Research are only available in 3 cities: Nantucket, Peterhead and Honolulu. Apart from this, some compartments require a special skill in order to start the research. You can hire a crew member with the right skill or you can unlock and assign the skill to the Captain.

If you click on the compartment you want to upgrade, there is a list of requirements. If there is a skill needed, you will see it there.

Alrighty, thanks a bunch.

Very frustrating how you're forced to hire crew with a specific subclass in order to progress to better ships, especially when there's room for only 3 crew, and two of those are forced to be engineers, or engi + sailor or engi + scientist. That, or mess up your captain in order to unlock a compartment. Still hurts when upgrading, gaining the ability to have 6 crew, you now need 4 of them specialized to compartments to further upgrade. This leaves very little flexibility in how you'd like to from your crew.
Bad design choice here.

Originally posted by Antiga:

Very frustrating how you're forced to hire crew with a specific subclass in order to progress to better ships, especially when there's room for only 3 crew, and two of those are forced to be engineers, or engi + sailor or engi + scientist. That, or mess up your captain in order to unlock a compartment. Still hurts when upgrading, gaining the ability to have 6 crew, you now need 4 of them specialized to compartments to further upgrade. This leaves very little flexibility in how you'd like to from your crew.
Bad design choice here.

I agree. It was a bit annoying to manage the crew like that but I finally got the Large ship so now I got a decent crew but it kind of hurt I had to fire one of my starting guys to get this working.

I got the large ship from the starting ship found it to be very easy once i realised what i had to do. The problem is everyone is a filthy casual these days and arent interested in the slightest bit of thinking

Originally posted by Antifreedomring:

I got the large ship from the starting ship found it to be very easy once i realised what i had to do. The problem is everyone is a filthy casual these days and arent interested in the slightest bit of thinking

It is actually the reverse of thinking.

You need no thinking at all to hire a crew man that has this skill to get this ship.

Thinking would be having passive skills that take more than 1 point to buy...do i want to wait 2 levels to get this skill to keep this crewman? Or just go with this setup and hire this guy and get that hunting skill now?....see that is thinking.

Yeah it sucks I have to fire one of my 3 crew members in order to hire the guy with the skill to research what I want to research to buy my next ship. I am attached to these guys! And one of them is my lover!

Holy necro batman

This is my main gripe with the game. Makes ZERO sense. Stupid mechanic. You end up with useless sailors because you have to pick some bad classes for a upgrading a boat.