Starship Corporation

Let me start off by saying this is an awesome concept and I have been having fun with the alpha.

I was thinking you should add a feature that lets you add extra training to your crew. You would be limited by time the crew can spend practicing and cost to perform the training. Let me give an example of this. You have a transport ship with no military units on it. But your crew has spent extra time training for boarding of enemy crews or alien infestation. So while you have a civilian crew, they are extra prepared for this situation. Maybe with some small arms or battle doctrine. This would allow each ship's crew to be a little different and specialized in certain things. You could also assign this training for your different crews.
-Pilots
Evasive maneuvering-Your pilots have trained to avoid conflict and enemy fire.
Battle positioning- The pilots are skilled at positioning the ship as to give your gunners an advantage.
Long range- Your pilots have learned to maximize the efficiency of your ship and can get increased range out of it.
-Technician
Fire prevention- Your technicians have spent extra time to learn how to fight fires better. Maybe they move faster to the fire.
Maintenance- They can perform the routine maintenance of your equipment faster. This would mean fewer technicians can maintain more equipment.
Battle drill- In case of an invasion of the ship, your technicians have been trained and equipped to deal with small engagements. By no means are they military but they would increase your chance of survival.
-Med staff
Trauma- your medical staff are better at healing serious wounds and injuries
Has-mat training- In case of hazardous material in your ship, your medical staff are better at handling it and containing it.
-Military
Defending-skilled at defensive positions
Boarding-skilled at attacking enemy ships
Stealth-infiltrating enemy ships and not alerting their sensors
Weapon systems- skilled at firing the weapon systems of the ship

These are just some ideas I had. I think this would allow more customization of the crew and no ship would be the same. This could be set up by having each roll have a slot for some extra training. You then select what training you want and you are limited by resources or the time it would take to maintain this training. For example, battle training may be expensive due to the special courses your crew has to go to and the added small arms.

Crew RPG elements of some kind would certainly be cool.

what would be cool, in my opinion, would be to give a secondary skill to character (chosen at random, always 1 or 2 grade lower than primary skill) and give gradation to those skills. For example, a technician (grade 1) that have some notion of "military and security" skill (grade 0) would be better to deal with fire than any other technician that don't have such secondary skill.

in my view, the gradation could be like this:

grade 0 : low level duty advantage(needing only a small training session to master), always as a secondary skill (firefighting for military skill, first aid for medical class, hacking for engineer, small craft piloting, like boarding craft, for pilot)
grade 1 : standard duty advantage (needed for maintenance, generally need a long time to master)
grade 2 to 5 : character of greater duty (like officer, elite soldier, chief engineer, ace pilot, surgeon, ...) but only really big ship would need grade 4 or 5 character

the higher the grade, the better they are at doing their duty or leading other people, but they would also need to have a good moral as they can influence the moral of the lower grade crew member of their own skill class (the kind of thought like : "if the captain say it's ok, then it's ok").

if the moral would be influenced by the number of people on board, then having a good high grade/lowgrade ratio (like 1 grade 2 for 10 grade 1) could reduce the moral loss, but hiring high grade character would cost a lot and might require special quarter for them (like the captain having his own quarter, the captain's cabin.)

for example, if on a military ship you have like 51 people ( 8 engineer, 6 pilots, 2 medic,1 captain and 34 military), if we say that a ship's captain (counting as a special character) influence 20 grade 1 characters (no skill restriction) that are not under someone else influence (putting the engineers, pilots and medics under the captain's influence, technically all the "civilian"on board) , then the military part would be 30 soldiers (grade 1), 3 elite soldier working as squad leader (grade 2) and an officer (grade 3). however a failure in command, like the captain getting killed or being sick, would result in a moral loss for all the people he influenced (i.e. all the pilots, medics and engineers) increasing the chances that the military take control of the ship (provoking a mutiny within the military or the civilian, in this scenario it would more likely be a civilian mutiny. if it was the officer(grade 3) that was lacking then it could have been a military mutiny as one of the 3 elite soldier (grade 2) would try to get full control of the ship by capturing, convincing or killing the other two elite soldier and the ship's captain.).

NB: that would mean that every ship would need at least a captain to keep integrity in small crew and if the crew is too big for a captain, then he will need to delegate that task to some officers. forcing us all to find some more space to fit the captain's cabin and officer quarters.