The exact staffing of a bird-of-prey is a bit of a muddle in the canon (there's a surprise! Star Trek weak on details? The devil you say, sir!), and the Hwacha' has a roster informed by a combination of a couple of different sources and simple plotting expediency.

To wit: The Haynes Klingon Bird-of-Prey manual (which was one of the main references for the story; the Hwacha' is a different class from the one depicted in the book, but their overall configuration and, we can assume, the deck plans are similar) puts the crew complement of a bird-of-prey at 36, of which six are officers and the rest bekk (enlisted crewmen). That's a little more in line with general expectations about this sort of thing, and allows for the ship to be fully operational 24-7 with three complete watches rotating (like a real-life naval warship).

On the other hand, the crew complement of the bird-of-prey in Star Trek III, the first one to appear in the canon, is explicitly stated in the film as "about a dozen", and Commander Kruge appears to have only two lieutenants (Torg and Maltz) - but there is never a single indication in Star Trek III that Kruge's ship even has an engineer or science officer, and he might've had a third lieutenant before he disintegrated the weapons officer; there's no indication of whether that guy was an officer, or even if the Klingons of that era even had them, as such, but he was the one operating the weapons on the bridge, which in UF, at least, is an officer's job.

So, we have a situation where I wanted Jurdak's ship to have a "night shift" where not much was happening, which argued for the smaller "skeleton crew" staffing of movie-Kruge's ship, but the way the KDF is organized in UF meant there would have to be at least four lieutenants, five if you include the first officer (and Jurdak needed one because he could barely be bothered to operate the ship himself).

If it helps, you may consider that Jurdak was well-known as one of the worst captains in the Seventh Fleet, and people would do almost anything to avoid having to serve on his ship. It may therefore be that Koloth-class ships are supposed to have 30 or more bekk aboard, and Command simply couldn't find that many who couldn't get out of it. Like jury duty in sparsely populated counties. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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