Switch to smaller ship without dismissing crew

[Lane]

Is it possible? Would be nice to to switch to faster more specialised ship without having to dismiss whole bunch of veteran crew...

[Trese Brothers]

No, you have to dismiss crew -- switching down is definitely more difficulty. If you're looking to keep a fleet of ships at the ready, it is best to keep them in the same mass class with similar crew/officer requirements.

[Lane]

Ahh thats unfortunate, guess I could just start with another character for more specialised gameplay.

[davea]

In the lore, crew never waits around. As soon as you let them go, they will hire onto other ships that need them.

[Eryan]

Originally posted by Trese Brothers:

No, you have to dismiss crew -- switching down is definitely more difficulty. If you're looking to keep a fleet of ships at the ready, it is best to keep them in the same mass class with similar crew/officer requirements.

How about having a home base?

Either a planetside home base or an orbital station?

Both will need a one time payment to build facilities and also a monthly upkeep.

Planetside base will be cheaper to build and upkeep but will also have to pay monthly rent to the faction that own the planet. While for Orbital Station, build cost and upkeep will be more expensive but there's no monthly rent to pay.

As for the crew, They will still need to be paid monthly. In addition food, spice and entertainment need to be provided. Food and spice can either be bought planetside, ordered and delivered by Star Traders or you can stock up personally. And facilities can be build to provide entertainment. Missing any of these and morale will drop and crew will leave.

Maybe using the ship mechanics and apply it as home base except unlike a ship, a home base is tied to the planet or orbit.

[zerp64]

We have missions that allow us to insert former passengers as contacts, yes? I wonder if it would be unreasonable to create a high level diplomatic/smuggler/whatever talent to use your current high rep and high influence contacts to insert one of your officers as a contact of some kind. Make it something high risk- contact deaths for failure if done illegitimately, large loss of faction rep, etc.

And then there's the chance that the officer-turned-contact prefers the power they gain on their world rather than go back into space with you when you ask.

Could also be a good way to develop contacts in places that make them more useful, like a smuggler on a tradeway station or something.

[Trese Brothers]

@zerp64 - its a cool concept, but it doesn't fit the lore amazingly well. You could live forever among the stars, do you want to stop here and serve as a grav for a few short years and die?

@Eryan - bases were a stretch goal for the KickStarter we didn't achieve. It definitely is a feature set we were very excited about, but now we're focused on finishing out our promised roadmap and then moving on to the real crowd favorites like modding.