Switching Roles?

[Tosh]

Is it possible to switch roles in solo? I wanted to get some experience playing helm and tactical before trying MP, but it keeps locking me in the captain role in solo play. Maybe I'm just missing something?

Tosh

[Bladehelm]

Yeah, you can click on the helm, tactical, or engineering officer and it will give you a list of orders as well as an option to take over the position.

Not only is this a good way to see how each of the stations works, it's also unavoidable in some situations because the Helm AI isn't very smart and can only get one order at a time.

For instance, you can command the helm to go to a point in space, like a rendezvous with a ship, and the helm will fly straight there. The AI is smart enough to avoid big objects like asteroids and space stations, but if there is a dangerous space anomaly or a mine, you can't tell the AI to fly AROUND the anomaly on your way to the spaceship. This is a HUGE pain in the butt!

[Team Triss]

The captain has to be human, that's why it's locking you to the role, but as mentioned you can jump to any open role in game as captain.

You can't give orders to other stations from anywhere other than the captains chair, though, so you can't jump in and spend the entire game in tactical.

[green_abobo]

can you plot warp course from helm, set power \ charge warp core @ engineering, then actually engage the warp drive (pull the cool lever) back @ helm?

i was trying to do this during the training. it kept negating helm targeting vector, when i'd switch back to engineering, flip back but by then the warp charge had expired.

why didnt they just have hotkeys for each station, instead of making you use the aggrivating orders menu?

[Brigandine]

Because originally the game was meant to be played in VR with touch controls/traditional control in mind. So when you can reach out and manually tap the button with a finger, it works with ease. Otherwise you have limited space on controllers to have hot-keys for specific commands and stations.