Your ship may only be crewed by 50 individuals, but it likely carries additional civilians. It is also likely that your captain is assigned more then 50 crew for the ship. Like any modern navy vessel, there are more crew than the ship needs, since many rotate out on leave or do assignments off the ship.

Just think that you have a number of officers attached to your command, but not necessarily pushing buttons on the bridge.

If this is still too much to imagine, then by all means, only take 50 DOffs.

Also sleeping. If your ship need 50 people to run it. Then you need 150 on your ship so you can have your 3 shifts allowing your crew to eat sleep and have some off time.

The ones your not using are hanging out in a transporter buffer pattern.

And consider the number of 'crew' who aren't set as day to day workers. For example, the entire civilian section. If you have a Defiant class escort, you probably don't have a couple of chefs, a number of colonists, two entertainers and a trader hanging out in the tiny rec room on deck three. Instead, they're probably back at your home port -- as much people you can call on when needed as anything. Think of Quark, Vic and Garak on DS9. (Admittedly, there was this space station, but technically Sisko's ship was the Defiant for these purposes.)

For the more Starfleetish positions, consider the number of support staff needed to repair, refit and resupply your escort when you put in between missions. The Defiant didn't stay out more than it needed to -- it did its missions and returned to DS9. Even when the Federation was driven off the station, the Defiant would fly sorties and return to a starbase. A good number of its Duty Officers would be that support staff, under the broader command of the ship's captain.

If that seems unusual, think of the number of times old friends and civilians showed up on the different Trek shows to help out with a given situation. Your 'duty officers' can constitute your extended network of contacts if your ship is too small to reasonably accommodate them.

Those are all good points, and a good way of looking at it.

However, there's not many ways to look at the fact that apparently my Defiant somehow crammed 20 shuttles into it's non existant shuttle bay...

Perhaps Starfleet sent a shuttle to pick up the crew for the mission? This happened a number of times in TNG. Often a character would arrive via shuttle to pick some one up for a mission. In the Defiant's case, maybe they just transport over or dock via airlock.

Maybe they were not aboard your ship to begin with, but on starbase for leave or other assignments.

I am hoping that they open a section for non-combat (either ground/space), when it comes to things like transwarp. Although that is the only one of that nature that I've come across, it seems like it could be a unique category unto itself.

Increase active DOFFs on ship, cool. I am loving the DOFF system, just would like to throw out a couple of tweaks.

1) Situation updates from DOFFs, especially those on long missions. This would be implemented as some sort of progress bar that tells us if they are doing Good, Bad or OK on their mission. Have it frequently so that way we feel connected to our away teams.

2) Department Heads, this idea have been thrown around a lot to turn our BOFFs into Department Heads over categories of DOFFs. I would still like to see this in.

3) Maybe allow for random variations in recovery time of DOFFs from missions. Like 50% chance to arrive on time, 25% chance to arrive late, and 25% chance to arrive ahead of schedule.

4) How about a notification when crew get injured or killed.

why do people keep say you can only have five active when its actually ten. five for space and five for ground.

Some of them don't do anything, some of them are sleeping, a lot of them are doing missions that take them off of the ship. I guess you gotta roleplay some