[Makinus]

I do agree with the first and second Posts, while this looks contraditory, let me sexplain myself:

I do agree that ship personel should be handled in the way that alarikf stated, as in every RL situation and in the majority of SF books that i read we see that a nation,empire, etc. that have a huge flet normally have more unskilled personal manning their ships against an empire with a smaller fleet (the population bases being equal), and, when you have a war, attrition loses forces you to employ more unskilled personel...

In an additional note, you woould only lose personel quality by "attrition" if you actually lose ships, and in a very small rate in comparision of quality lost because of the size of the fleet, since wars and conflits tend to increase the skill leels of the personel involved (at leats of the ones that survive the battles).

As about Cap Kwok said, facilities and planetary production should not be affected in the same way than ships, as the population numbers used in SE allow a lot of "grunt labor", and modern facilities productions in the tech level in wich the game start should not need to bia a personel to man (lots of automation)...

It is important to note that in the to instances aove we are handling with 2 different types of skill: the first would be the skill to navigante, maintain and possibly (in the case of warships) to fight with a spaceship, and the second the skill of using an suposedly higly automatized facility to produce resources...

In another note, if the manpower scheme sugested by alarikf is used for ships, we must create a way so the warships end using better skilled and bigger crews than support ships, since (at least i think so) any empire woul put his most skilled people in a battlecruiser instead of a simple pop transport...

just my two cents...