Welcome starpilot.
Select your destiny...

People Management

People management is important for a space captain and the chances are you will have a lot of weird people on board your ship at some time or another.

If you like good old fashioned discipline, you can jettison anyone into space at any time. This is a rather harsh punishment, but the ability to shove someone into a cramped, spinning, yellow and black striped tetrahedron is sometimes desirable. Do not expect jettisonned crew members to want to work for you again. This practice is illegal, so be careful where and how you do it.

Crew

It's nice being the boss. In the harsh world of the Flatspace II galaxy, it is also a good way to survive because your crew can form a sort of meat shield around you when your armour is holed. Crew work on the ship and keep it maintained and running. Crew members are paid a wage each time you dock. Crew are very loyal and if you keep them in pay they will not stab you in the back, panic, quit or ignore orders.

Each ship has an ideal number of crew to keep it running but you can fly any ship with no crew if you desire. You cannot assign more crew to duty than the ideal number but you can carry extra off duty crew if you have the cabin space on board. Reserve crew still get paid but do no work on the ship.

You can assign or relieve crew members at any time. Crew are always assigned to duty in strict order, first the pilot or captain, then turret gunners for ships with gun turrets. After that crew are assigned depending on their training, the first crew member becomes the head of department. Fighter pilots and ship captains usually keep on going until they die in ultimate glory, but ordinary crew members stop work if they get injured.

Training

All crew can be trained in one of three main roles, Medical, Maintenance and Security. Turret gunners and the pilot will also act upon their training.

Medical crew heal any other injured people on board. All medically trained crew members will automatically start healing injured people. Injured crew of any type will not be able to do their job, so having some medical staff is always useful.

In exactly the same way, maintenance crew repair damaged ship components although armour can only be repaired while in dock and never by your engineers. If any part of your ship is damaged and you have a healthy maintenance crew member on board, they will eventually repair the component. Note that like healing, repairs can take some time.

Security staff are useful if you have passengers on board, particularly criminals. Criminals do not respect the property or lives of others and employing security guards will help prevent vandalism, saboutage or worse. Not all civilians are innocent, and those who carry passengers for high fees should be aware of the possibility that anyone can be a criminal. If you have enough security guards a lockdown is imposed, and that tight control of the ship ensures that passengers behave themselves.

Crew In Combat

When your armour is pierced, crew start getting injured and killed. This can happen to anyone on board. If the captain gets killed it's all over, so if you have a lot of crew then you are less likely to be killed yourself.

Passengers

Passengers are free to wander around the ship and can often be found snooping, lurking, creeping, tripping, bumping and generally roaming. Aliens and passengers with criminal records should be considered dangerous, although in practise criminals rarely make themselves known. Any criminal or captured alien prisoner should be surrendered to the police at the nearest police station. Castaways found adrift in space can also be rescued and released at a trading station.

It is also worth mentioning that a few ship captains engage in slavery or alien prisoner abuse. The Rentex Hull And Astrogation Corporation does not endorse this activity and should remind the reader that slavery is a crime under galactic law.