Originally posted by Buggy Boy:

Seems a bit crap to be honest, I have three NPC employees sitting around on the station, I can bring one onto my Type-9 but the two other empty slots just have to remain empty, and my remaining two pilots just have to twiddle their thumbs on the station? Why can't I bring all three of my employees with me on my Type-9 so that they can man turrets, fly fighters, etc?

What gets me is that the two empty slots actually say on them 'hire pilots...', well I did, and for the life of me I can't see any way of putting them to use in those slots beyond the first.

You can join a team of 3 other human players, and they can board your ship and sit in those seats.

Pretty much, and there isn't enough to occupy 3 other CMDRs were you to recruit them. MC is, unfortunately, quarter-baked. Perhaps FDev will finish baking it now that they're getting back on track.

In Elite: Frontier I seem to recall being able to control a turret and see through it's 'eyes' for shooting ships etc, and switch between turrets; I could also hire NPCs to man these turrets and they would fire autonomously (if given the order to do so), I find it strange and disappointing that Elite Dangerous doesn't seem to have this facility. Elite: Frontier was a 16-bit offline single player game, if my old Atari ST could handle controlling that sort of NPC stuff, and also handle all of the background simulation (granted, it was a much smaller gaming universe, but it was still big enough) then modern systems definitely should be able to, so it has to be a conscious decision by FDev not to implement it.

No. You can only use 1.

Your NPC pilot can't use a seat. They're not even on your ship, I'm pretty sure they do a galactic, work from home, tele-presence sort of thing... I know... I know... Right now you're thinking I'm some sort of deranged lunatic, but take a look at the evidence...

1.
They never occupy a seat on your ship. NEVER.
Some of us have been requesting this oversight be fixed since the SLFs were added to the game.

1b. Even if you leave them flying your ship, while you fly a fighter: It's still you sat in the pilots chair. You're not actually on the fighter, you're using tele-presence.

2. What happens when you forget to make your crew member active?
You can't set them to active until you dock back at a station. Not being able to set them to active (even when you're landed on the ground), would suggest that they're not on the ship.

2b. So you've set off without your crew member.
Travel to the other side of the bubble without stopping. Your crew member is waiting for you at the station... Leave them there, not active again...
Travel 22000LY to Colonia... They'll be waiting for you at the next station you stop at, no matter where it is.

So... "On call, Galactic WFH" using tele-presence (which is part of the game lore), makes more sense to me than "I've got human popsicle in my pocket that only thaws out at space stations" (and who keeps putting in time sheets, even while frozen... ).

OK, maybe I am a little deranged

fighters are obviously remote controlled. When they are destroyed you can simply launch another. But I wonder why they have a cabin and a seat at all? This doesn't make sense.

Multicrew 2.0 would be nice !
We can keep some hope with all the good work done in 2024.

Actually, since odyssey if I'm correct, there is both telepresence multicrew and physical multicrew.
I also believe that with human multicrew, you always see the dudes sitting on the seats... No matter if it's physical or telepresence.
Which makes it even weirder with npc multi crew and all the empty seats.
It's also quite hard to understand why we can hire multiple npcs but only get one active at a time ?

Originally posted by ждун:

fighters are obviously remote controlled. When they are destroyed you can simply launch another. But I wonder why they have a cabin and a seat at all? This doesn't make sense.

That's an excellent point, sir. If it was all about tele-presence then ALL ships should (technically) be capable of multi-crew, even if it's only to man a weapon, shoot off the chaff launcher, or whatever. The fact that multi-crew (using NPCs) is only possible in ships that physically have the seats, and then you're only allowed to take one NPC along with you and they don't literally appear in any of those seats, doesn't seem to be adequately explained that I can see. It's just... because reasons. Imagine if tele-presence was a module, like the autodocking computer, that you could fit to any ship, and if that module became damaged then their tele-presence would be intermittent or gone entirely, I think that would only add to the game and make it far more interesting.

Originally posted by Gargouille_84:

Multicrew 2.0 would be nice !
We can keep some hope with all the good work done in 2024.

Actually, since odyssey if I'm correct, there is both telepresence multicrew and physical multicrew.
I also believe that with human multicrew, you always see the dudes sitting on the seats... No matter if it's physical or telepresence.
Which makes it even weirder with npc multi crew and all the empty seats.
It's also quite hard to understand why we can hire multiple npcs but only get one active at a time ?

I think crew used to die when your ship got destroyed (before my time) and multiple pilots allowed players to build a stable of pilots to account for their eventual demise.

Originally posted by spam:

I think crew used to die when your ship got destroyed...

Yep. Most people didn't use them for this reason. Was total trash.

Originally posted by spam:

Originally posted by Gargouille_84:

Multicrew 2.0 would be nice !
We can keep some hope with all the good work done in 2024.

Actually, since odyssey if I'm correct, there is both telepresence multicrew and physical multicrew.
I also believe that with human multicrew, you always see the dudes sitting on the seats... No matter if it's physical or telepresence.
Which makes it even weirder with npc multi crew and all the empty seats.
It's also quite hard to understand why we can hire multiple npcs but only get one active at a time ?

I think crew used to die when your ship got destroyed (before my time) and multiple pilots allowed players to build a stable of pilots to account for their eventual demise.

Oh thanks for the information, I was completely unaware of that !

It's mostly just an oversight and the setup is 'video gamed'. It could use a refresher, especially something about the actual science and technology behind telepresence. Of course when the game went into development, they weren't thinking about the potential for AI technologies and how things would escalate into the future.

Realistically, by the year Elite: Dangerous takes place, AI technologies would be light years beyond where it is now, with heavy automation of multiple facets of every day functions. This is also something that happens in sci-fi franchises that haven't adapted to new real-world technologies, with one of the biggest culprits being Star Wars and even Star Trek. One reason that these franchises and similarly themed games don't 'update' the tech to a more accurate version of what the future would look like is that the automation appeal just isn't as exciting. :P

There's also the issue of the cockpit/character body in use on ships and SLFs. For example, when you fly the SLF, it's you in the SLF. It shows your character. You can then fly up to the window of your mama ship's cockpit and see your crewmate actually is in there, flying it. So it is one of those, just shut up and go with it, video gamey things.

Crew did used to die when they bit the dust in combat. Now they don't. Space magic is the explanation. It also means there's little point in having more than one crew member contracted. Each one has to skill-up in combat so leveling 3 characters for the same function, in which they can no longer die, is a waste of funds, since they take a cut of your pay regardless of whether they are active or inactive.

Granted, the space legs update kinda went in a different direction than the original desire players had of just wanting to be able to walk around their own damned ships. Now we got space legs and ground combat is a thing, but we still can't walk around our ships.

Had they ever the budget, expansions to these systems should add that ability, with larger ships having customiseable sections of the ship, like living quarters, mess hall, medical bay, etc. The jumbo sized ships like the Corvette and Anaconda clearly have windows where you can see hallways and multiple doors lining passageways you can't access. The whole 'crew presence' could be expanded significantly, such as hiring out the medical team, or research teams to assist with all that bio scanning and exploration data gathering and analysis. There is a lot of room to grow. IMO, that would have been the better place to start, before then adding stations you could visit on foot and then ground combat. Could have been a more stable experience, and consoles might have been able to at least hang with the content that let them move around their own ships instead of what actually happened that ended up killing console development altogether.

Funny you should mention having crews do things like scanning stuff on planets, this is something that Genesis Alpha One does have and, although the planet surfaces in it are limited to a very small area (it's a much simpler game than Elite), what's there works quite well for it's purpose so I'm sure if FDev wanted to include this kind of bot-assisted gameplay they probably could quite easily.