Crew and Admirals

Important: Information is subject to change during development

Crew

Officers Tab

Each ship and station needs a crew, they will have a minimum and maximum capacity of crew members. The more experience the crew has the better the ship will perform. Experienced crew members have impacts in all fields an example being that as a ship takes damage, more experienced crew will evacuate closer to the correct time that they need to. Better crews will be able to line up their weapons to a target faster or increase their rate of fire.

Crews require a constant supply of food, therefore logistics play a vital role in keeping your crew in top shape, and to keep them from starving.

Equipment

Crew members wear advanced space suits during deployment. In the possibility of a decompression event a helmet is deployed from inside the suit and quickly encapsulates the head, saving the wearer from the hostile conditions of space. Due to the helmet mechanism of these suits crew members frequently shave their heads, receive injections to slow their hair growth or opt for extremely short hair styles.

Officers

The Falling Frontier universe is a hard and unforgiving place. Officers require incredible skill to be able to operate efficiently in space. To train an officer, large quantities of money and population must be sacrificed. Some people in the group don't cut it, drop out or may even die during the process of selection. At the end one person is recruited as an officer, adding skills and abilities to a new ship.

Officers are the command crew of all ships, civilian and military. The known types of officers are admiral, captain, gunnery sergeant, engineer and navigator.

Officer functions:

• Captains provide oversight, moral and training based perks to enhance a ship's overall effectiveness in any theatre.
• Navigators pilot the ship and preform the necessary calculation for FTL jump. Training based perks focus around local navigation and optimizing jump calculations.
• Engineers are responsible for ship maintenance and repair. Training based perks focused on running and repairing the ship. This includes enhancing logistical based operations responsible for loading and offloading supplies.
• Gunnery officers oversee training and operations of gunnery crews on board the ship. Training based perks focused on crew accuracy and ordinance reload times.

Officers can be injured or even killed if damage is taken to the command bridge. Injuries are stacking aspects so when an officer is hit he can get a minor injury. Multiple minor injuries amount to a severe injury and multiple sever injuries result in death. The death of an officer affects the ship in a negative way regarding the officers role. An example is if the navigator is killed the ship will take longer to perform maneuvers. If all command crew die, the crew of the ship will automatically abandon ship using escape pods. Officers have a Renown value, the higher the Renown the harder they are to provide information but the more accurate that information is. The lower the Renown the easier they are to provide information but it may be inaccurate. To add, change or replace an officer the ship must dock at a station. Created officers are added to the officer pool which is accessible by all stations.

There is a leveling system which makes high ranking officers gain skills and passive abilities that benefit the ship, like accuracy and fire rate. The better their experience is, the more effective these buffs are. If a command crew is killed in action, the ship will be considered lost. They can also be captured and interrogated by enemy forces.

Admirals

All ships are going to need leaders, either captains or admirals. A captain can be promoted to become an admiral.

Admirals will provide passive buffs to ships. They also allow grouping of ships to create flotillas. These flotillas allow for synchronized jumps, specific formations and merging on a position at the same time.

Command Crew Leveling System

Each command crew type currently has a total of 6 perks to choose from. There are 3 tiers and a total of 2 perks in each tier. Once a tier has been researched the player can pick between 1 of the 2 perks in that tier to be trained. When the player has researched the 2nd tier, that tier would become available. At the moment crew can only be trained before being deployed to a ship.