At times, it seems like there is only one crew member operating each unit, aside from the main units like the Mothership or Carrier. Other times, small units say things that suggest there might be multiple crew inside. Smaller units may even be remotely operated from larger ones.
In the first missions of Homeworld, we save large pods with people counting several thousands. It seems like a lot of those people are not crew member material and are just regular folks who don't take part in battle.
One of the first Deserts of Kharak missions explains how we must stall for Rachel S'jet and her crew to do their stuff. In the cinematic before she was the only person to sit inside her vehicle, so where are her crew coming from?
Is it said anywhere, maybe in the big manual, how many people man each unit?
Best Answer
I don't know of a canonical answer but I can say that in several later cinematics (in Deserts of Kharak), there are other crew either implied or actually shown - for instance a co-pilot in the S'Jet baserunner - radio messages about picking her up in the opening cinematic must be coming from the co-pilot.
In Homeworld 2, one of the missions involves picking up crew for the mothership. According to what I could find online, the Mothership has a skeleton crew compliment of 8000 (not confirmed).
I've found this thread which discusses crew complements, and although I'm not able to verify, some claim the following numbers:
Essentially there's no canonical answer that I could find, aside from the very vague guidance offered by cinematics.
EDIT: I do have in my possession an original paper manual for HW1, I will have a read of it and see if there is any mention of crew numbers later.