weapons, helm and navigation, engineering and science.
CAPTAIN
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There are four command officers starting with the captain, who is supported by a first, a second and a third officer. His responsibility is to command the ship, making all the important tactical decisions. The crew consider their lives to be in his hands and a good captain takes the responsibility seriously. He expects total obedience from his crew and in return they expect him to lead them to glorious victories and to bring honor to the ship and the crew.
The captain has the right to promote officers, and even to elevate a servant to warrior status. He has to be careful how he uses this power since any unjustified promotions or signs of favoritism are likely to result in a challenge.
FIRST OFFICER
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According to Klingon tradition the first officer ‘serves the captain but stands for the crew’. When the first officer takes over command of the crew, they surrender their battle record to him, which should provide a healthy list of victories. He then pledges the crew’s lives in the service of the captain.
He is tasked with the day-to-day running of the ship, scheduling drills, assigning duties, and ensuring that the crew and the ship are functioning at peak efficiency. It is also his role to offer tactical advice to the captain, presenting different options in combat. In many ways he is seen as a captain in waiting and must be ready to assume command if the captain is incapacitated. He must also be strong enough to challenge the captain if he sees any signs of weakness or feels that the captain is leading the crew down a dishonorable path.
During the Dominion War, Martok famously took the disgraced Worf into his house and made him his first officer.
SECOND OFFICER
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The second officer is effectively an understudy for the first officer, and normally performs similar duties on one of the other shifts. Unlike the first officer, he has little direct contact with the captain, but may be closer to the crew. His recommendations are fed directly to the first officer. By tradition, he takes particular responsibility for the condition of engineering and weapons.
THIRD OFFICER
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The third officer is a junior position normally held by a young man, who is learning the needs of command. Thus the third officer serves at a variety of different posts around the ship, learning the skills of all the departments. Unlike the first and second officers, he is unlikely to take a shift in command of the ship during combat missions, but he will take shifts in command during peacetime.
HELMSMAN
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The helmsman is responsible for laying in a course and controlling the ship’s speed. For faster-than-light travel the on-board computers provide recommendations about the best possible course, based on the position of stellar objects, but the helmsman is responsible for monitoring progress and for compensating for any unexpected activity. The Klingons place great store in a helmsman’s ability to pilot a ship manually, and the helmsman must be capable of performing a wide variety of maneuvers both in open space and in a planetary atmosphere. He or she is also responsible for learning a wide variety of tactical maneuvers, which will be specifically laid out by the captain.
For a Klingon warrior surviving into old age is unfortunate. The great hero Kor managed to secure a junior post on the Rotarran that ultimately allowed him to earn a glorious death.
WEAPONS OFFICER
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The weapons officer assigned to the bridge has direct control of all the ship’s weaponry. Since this can vary from vessel to vessel, it is vital that he is completely familiar with all the systems and their capabilities. Weapons control is routed to the station on the bridge, but there is also a warrior manning the weapons room deep within the ship, with whom the weapons officer is in direct contact as well as monitoring the tactical computers.
It is common for Klingon women to serve on a Bird-of-Prey although they rarely rise to command.
The weapons officer has the duty of studying any and all enemy vessels the crew are likely to encounter, to ensure that he has as much knowledge as possible about their offensive capabilities and any weaknesses that the Klingons might be able to exploit.
The half-Klingon-half-human Alexander Rozhenko became something of a mascot for the Rotarran, making up in luck what he lacked in skill.
SCIENCE OFFICER
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It is a misconception that Klingons have no interest in science; it’s simply that they are most interested in the kind of science that can be used in combat. The science officer is a vital member of the command crew and is responsible for interpreting all the sensor data that the ship collects. This is vital when dealing with unfamiliar stellar phenomena that could pose a threat to the ship or render the cloaking device ineffective. Before teleporting to a planet or landing on the surface, the science officer will assess the safety of the atmosphere and make recommendations about the best possible landing site.
In combat, he or she will advise on the condition of enemy vessels and collects as much data as possible on their performance, which is then s
hared with the weapons and engineering officers in order to devise effective tactics.
ENGINEERING OFFICER
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The engineering officer is a role distinct from that of engineer. He or she serves on the bridge and is responsible for monitoring the condition of the ship at all times. He or she also has control of the cloaking device. This role is roughly the equivalent of an Ops officer on a Federation starship. During combat, he or she is responsible for damage control and for monitoring the condition of the cloaking device, shields and warp and impulse engines, transferring power between the different systems as necessary.
The remaining crew members are either warriors or servants. The surgeon is a warrior, but the six engineers and three cooks are all servants.
THE CREW
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The crew complement normally consists of 16 warriors, who provide cover for the senior staff on the bridge and man the weapons room. Warriors are not officers and did not attend the training academy on Ogat. Despite their lower status they are considered to be the backbone of the Klingon fleet, and every Klingon child aspires to become a warrior. They are trained in all the ship’s systems and are often every bit as capable as their superiors. They spend a considerable amount of their time in one of the ship’s main communal areas—the training hall.
The walls of this large open space are hung with bladed weapons such as bat’leths and mek’leths. This area is used for any occasions when the captain needs to assemble the crew, for example when accepting new crew members aboard or when briefing a boarding party, but above all it is used for weapons training and martial arts drills.
The center of the room is left open, essentially like a gym floor and it is common for all crew members to spend at least one hour a day here performing Mok’bara drills, with and without bat’leths, and sparring with one another. Full combat sparring is banned during active combat missions because of the risk of serious injury.
For Klingons injuries are a part of everyday life. They can be sustained during sparring, disagreements about status, even in mating. Accordingly, Klingons place great importance on medical treatment. Every Klingon learns basic field medicine from an early age and can perform stitches and set bones almost as soon as they can wield a bat’leth.
DOCTOR/SURGEON
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Every Bird-of-Prey’s crew includes a doctor or surgeon—the Klingon word HaqwI’ literally translates as bone mender—who specializes in medical treatment. Although the surgeon is not an officer, it is still one of the most respected positions on board ship. There is no warrior worth his salt who has not been injured seriously enough to owe his or her life—or at least a limb—to the surgeon.
The medical bay is located on Deck 5, and consists of three distinct areas: an emergency treatment room, which is dominated by an examination bench; a surgical and recovery ward, where more serious injuries are treated and the severely wounded have the chance to recover and the surgeon’s quarters. By actually living in the medical bay, the surgeon is always available.
Even when the ship isn’t in combat mode the surgeon is kept busy treating the kind of minor wounds, such as cuts and cracked ribs, that are the inevitable consequence of the Klingon way. During actual combat, whenever Alert Status One is called, one other warrior is assigned to the medical bay to perform triage.
Klingon medicine focuses on providing immediate treatment and getting a warrior back to his station as quickly as possible, often with the aid of stimulants. Wherever possible treatment is provided on the examination bench. The surgeon typically injects a combined stimulant and pain killer, before using a petqaD to bond broken bones in place and a dermal regenerator to suture any wounds. Typical turnaround times allow an injured crewman to return to his post within seven minutes.
In more serious cases, where there is severe internal bleeding or a limb or an eye is in serious danger of being lost, the surgeon restricts the injured warrior to the medical bay. The typical medical bay has two recovery beds and one surgical bay. In cases of life-threatening injuries, the patient may be placed in stasis.
Klingon warriors hope for nothing more than a glorious death in battle and hope to die while serving on a Bird-of-Prey.
Brawling is a part of life on a Klingon ship and is used to establish and maintain a hierarchy amongst the crew.
If the surgeon deems that an injury will seriously impede a warrior’s life whatever the treatment, the warrior is simply allowed to die. For example, Klingons have never developed sophisticated treatments for paralysis caused by neurological damage.
ENGINEERS
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The six engineers are based in Main Engineering, where the warp engines require almost constant supervision. There are always two on duty—in order to provide cover if one of them should be killed in action. An engineer is a specialist and, since he or she is not a warrior, has a lesser status than any of the bridge crew. In fact, the engineers are under the direct command of the Engineering Officer on the bridge. The Klingon attitude is that the engineer is basically a mechanic, who is responsible for keeping the ship running at peak efficiency, but nowhere near as important as the pilot or the command officers who set priorities.
All Klingons are trained to have more than a passing familiarity with the ship’s engine systems, and no less a person than the Klingon hero and Dahar Master Kor boasted that he once personally stripped down his ship’s cloaking device. However, Klingon warriors have little time for monitoring the exact intermix formulas and plasma pressures in their engines, which they consider to be a menial task.
The engineers’ duty is to the ship above all else, and their lives are literally not worth living if important ship’s systems fail during a mission.
The mess hall is the social center of a Bird-of-Prey and used by every member from the lowest servant to the captain.
COOK
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The cook is possibly the next most important person on the ship, even though they have the lowest possible status. Unlike other spacefaring races the Klingons do not eat, or approve of, replicated or even cooked food, which they consider to be artificial and burnt. A proper Klingon meal consists of freshly slaughtered or live food. The cook doesn’t actually cook anything—instead he is an expert butcher, who knows how to season food, often with extremely powerful spices.
The mess hall itself is the social center of the ship, and off-duty crew members will invariably congregate here. The mess hall is dominated by a huge table at which each crew member has a designated place. Seating is strictly hierarchical, with the most honored positions being at the heads and in the center. New crew members have to fight for their place at table and it is common for crewmen to brawl in this area. This is perfectly normal and is not seen as a problem.
Klingons like their food freshly butchered and routinely carry a stock of live targs.
The state of a ship can often be judged by the quality of its gagh. If things are good, the gagh will be live and active, perfect for eating.
The entire crew uses the mess hall, including the captain. There are no private dining halls on a Klingon vessel and a good commander is seen eating, drinking and laughing with his crew. When he is exceptionally busy, a commanding officer may choose to eat in his quarters but he would be unwise to do so on a regular basis. The cooks work hard to keep the mess hall supplied with food and drink. Kahless himself once said that a general’s first victory is keeping his army well fed. A bad cook on Bird-of-Prey is unheard of, not least because Klingons use violence to express their dissatisfaction with poorly prepared food.
The three cooks—one is always on duty—operate out of a galley that is adjacent to the Mess Hall, which consists of a large preparation area, pens for livestock, which include live targs, and vats of foodstuffs such as gagh—live serpent worms that are one of the staples of the Klingon diet.
Only the cook himself has access to the ship’s supply of bloodwine, which is always kept under lock
and key and dispensed only as the captain sees fit. Other senior officers are permitted to bring their own bloodwine on board but this is also distributed at the captain’s pleasure.
Accommodation on board a Bird-of-Prey is famously austere, even though there is more than enough room to provide spacious quarters for every one of the 36 crew members. The senior officers—the captain, first and second officers—normally have their own private quarters that include an office space where they can prepare for the day, communicate with the Klingon High Command and hold audiences with junior crew members. Other crew members often share their quarters and have little room for private possessions. Typically beds are little more than alcoves built into the bulkheads and crewmen have a simple locker in which to store their trophies and personal effects.
To the Klingon mind, life aboard ship is about one thing—the glory of battle and everything else is secondary. Like the ideal Klingon warrior, the crew is disciplined and of one mind, and their ship is stripped back and lean.
A happy Klingon ship often rings out to the sound of opera as the crew sing at their work.
