How to command crew?

[MarvinTheMartian]

5 hours into my first game and first frustration with the UI

I have found and claimed a derelict ship, I have a marine on board and I want him to pilot the other ship - how else am I meant to get it somewhere safe?

We're in space, a few metres away from the other ship and I locate the crew in the menus but there's now context menu to assign the marine to captain the other ship! Where in the UI menu can I do this? I've scanned through a pile of YouTube videos without finding any detailed examples and I'm not even sure if menus might have changed since those videos were made.

Both ships are owned by me, I'm piloting the claimed ship with the marine on board the claimed ship. I miss the X3 menus.

[pref]

Iirc you had 2 lists of crew on that window, the second one could be expanded and that was where reassigning was possible..?

[MarvinTheMartian]

Turns out they're too lazy to spacewalk, I did the deed and then promoted one of the crew on my new ship to pilot once I was back in the captain's chair on my original ship. Now if I can just figure out how to order them to land at a station...

[Xcaliber]

Not sure how you both ended up on the claimed ship!!

View property menu (second from top on left) -> left click to highlight the ship (make sure it's highlighted) -> right click and select information -> left click personnel -> crew -> full crew list -> marines -> recruit (probably).
Right click on marine and select promote to captain.

If you press enter and select Get Up from top menu and move away he should then take over. Guess you'll have to spacewalk back to original ship. Good Luck!!!

[MarvinTheMartian]

Thanks, that is what I did.

Found the derelict by chance, claimed it myself and went off to get a pilot for the starting ship (It's twice as fast as the starting ship with docking mk2 and other goodies) figuring I would go back, kick him out the airlock and he'd fly it to the nearest station for me. Instead, we had to do the swap in a station.

Enjoying it so far but finding the control system frustrating.

[DaMuncha]

swapping pilots is frustrating as hell, and you cant hire a new pilot from the equip dock if you already own the ship.

[RodentofDoom]

Once an extra ship has a pilot you can give it orders on the map

select the ship, then right click a station somewhere, [dock at xyz] will be one of the commands

[Tamina]

swapping pilots is frustrating as hell, and you cant hire a new pilot from the equip dock if you already own the ship.

Why? What happens when you select the "Hire captain"-checkbox in crew menu?

[Lord Crc]

swapping pilots is frustrating as hell, and you cant hire a new pilot from the equip dock if you already own the ship.

I just did this. Found a derelict ship, claimed it, flew it myself to a station (trading station in this case), exited the ship, found some bloke in the docking area, hired him and I got a choice if he should be captain or service crew. I selected service crew but then changed my mind, so I went to ship info menu and promoted him to captain.

Tedious yes, but possible.

[DaMuncha]

swapping pilots is frustrating as hell, and you cant hire a new pilot from the equip dock if you already own the ship.

Why? What happens when you select the "Hire captain"-checkbox in crew menu?

Nothing, it is uncheckable, it just stays as a blank box, unclickable. It is only selectable when you buy a new ship. you cannot buy a captain for a ship that you allready own. This has been the case since the day the game came out and is still that way and everyone I have talked to who owns the game has this problem too. The only way to hire a new captain is to buy a cheap new courier ship for 100k, tell the new captain to work at the claimed ship, and then sell the empty courier back to the station.

You can hire a crewman NPC to work at the claimed ship directly off the platform but he has 0 skills and cant perform even basic trade instructions.

Why on Terra is the pilot bar only accessible if there is a black market dealer quest on board?