Intergalactic Summit

And only believe half of the ones you can.

One of the technological marvels used by the Righteous, is a Takmahl mass cloning device.

This device is capable of generating an entire replacement crew from a suitable mass of whatever biological matter is available.

E.g. if you have ~6000 kg of plankton, fish or animal products available, the device will turn out around 100 crew. Enough for a bunch of frigates, or a light cruiser.


Marvellous.

I try to generally stay the hell out of the way. I know every ship and subsystem I own intimately, but actually doing the jobs they do is something they're trained and experienced with. The best companies to hire crews from are generally recognized by the fact that they train their people to ignore pretty much everything the implanted nutcase does or demands and instead do their jobs exactly to specification from their parent company, or what their chief tells them.

When crew starts falling over themselves to kiss my arse and follow my every whim I start to get worried, because that implies they're more concerned with my good graces and money than keeping my ship and myself in peak working order.

The anthill that constitutes a ship may need a queen, but she should mostly sit in the pod and do her thing while everyone else makes sure the damn thing doesn't collapse.

tl;dr As with guns, combat, maintenance etc, I have people for that.

Airlock.

Order pizza.

How dare you!

Pizza is a delicious and yummy food and under the protection of our mighty Federation Navy. You mess with pizza, you mess with Navy!

I am like that generally, but there are exceptions. If I am captaining a frigate at the time (which is not an infrequent occurrence now that I have moved back to the State), and something catastrophic happens and we aren't going anywhere, I will pitch in with engine maintenance. It's a field I am competent in, and frigates always run light on grew. With less than a dozen people on board each one of them is essentially a department head in charge of themselves, so command structure is a bit more condensed and a bit looser and informal for the most part, and everyone needs to be able to assist the other crew outside their own area of expertise even if that help is in the form of holding a flashlight or turning a screwdriver.

Also as far as frigates go, you probably want a bit better skilled and experienced people on-board because that cross-training is so useful, and, in general, that results in you getting older crew that have been doing this a lot longer, so most of them earn't crawling over themselves to please the demi-god inside the egg like fresh recruits sometimes do, so I think interacting with them tends to go over a little bit better. Granted you do occasionally end up with people who have developed a longstanding grudge, but I personally try to weed them out of my frigate crew pool due to the morale and discipline problems that can cause. I have been known to mingle with crew a bit since I need downtime too, but it's the small ships that really throw you in with the rest of the men and women since larger vessels usually have segregated facilites for officers and enlisted, and even larger vessels subdivide the groups (ie. enlisted are divided into crew and NCOs, officers are divided between junior and senior)



Food cubes for everyone, because, you know, no Caldari has ever been able to actually enjoy things occasionally.

I am there with you. Though my record shows I am a career soldier even into my capsuleer training, I have always been something of a tinker, and engineering is something of a hobby, though it's now been expanded into something of a second career, and I have a small scale research and development firm that specializes in propulsion engineering. My current focus is on ways to utilize starship modules to supplement or replace core functions of the ship, and if you subscribe to any research journals, you may have noticed a piece authored by my firm regarding a redesign to the MWD interface to let the backup warp systems utilize certain components of an installed MWD for redundancy (A MWD isn't a warp drive, but they do have some parts in common).

You may find me crawling about in an engine bay at times, but that is actually more likely to be one of my firm's test ships rather than one of my personal vessels.

This may be a bit of a tangent, but working with a team of scientists and engineers is different than working with a crew even though I am still the head researcher (also, due to the nature of capsuleer based research utilizing the implants and wetware of the researcher, the reason training is required and affects the speed and results, and why there's a limit to the number of jobs, I am also a component part of the mainframe)

And thus began the great Gallente/Provist Pie war....

For my Frigates - since all I really find myself in are Gallentean ships - I usually hand pick the one or two individuals who man my ships. It's not too big of an issue considering stress or employment or whatever because I tend to do thorough, thorough background checks on any crew I don't eat up from a business who throws them at me. The biggest I'll go via handpicking is a destroyer-class, my main example being my Algos.

I've sort of betrayed my own mantras and made unusually friendly with my Algos crew. I've seen some of the baseliner fanfic they've written? It's kind of, uh. Well, it's out there. These guys and gals are some of the best I've ever worked with, though, and they understand they probably won't live until retirement. Maybe I've indoctrinated them with my dashing looks, who knows?

Anyway, though it's immensely satisfying, I'd honestly suggest keeping distance when it comes to crew because you'll rarely get as lucky when it comes to reliable people. Remember, you're known to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, so there's a high chance someone will have an ulterior motive (at least if you've posted up in Gallente space).

EDIT - Also, whoever you are, you probably have fanfic somewhere on GalNet about you and someone else. Read at your own risk. Some of it is pretty good, not gonna lie.