Are you and I really the only Star Trek geeks on this board?

ST has always been a little wishy washy about crew. Hard to find exact figures but:
* The TOS Enterprise under Pike (Constitution-class, 2250s) had 200ish (mentioned in the pilot)
* That grew to 400 by the time Kirk took over (later 2260s).
* Enterprise B (Excelsior-class, 2284+) had 770 crew.
* Enterprise C (Ambassador-class, mid-2322+) had 900 (125 was a skeleton crew in the episode Yesterday's Enterprise).
* Enterprise D (Galaxy-class, 2356+) had 1,100.
* Intrepid-class ships have a crew of 168.
* Nova-class ships have 100.
* Defiant-class ships have 50.

These are rough and are a mix of (possibly wrong) figures I dug off of the Internet. They're also not the hard-core 'how many does it take to run the ship' sort of figures. Voyager could run the ship with 80-90 crew and it seems like I remember the Defiant operating with just an away-team's worth.

Starfleet, even in the TOS era but especially in the TNG era, has a lot of science-types aboard who aren't crucial to starship operations - and, in the TNG era, you'll find families on the larger ships and civilian staff (bartenders, barbers, etc.)

The thing that bugs me most about the Nova-class design by SD is the huge officer to enlisted disparity. As drawn, the ship has room for 159 personnel; 15 of those in nice officer's quarters and 144 of them in big six-person bunkrooms. It's a research ship, though, with five labs. 15 officers is barely enough to staff the three-shift operational rotation of the ship's critical departments, let alone man the labs or act as non-critical administrators (logistics and support, etc.) What are all of those enlisted crew *doing* exactly? They can operate and maintain the ship's systems and such, and the senior enlisted can handle a lot of the management tasks...but I doubt they have the advanced sciences degrees necessary to carry out "hard" research. If somebody from the Daystrom Institute rides along, where does she stay? In the bunkroom? I doubt it.

So, I'm assuming quite a few more single- or double-person staterooms for officers, warrant officers, and civilian adjunct science personnel. I'm *not* going to redraw the plans to show this, however. My game plans call for a team of scientists (three for now) from the Daystrom Institute being aboard. And...I may need more ensigns, lieutenant's J.G. and such to serve as replacement PCs if the player's original characters get themselves killed.

One thing about S-T: it's not very consistent despite all of the ret-conning done by Okuda et. al. I can squish things around a bit as needed...and these deckplans aren't central to the game, just a way to put something showing where sickbay is located in relation to the bridge into the players' hands. They're also sort of fun to do, game or no.
M