No medical.

I'm not saying that there were no medical personnel on the Victory. I'm saying that there might not have been an MD aboard. Trained medical personnel can be very capable, even in emergencies. Doctors may well have been harder to come by in that stage of the war. The Victory wasn't a large carrier (large ones certainly have MDs aboard), and it wasn't exactly a well equipped carrier.

Tolwyn probably wouldn't be above bringing a personal doctor with him. He DID bring a personal chef, and snobby generals and admirals have been known to take on personal physicians.
 
Victory wasn't a large carrier (large ones certainly have MDs aboard), and it wasn't exactly a well equipped carrier.

No Victory isn't large, but I don't know about ill equipped, all the fighters were pretty top of the line. I said before that there is also probabably not a doctor but only medics of some sort on smaller vessels as well... but in the case of the Victory which was planned to be used in such top secret operations like the testing of the Excalibur prototype, the Behemoth, and the Temblar bomb I'd say Victory was only small and old so the Kilrathi would generally not find it such a threat compared to other carriers and because it was expendable, just in case the Kilrathi did figure out what was going on. That's just my theory though. In the grand scheme of Confederation planning it looks to me like the Victory was a very important ship.

I'm willing to bet Victory was pretty well staffed despite it being tiny and obsolete, especially compared to other carriers in its class.
 
I can easily imagine there being multiple doctors aboard the Victory, or any other carrier. By the time Wing Commander has rolled around, humanity has not only a huge population on Earth, but large populations on numerous colonies. A whole lot of people. A whole lot of people willing to go through med school. At times, the amount of Confederation carriers has been counted in single digits. Surely there's got to be enough to go around?
 
remember that in WCP the mission where you go out in a panther and find that downed black widow pilot? if you won you see the pilot carried away on a stretcher surrounded by a bunch of medics and ppl.
 
Spien said:
Well of course the Midway would have doctors, it's gigantic, that's not really what's in debate.

Actually, the original statement was that we never saw any doctors in the WC games, period - an idea which has since been shot down, with the mentions as far back as WC2, and most recently in WCP. As far as whether all carriers had doctors... I'd say that all the fleet carriers and any capital ships intended for combat had at least one, and a few trained corpsmen or medics at the minimum. Corvettes may be the exception to this rule, though that's not a given... but we only see a few in novel, and the only one whose crew we get a detailed breakdown of has no apparent doctors among them.
 
I would tend to think that any vessel or base with a crew of more than a hundred would have a dedicated medical professional of some sort. Vessels with ten to a hundred crew would probably have somebody with medical training but no dedicated ship's doctor.
 
This entire thread is crazy. Even modern carriers, which are smaller than the Victory, include fully staffed hospitals with multiple doctors and dentists.
 
Never considered dentists. However, I did feel with all the proof everyone kept throwing in the way of there being doctors and meds on board, that we would've just concluded that there were. I just really don't think at this point anyone can prove otherwise. But if someone can actually prove that there weren't, I'd be super impressed.
 
Its strange that it wasent any medic there when cobra was kiled since medics is ofen the first to arrive the scene....

Dentist is very importen, becouse of the G powers....
 
The Victory's twice as long as a modern carrier (and one quarter the mass, and half the aircraft), but what about crew size? I haven't been able to find any info on that quicklike. I would wildly guess it at about four or five hundred, since it's one of Confed's smaller carriers. Modern carriers (as well as the big WW2 flavor) have 5k-6k people. Modern naval vessels with crews in the hundreds often do not have doctors aboard.

Though since the Victory did have 3 other ships grouped with it, and since it's less likely that those three ships had doctors while the Victory did not, that the Victory might well have some MDs aboard to serve the whole group.

@Shipgate: I don't think that seeing medics of some kind really indicates that the doctor:crew ratio of the given ship is above zero.

I don't think there's anything crazy about some educated conjecture in an area of Wing Commander we don't really know much about. Isn't that what these forums are best at? : )
 
PeteyG said:
The Victory's twice as long as a modern carrier (and one quarter the mass, and half the aircraft), but what about crew size? I haven't been able to find any info on that quicklike. I would wildly guess it at about four or five hundred, since it's one of Confed's smaller carriers. Modern carriers (as well as the big WW2 flavor) have 5k-6k people. Modern naval vessels with crews in the hundreds often do not have doctors aboard.

Though since the Victory did have 3 other ships grouped with it, and since it's less likely that those three ships had doctors while the Victory did not, that the Victory might well have some MDs aboard to serve the whole group.

@Shipgate: I don't think that seeing medics of some kind really indicates that the doctor:crew ratio of the given ship is above zero.

I don't think there's anything crazy about some educated conjecture in an area of Wing Commander we don't really know much about. Isn't that what these forums are best at? : )

Let's put it more simply - in the games (WC2 in particular), we hear of doctors. In the novels, we also hear of doctors or see them in their natural setting. We're also talking about the fact that these ships are engaged in combat and do not always have a base or a well-equipped hospital to fall back on should they have serious casualties, nor are those bases often within an hour's flight from the carrier groups or lone capships if there are problems. Therefore, we've both the reason to have doctors -and- have been given indicators that they're present. Arguing that doctors aren't present is like arguing that a current United States Navy carrier doesn't have a PX or a barber shop, just because you never see them on TV or something, but you've only heard that they exist and have read about them.

Beyond which, you're still arguing apples and oranges - yes, many vessels have only corpsmen or medics aboard. However, that's because they're not designed to travel by themselves, nor are they ever too far away from medical assistance if it's necessary, be it in the middle of combat or in the middle of a peacetime cruise. Good hospital facilities are only an hour or so worth of flight time away, be it the carrier which forms the nuclear of a battle group, or a land-based facility of either an allied nation or a USN base.

In Wing Commander, just crossing between planets can take a few hours - and we're not even counting the fact that the fighting may take place in contested and depopulated systems. Yes, many people will not survive due to environmental conditions outside, and pilots are particularly vulnerable to it. However, people onboard the ship may get wounds which will let them live for at least a few minutes, assuming that their section doesn't vent out or get fried by enemy fire. There are also things like landing accidents, ejected pilots who are wounded, and perhaps a support ship having been evacuated with some of their crew collected by a carrier's S&R group. At the very least, the carriers do have decent medical facilities, and I suspect the cruisers do too - at least, the Austin had a psych ward.
 
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