What does one have to do to aquire a better quality crew? Also, is there any way to buy the services of a trainer to raise the stats on an npc?

There are currently no rules on how to upgrade crews. However, I believe there are a few house ruled ideas for it in the House Rules section.

MILLANDSON said:

Could you link to one please ?

None of the topic titles look like they would have it, and the forum search is useless because I can't tell it to only search there.

Note the "I believe" I don't have a link to any one in specific, I just know it's been discussed a little before in more than one thread. No idea what the thread names would be now though, the discussions were about 4-5 weeks ago now.

There's a ship point cost for upgrading your crew at creation, but nothing more.

As a new ship is assumed to come with a crew, it presumably also applies to buying new ships (Directly added to the difficulty of the test) but buying them on their own is trickier.

Using the acquisitions chart, it would seem to be:

Availability:
By planet and skill of crew (Typically Scarce +0 on a populous world with a star dock)

Scale:
-30 (10,000+ men)

Craftsmanship:
By skill of crew

So upgrading a crew's skill from 30 to 40 at Port Wander would be a profit test of -40 (-30 scale, -10 craftmanship)

St. Jimmy said:

This is pretty much the same conclusion my group came up with as well in regards to upgrading the Crew skill of the vessel.

There's one more crew quality than item quality, some more work is needed.

Graspar said:

If the modifiers given weren't specifically examples, and it's mentioned that they are not an entire list of modifiers, it'd need extra work. Given that they are examples, it's not hard to just chose one more negative modifier.

Graspar said:

Hmm, how about going with the same trend as the availability modifier does? Just find the equivalent penalty for best quality and find the similar penalty but for availability and consult the next step above it concerning availability. Should give you a reasonable figure.

Lots of drills and training (at the risk of morale loss) or experience (gained through endevours).

Thanks, everyone. This thread has helped a lot!

Varnias Tybalt said:

Sure, but I was thinking more along the lines of adding an extra modifier in the opposite direction. After all, a crew that will occasinally hold the lasgun with the wrong end towards the enemy should be rather easy to aquire, just get a few press-gangs together and "recruit" random people off the streets.

*edit* I'd also like to add that I really hate this quote system. What's wrong with BB-code?

Graspar said:

i think rules for the acquisition of crew is actually in the rule-book under crew. Well it's about filling up your crew population, but if you have NO crew at all you have a population of 0 and have to fill it up accordingly.