Any ship requires a crew for it to be able to operate properly.
Unfortunately, in these guidelines, the actual crew requirements are extremely vague...

Minimum crew requirements from SFB apply. Use the following table to help determine an approximate guide for ships crew.

Basic Crew

The values listed above are basic crew values for a ship of a certain size. Cylon vessels tend to be at the lower range of the crew scale, while Colonial warships tend to stretch from the middle to high values. Civilian vessels tend to vary widely, using lower values if they simply carry cargo, to much higher values if they carry passengers.

Deck Crew

A ship generally requires 1 deck crew per fighter box that it carries (so about 3 deck crew per fighter flight). A ship can also carry 1 deck crew per shuttle box, but this is not standard on non-warships. It is possible for a ship to carry no deck crew at all, and this is allowable, but then fighters will not be able to be rearmed during combat.

The maximum amount of deck crew allowed is equal to the sum of all fighter and shuttle boxes.

Boarding Parties

A player is allowed to choose the amount of boarding parties that they wish their ship to carry, although civilian ships will not carry many. If a ship carries over 10 boarding parties, then it must also have one barracks box per additional ten boarding parties or fraction carried.

Cylon Variant Crew Rule:

If using the variant Cylon rules, then work out the crew requirements as normal, and then to determine the actual crew value, use the following formula.

Crew units = (crew units/[3 or 2]) + (deck crew/2) + (boarding parties/2) + ([fighter flights * 8]/10)

Variant SSD Crew Rule:

If using the variant SSD rules, then Colonial vessels have too high a crew value. Simply divide them by 4 (Huge ships), 3 (massive ships) or 2 (everything else) to get more acceptable values.