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Ship operations - Am I a bad captain?

I recently purchased the Pathfinder class and accompanying Voyager bridge. It was heavily overpriced like a lot of stuff in the C-store, but I am quite happy with it. I am now also finally able to visit the other decks - on a sidenote, I find it extremely strange and unnerving that I could not access those decks on the default bridges on PS4, but that's another story.

Being able to walk around my beautiful ship, I noticed some... operational peculiarities regarding my crew.

The first thing that I noticed, is that there is a huge number of crew members aimlessly walking through the ship's corridors. I mean, when I'm walking around the decks, I am literally overrun by crew members that do absolutely nothing except walking up and down the corridors and occasionally enter a special area (such as Engineering), but then just stand there for a second, and then turn around and resume their meaningless journey. At the same time, NONE of the stations in those areas are manned. How does this ship of mine manage to run? Why is no-one performing their duty? Am I a bad captain?

Okay, what I said is not completely true - there are some crew members that are manning a station. These are the departments heads (I guess), they sometimes appear to be doing something. However, these are completely random persons and they are not part of my bridge crew for unknown reasons. This does not strike me as a particalurly efficient operation for a star ship, not in the least because I have no idea who they are. Does this make me a bad captain?

While I'm on the subject of bridge officers, none of my officers have a specific duty (like tactical officer of operations officer). They are randomly manning bridge stations. Again, this does not seem an efficient way to run the ship. Why can't I assign a bridge officer to a particular station, i.e. chief engineer, pilot, chief medical officer, operations officer, first officer, etc. There used to be an option in previous STO builds with department heads. But for the time being, my bridge crew performs random tasks. Does that make me a bad captain?

Comments

  • luminaire#0745 luminaire Member Posts: 77 Arc User
    Short answer: Ship interiors were always an afterthought and have been long abandoned.
  • echattyechatty Member Posts: 5,913 Arc User
    edited September 2018
    What azrael said. Whenever the captain is walking around his ship, there are crew walking the corridors. As for the stations, I think that's just a random thing.

    And no, I don't think anything is overpriced in the store. In fact, everything is reasonably priced. Can I afford some of it? No. Not without some patience collecting dilithium to convert to zen.
    Now a LTS and loving it.
    Just because you spend money on this game, it does not entitle you to be a jerk if things don't go your way.
    I have come to the conclusion that I have a memory like Etch-A-Sketch. I shake my head and forget everything. :D
  • tm706tm706 Member Posts: 334 Arc User
    Crew members milling about is a common sight on ships. When I served in the Navy either you were busy doing something or milling about trying to LOOK busy. A surefire way to avoid unwanted attention was to grab a clipboard (PADD?) and just move from space to space making it look like you were doing something. I think you need to crack down on that on your ship now that an old salt like me has educated you. ;)
    Coffee is life.

    Message me in-game (@tm706) for help

    1st Alpha Quadrant Fleet
  • lianthelialianthelia Member Posts: 7,820 Arc User
    azrael605 wrote: »
    1. No they aren't overpriced.
    2. Have to talk to Sony and Microsoft about why ships don't have full interiors on console.
    3. Crew walking the corridors is seen in any episode of any Trek where a main character walks the corridors and people are not on duty 24/7.
    4. The Department Head screen is still there, open your Doffing menu, look at the left side bar.

    While 3 is true, I do agree they could stand to cut down on the random crew clutter a little.
  • feiqafeiqa Member Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    tm706 wrote: »
    Crew members milling about is a common sight on ships. When I served in the Navy either you were busy doing something or milling about trying to LOOK busy. A surefire way to avoid unwanted attention was to grab a clipboard (PADD?) and just move from space to space making it look like you were doing something. I think you need to crack down on that on your ship now that an old salt like me has educated you. ;)

    You're not supposed to tell officers that one. What next you letting on we don't actually need them to get the job done?

    Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
    Network engineers are not ship designers.
    Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
  • warpangelwarpangel Member Posts: 9,427 Arc User
    Crewmembers don't do anything. Way back when there was actually an in-combat stat that tracked our ship's crew and it did almost nothing. We could go on and do everything just fine with 100% of crew dead. :D

    We fly our ships alone on manual controls and do everything ourselves either directly or with our Awesome Space Magic Powers. B)
  • jbmonroejbmonroe Member Posts: 809 Arc User
    Empty corridors would make you think you were RPing "The Mark of Gideon."
    boldly-watched.png
  • cpttiemenscpttiemens Member Posts: 5 Arc User
    I didn't mean that the halls should be empty... It's just there there are now crazy many people running around. You could easily cut 70% out and still have a decent filling of the space. And it would be nice if some of them would sit at a console and pretended they did some work :wink:

    As for the pricing; maybe it's not overpriced for the standards in current games, but come on. 30-50 euros just to get one ship? You can get a full game for that money.
  • baddmoonrizinbaddmoonrizin Member Posts: 10,247 Community Moderator
    Necro. /Thread
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