The perfect team.

[Targan]

While not part of the team per se your forgot Inara (courtesan). She added an odd mix of skills including negotiation and the ability to open doors, both with her contacts and her beauty and charm. For anyone who has not seen the show Firefly (or the followup movie Serenity) I highly recommend it. I am a big fan even have the opening song as my ring tone.

Oh no, how could I forget Inara! For shame. That girl desperately needs my phone number.

[Targan]

The useless chick thing was a quote from a tv show where they were talking about the A-Team and such. WHere the role of the woman was pretty much to get caught and need rescuing. Ayrn and River both rocked.

I loved the end of the fight scenes in Mr Universe's facility where River is standing with a sword in one hand and an axe in the other (both dripping with gore) and you can see she is absolutely ready to take on about a dozen Alliance marines who all have rifles trained on her at point blank range. I reckon she would have had a slim chance of actually taking them all out.

Anybody seen the film Equilibrium Awesome Gun-Fu style in that.

[Adm.Lee]

I tend to view it in terms of two different groupings, in-combat and out- roles.

In-combat: Leader, fire-support (GL and/or SAW), maneuver (scout and assault guys), medic. If you have vehicles, then drivers & gunners, obviously. If you have contact with the outside world, then you need radio operators.

Out-of-combat: scout, "face" or negotiator, leader. Again, with vehicles: driver and mechanic. Radio operator, if possible.

You can mix characters, from Column A and Column B. A third column might be who's carrying what gear

FWIW, when I was in college I found in the library a RAND study on LRRP teams in Vietnam. One of the findings was that 6 was an optimum number of men on a patrol. More than that was too many for the leader to keep track of, and many more were more likely to get caught. Fewer tended to run into problems of fatigue, both from carrying too much stuff and pulling sentry duty too often.

[Abbott Shaull]

Well actually the actually positions that I think if you looking for a group, in many cases the group would have to be cross trained in couple specialization as you are trying to note out here.

I would tend to look at how Special Operation units try to set up their basic A-Team or look at a base team for SAS. For the SAS the four-man team would have one medic, one weapon, one signal, and one engineer specialists in the team. US Special Forces 6 man team would have intel and language specialist.

Now many of these would be cross trained as mechanics, drivers, and many more specilizations.

In the field and in the garrison, there would be one who would be leader. There would be a point man, and they would have various weapons positions in their organization. I tend to think as basic fire team in which there is a Leader/Rifleman, Grenadier/Rifleman, and Automatic Rifleman/Machine gunner for a three man team. If the team in 4 or 5 men, add Rifleman, Assistant gunners, or point man if desired. If the team is 6 or larger, you can make 2 teams as desired.

Just some thoughts.