We all know there are certain bridge officer skills that can only be acquired by training particular captain skills to the maximum level. And even then the captain must be of the same career-type as the bridge officer to train them.
For captains who choose a ship-type that doesn't match their tactical, engineer, or science careers, this poses an obvious problem. The result is a crew that lacks access to roughly 60 skills of the rank-III variety because their captains simply can't teach the officers any of those skills (because the career-type of the highest ranked bridge officers doesn't match that of the captain's).
All through beta there was a rumor floating around alternative methods of acquiring these skills for officers/captains in this situation would exist. That the skills would either show up on uncommon or rare officer drops, or that other captains would be able to train officers and then trade them to other players. None of these appear to be true, although even the manual itself implies that this is possible.
What so many of us are looking for is an answer, and why there have been so many threads on the topic at this point without any kind of response.. I simply don't understand. Because the questions are really very simple: Do alternative methods of acquiring these particular rank-III skills exist? If so, what are they? And if the feature hasn't been implemented yet, when can we expect to have access to that particular functionality?
Please just provide us with the answers. This is really important to a lot of players. It's a huge factor in our career/ship choice, and all we're really asking is for solid information on how a major aspect of this game works.
Side note: While I'm not a fan of bumping, I certainly wouldn't be upset if this message stayed in plain sight on the front page long enough for us to have received some real information.