A question about CD

[David]

1. When was Sarah first introduced to the story?

Chapter 2, but Chapter 2 won't make much sense without Chapter 1... and that follows straight on from the Prologue...

(Read it all!)

[Geo]

Controlling is a very demanding and highly specialised job and there are very few people in the galaxy who can cope. Remember, Bob was made Controller of Espenson Station because the station's former Controller was disabled and backup Controller was killed all in one blow. Perhaps the RASF might have opted for a more high-tech individual, given time.

With Bob been a controller of a mere frigate, I was under the impression that most, if not all, military ships have a controller?
Is this assumption wrong? Because 'few' people able to cope doesn't sound like there are hundreds of thousands people available to control every military ship and every large enough structure in the whole of human space.

[jae]

Thank you both! The Navigation archives is a great resource. Oh, and I have read it all from the beginning, I just was a bit hazy about the details, and wanted to recheck!

And thanks especially, David, for the whole thing! Serious thanks.

[javcs]

Controlling is a very demanding and highly specialised job and there are very few people in the galaxy who can cope. Remember, Bob was made Controller of Espenson Station because the station's former Controller was disabled and backup Controller was killed all in one blow. Perhaps the RASF might have opted for a more high-tech individual, given time.

With Bob been a controller of a mere frigate, I was under the impression that most, if not all, military ships have a controller?
Is this assumption wrong? Because 'few' people able to cope doesn't sound like there are hundreds of thousands people available to control every military ship and every large enough structure in the whole of human space.

A "few" out of billions, if not trillions of people, in a single multi-stellar power is still a rather large number of people in absolute terms.
Call "few" in this context about .5% of the population - that number courtesy of my ass; out of say, the 6 billion or so people currently on Earth, that would still be about 30 million.
Figure about 1% of them enter service, that's still about 300,000 people. In relative terms, that's .00005% of the population, making that a 'small' sub-group with 'few' members; in absolute terms 300,000 people is still a fair number of people.

Drop the percentage by a factor of another hundred, even, for 3000 people out of the current Earth population. Then take that percentage and apply it to reasonably large multi-stellar entities ... "very few" in relative terms is still a fair number of people in absolute terms.
Plus, while David hasn't released the size of their fleets, the number of ships and stations is probably only in the low thousands. That would still allow most or all capital ships and important stations to have at least one Controller, while still stretching the available supply of qualified personnel.

Bob may have been the only Controller readily available for assignment to Espenson - it doesn't matter if you can transfer person A to take over if you need to transfer person B to replace the person A, when person B is just as qualified for the position as person A and currently unassigned.