Assigning Bridge Officers

As you have discovered, there is a limit to how many BOFFs your captain can have (separately from the ship itself).

If you look on your status screen, you will see a series of bars in the left-hand column, listing your captain, ship, (possibly) shuttle, and then all your current BOFFs; if you have more slots than you have BOFFs, there will be bars at the bottom of the list that are grey and say "no officer".

If you do not have bars like that, you can't add any new BOFFs.... so you will need to level up, get rid of an existing BOFF, or purchase additional BOFF slots from the Zen store.... in order to either create new slots or free up existing ones.

Once you *do* have a grey bar, you can add a BOFF either from your candidate storage (button on bottom of stations screen) or from inventory.

Once you *have* the BOFFs in your status screen, you can mix-and-match which ones are actively used on your ship (subject to the types of seats the ship has) and also for away team, to your taste.

I find that in general, you will want to have at least two BOFFs of each type (tac, sci, eng)... there are certain ones that are better than others (for damage production, due to their "traits") but without knowing which faction your captain is, I cannot advise you on that.

Sci can do Polarize Hull.

vaylotte wrote: »

On the subject of Boffs ... how do I get my 'polarize hull' ability to show in my Ship gui ? I have two science officers and neither has the ability showing up. It's one of their skills I know because I purchased it. They have 4 slotted skills in the skills window but I can only use 2 ... hmm ...

The officers may HAVE 4 skills, but the stations on the ship are limited to 1, 2, 3 or 4 depending on the ship design. There's nothing you can do to change that. This will be shown on the ship's Stations screen (where you slot the officers)... the remaining slots will be grayed out.

(If you are having the display bug @protoneous mentioned, the affected slots show up as BLACK boxes rather than greyed out, so you can tell one from the other fairly easily.)

For example, the tactical stations on most Intrepid-type science vessels are Lieutenant rank (meaning they are limited to 2 skills).

You would have to slot the Polarize Hull in one of the (according to your post, two) eligible slots.

I don't know if you've used some of the very good online resources available such as the wiki. This part would pertain to your question above about different bridge officer abilities - https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Bridge_officer_and_kit_abilities

Sometimes a quick google search can work wonders.

Congrats on making Captain! Things are more fun having Commander bridge officer abilities available for your ship and away team

Know your Bridge rank lay out.