NPC crews and workstations

There has already been talk about there being NPCs in the roadmap, but they seem to be intended to be NPCs on other ships and stations. I would love for there to also be NPCs that work for you, on your own ship.

The way that this would work is that crew are tied to your ship which has a crew management tab in the control panel now. You can hire crew if there is an easily accessible walking path between your ship and a docked trade station, or between your station and a docked trade ship. They will then physically walk from their old home to their new one. If you dock with one of your own ships or stations and there is a walkable path between them then you can transfer your crew using the crew management interface.

In order to move a crewmember to a ship or station there needs to be a free bed. Whatever pressurisable room that bed is in will be considered their bedroom (Though you can make crew swap beds or declare a bed, or even an entire room, to be off limits to the crew if you want because it's your bedroom). If there are multiple beds in a single room then it's treated as a barracks. The idea is that the quality of their sleeping quarters will buff (or penalise) the quality of a specific crew member compared to their randomised base quality, so individual rooms, more space per crew member, windows to outside, and other blocks that might be in the crew quarters will all make the bedroom buff the crew member more.

Having additional specific rooms can further buff crewmembers as well, as long as the additional rooms are given life support and are accessible by the AI from, their bed. All together this will mean that there is actually an incentive to build elaborate crew quarters for reasons other than roleplay, and stop those things from just being a waste of space and mass, since the more space, energy and mass you devote to them the higher quality your crew will be.

The way you actually use crewmembers is with workstations, which are structures that can be built on your ship or station. As long as a workstation is accessible from the NPC's bed then they can be assigned to it, and their effectiveness in that workstation will scale with their quality from their quarters and crew facilities, along with their innate skills, which might cause a crewmember to be better at one job than another or to be just okay at everything or something. While assigned to a workstation they always provide the full benefits to their workstation, because waiting for all of your crew to finish sleeping just so you can use your ship at full capacity for 5 minutes until some member of your crew goes off to do something else isn't fun.

That said having them always just be rigidly standing at their workstation is also kind of boring, so the way I think they should work is that while they always provide max value they will actually wander around your ship doing different animations. They will spend time asleep in their quarters, interacting with each other and using the amenities in common areas, or when working they will use their assigned workstation but they will also use other workstations of the same type in the same room if there are any there. When the ship is in combat though they should all run to and stay exactly at their stations so that there's no path-finding or intensive calculations during combat which is already the most resource-intensive part of the game due to breaking and deforming ships. Crew quality should also be fixed during this time for the same reason.

For types of workstations, there should be the following types:

Engineering: These workstations get linked to reactors and other power-producing blocks in the same room as them, or nearby them in the case of turbines and solar cells. They increase the amount of power that a reactor can output and the reactor's power to fuel efficiency. They would incentivise having actual engineering rooms wherever your reactors are, rather than just sealing them in a heavy armour coffin.

Piloting: These workstations buff the effectiveness of mobility blocks such as gyroscopes, thrusters and wheels, increasing their max turning speed, thrust, and wheel speed respectively, or decreasing the power usage of these blocks if you're not making them go all out. They buff the entire ship. This would encourage more interesting and spacious cockpits and bridges so you have room for the workstation block or blocks.

Manufacturing: These would improve the speed and power usage of refineries, assemblers, H2/O2 generators and any other manufacturing blocks in the same room as them. These would make it more worthwhile having your manufacturing blocks be laid out in an accessible way rather than just burying them deep in your conveyor network.

Operations: These would buff drills, welders, grinders, and blocks like that for the entire ship, improving their speed, energy use, and in the case of drills resource yield.

Security: These blocks would buff the weapons and turrets for a whole ship, improving the tracking speed for turrets, the firing rate and potentially the damage per projectile. Specific workstations can be tied to specific turrets massively increasing that turret's buffs but cutting the buff off of every other weapon.

Hanger Support: These would be in the hanger and they allow small ships that fit within the same enclosed pressurisable room as the workstation to be repaired or potentially even built from scratch, as long as all parts are available, and enough personnel are provided to reach a minimum total quality of crew that scales with the size of the space(The better your crew are the fewer people you need, and additional personnel after you've reached the minimum just increases the speed of repair). This gives you the benefit of being able to quickly and easily repair and build ships once you have reached the point in the game that doing so isn't a challenge just time-consuming, since any grid that you do this with is going to be by definition in a larger already built grid that has enough crew quarters, common areas, power, and manufacturing infrastructure to support that hanger.

Crew Support: These blocks increase the quality of all crew except for whoever is working them. This isn't important for small ships, but once you have a large enough crew these roles start to scale really well. The blocks themselves would be something you would put in a medical lab, a bar, or some other facility that crew members might use. They would encourage more of those sorts of facilities on your ship.