Quote:judging by the techlevel of what we see - freelancer might be close to what Firefly Serenity is like... but even there the cruisers have tons of crewmembers, while the firefly itself appears to only need one single pilot.
This isnt true, you need both a pilot and an engineer minimum to make a firefly work. If you'll notice in many of the episodes and in the movie serenity itself, a lot of the ship's manuvers are handled by manual controls in the engineering room by kaylee - works more like a WW2 submarine when you think about it, as Wash has to call back to kaylee whenever they need to do a fuel cell burn, activate/deactivate individual engines for manuvers, or anything like that.
Of course, that may not be how it is here in FL, but that's how it was in firefly/serenity =P