Scaling of crew payments

[Hale]

I've got a few really, really small ships and I find it odd that a captain for those are paid just as much as a captain is paid for a huge, ginormous ship.  I can understand more for gunners because they all do the same thing, but I think that payments could scale based on size of the vessel for captains.  It makes sense if you think about it, in my opinion, because you would pay a captain less for a smaller vessel but it would also be less useful in most applications, especially fighting.

[QuikSnap]

IMO payday should be a lot longer than every two hours, I have just two ships and I spend ALL my time either making money for these stooges, or repairing after a raid that happens every 500 seconds.

[Kane Hart]

IMO payday should be a lot longer than every two hours, I have just two ships and I spend ALL my time either making money for these stooges, or repairing after a raid that happens every 500 seconds.

 

I think it's Every 3 hours 180 Minutes.

[LordHavoc]

I don't seem to have any trouble paying my crew. After a few fights with pirates and aliens, I salvage raw materials off their wrecks and that often yeilds more system upgrades and turrets.

I sell a few of these and get thousands. I usually get rid of white system upgrades regardless of type. Turrets, i'll brutally sell anything that has 'overheats' on it.

[SadisticSweety]

Yeeeeeeah, not a biggg issue, when you can sell 1 single exotic force turret for 180k - or steal all the things!! Guess we'll see if it changes after I find Naonite and beyond. LOL

[Thundercraft]

IMO payday should be a lot longer than every two hours, I have just two ships and I spend ALL my time either making money for these stooges, or repairing after a raid that happens every 500 seconds.

 

THIS! A thousand times this!

 

Consider other space sims where we get to pilot large ships with turrets and such. I'm not familiar with any which require us to pay for a crew complement, unless it was for a ridiculously large capital ship.

 

The X-series of games were great in this respect. We could use a literal AI program to control whole fleets of ships, without having to worry about salaries or wages.

 

I could maybe understand the requirement for ships that are under "AI" control and which we can give orders to. But, why do we need to pay for gunners or miners when we are the ones who are actually aiming and shooting the guns and aiming the mining or salvaging lasers?

 

Gunners don't actually fire our weapons - unless we build a separate ship and put it under the control of a captain or something. Gunners can't even give us an aim-ahead targeting reticle to show us how far ahead to aim to actually hit a target. Meaning? The gunners aren't doing their job!

 

Honestly, even if we had an actual aiming reticle, gunners still aren't needed unless the ship is supposed to be autonomous. Mechanical targeting computers have been around since at least WWII. And we have fairly sophisticated ones today. Imagine what kind of targeting computers will be available by the time we get to colonize the stars and space militarization becomes commonplace?

 

What's worse is the requirement to have TWO gunners or TWO miners per turret. I mean... why? Is one of them twiddling their thumbs while the is doing all the work? (Well, of course not. Because I'm the one doing all the work and both of them are twiddling their thumbs.)

 

For that matter, I think it's silly that we have to pay an hourly salary of several thousand credits for a captain just to order our ship to either follow us around like a puppy dog or order it to certain coordinates. A dumb computer should be able to do that much.

 

And don't even get me started on the requirement for hiring several mechanics. While it may be true that structures and vessels in space gradually break down (due to the evaporation of metals in a near perfect vacuum), IRL things do not break down that fast! In a matter of minutes, without enough mechanics, our ship starts to take damage. Now that's ridiculous.

 

IMO, unless a ship is truly big, hiring mechanics should be optional. That is, players would probably hire them anyway for the ability to effect slow repairs without having to dock at a repair facility all the time and to save on massive repair costs.

 

Other players may argue that a crew salary is just a drop in a bucket compared with the many thousands or millions of credits they're making. But when a player starts out in a new universe, particularly new players, it's often difficult to make those payments until a strategy or framework is established to earn lots of money on a regular basis.

 

For instance, I can't imagine that setting up a salaried crew on a fully autonomous ship could possibly pay for itself if ordered to mine asteroids. Mining does not seem very profitable to me - especially since most asteroids seem largely devoid of minerals.