Officers and Crew

Each bay of a ship can/should have an officer assigned. The officer would be of a specific type used for the specific bay. For example, captains would hire a doctor for the medical bay and an engineer for the propulsion bay.

It may be possible to launch/operate a ship without an officer assigned to one or more bays. As a result, the ship would have less or no capability in the domain that is lacking an officer. For example, a ship lacking an engineer might only be able to operate at half speed, or might not be able to accurately plot space jumps. Crew on a ship without a doctor most assuredly die of the common alien cold.

Officers are hired based on their skill inventory. Their skills are applied to their effectiveness at their job. A doctor may be good at "xenophage research" but not as good at "battle triage". An officer applies his skills to the tasks he is assigned, and exhibits a personality and behavior based on those skills. Armory officers that are "trigger happy" might never provide the option to attack hostile vessels with anything less than full power. Engineers that are "xenophobic" may not work well with scientists from other planets.

-- Captains should be able to perform field promotions to fill vacancies. It should definitely be possible to promote a crew member into an officership outside their area of expertise. A medic could be promoted to Engineering Officer, for example. The first couple of cycles after such a promotion would be wobbly and unstable. Then things would settle down for a bit.

Ideally, there should be some component for "natural talent". Perhaps that medic has a natural affinity for starship engineering, and the end result is 10% more efficient engine output. This would be a randomly determined element, with the possibility for "negative natural talent." Maybe the medic is all butterfingers in the engine coils, and actually permanently damages the engine!

-- Most ship modules require 5 crew members for optimal performance. This allows crew rotations, ample coverage of shifts, and redundancy of skills. A module lacking a full staff compliment operates at a reduced efficiency. In the event of ship problems / catastrophes, an under-staffed module recovers more slowly (if at all!).

Every day each crew member gains one experience point: doing your job every day reinforces your core skills. This is an abstraction of skills acquired through their assignment. Some days are routine, and some days are extraordinary. By earning 1 XP per day we don't have to worry so much about bonus points for complex situations, etc. Successfully resolving a ship fault yields a significant XP boost.

Assigning crew members to modules outside their core expertise delays XP accumulation. For example, putting a medic into engineering would yield one XP every two days, until such time as that medic gains sufficient experience in engineering to be competent.

Officers will start the game with more XP, indicating that this is not their first ship assignment (though presumably it is their first long-range mission).

-- All crew members should have names. This allows the ship captain to develop relationships with them. If an officer reports that Ensign Smith was caught sleeping at the helm again, the captain will think twice about assigning Ensign Smith to an away team. Such familiarity will also help with officer promotions.

It goes without saying that crew member death will be a bigger deal, too.

-- Crew members will be randomly generated, ensuring that each captain has a unique crew aboard.

Crew member details include:

• Name
• Home city, and country
• Gender
• Subject of study at IF Academy
• Area of expertise (may be different from subject of study)
• XP
• hobby

Optionally, we could cook up a brief biographical paragraph for each crew member.

The above details map pretty closely to a SQL schema. We'd also want boolean values:

• officer?
• alive?