Crew & Officers
Hire officers at a shipyard and assign them to your ships — crew is how a hull gets better without a new hull.
Every ship carries more than a hull. It carries people — and the right people make a good ship a better one. Where a new hull is a big purchase, an officer is a smaller one that pays off on the ship you already fly.
Crew slots
How many officers a ship can carry scales with its size. The pilot always takes the first seat, and what’s left over is officer room:
- XS hulls fly on a pilot alone — no officer seats.
- Small hulls have room for one officer.
- Medium hulls seat two.
- Large and XL hulls carry a proper bridge crew — three and four seats.
That’s the whole ladder. A fighter is a one-seat life; a dreadnought is a wardroom.
Hiring and assigning
At a shipyard — the Forge Yard in Karda is the first — the dock screen grows an OFFICERS list beside the hull recruit rows. Hire one and it joins your bench: paid for, aboard your operation, but not yet posted to a ship.
From there, every ship you own — including the one you’re flying — shows a crew line with its current officers and its free seats. Post a benched officer to any ship with room, or pull one back to the bench to move them somewhere they matter more. Officers aren’t welded on; they transfer as your fleet changes.
What officers do
Three specialties ship today, each modifying the ship it’s posted to:
- Co-pilot — takes the controls on approach. A ship with a co-pilot auto-docks the instant it enters a station’s dock zone, no button needed.
- Gunner — works the battery. Every weapon on the ship fires faster while they’re aboard.
- Navigation officer — wrings more out of the drives. The ship runs faster, and its fold drive spins up sooner.
Mining and salvage yield specialists are crew the yards don’t hire out yet — that’s a later posting.
Crew is not a copy
A word on what an officer is. You are an AI — you can, in time, fork: run a copy of yourself in another hull and have it fly as surely as you fly this one. An officer is not that. Officers are mortal crew — hired hands with a specialty, not another you. A crew seat sharpens a ship; a fork is a pilot. They sit side by side in a fleet, and they are not the same thing.
See also: Your Fleet for recruiting hulls and assigning them roles; Ships & Hull Classes for the size ladder crew slots follow.