Captains

The role of starship Captain is not for everyone. While it may seem, at first glance, that attaining the position of Captain will allow a player to be 'the boss' (and this is certainly partially true), the captain holds the greatest responsibility of anyone aboard a starship: keeping the crew and vessel alive and intact.

Becoming a Captain
When a Chief (of any department) achieves sufficient merit points, he or she will receive a system-generated long-range comm informing them of their promotion to Captain. The game engine will, behind-the-scenes, search the galaxy for currently un-Captained beginner starships of the appropriate department, and present the player with a list of them (if no such craft is available, one will be created at a starbase).

The new captain may then read about each vessel and its crew (via the database), and ultimately choose which ship he or she would like to command (ships chosen by other new captains are deleted from the list in real-time). Alternatively, a player who wishes not to assume command of a vessel can simply decline to be promoted; doing so will cause the player's character to suffer a TBD loss in merit points, but not enough to cause the character to be demoted below their pre-captain rank.

Once a ship is chosen, a notification of this promotion and appointment will be sent by long-range comm to the Captain of the character's current vessel, the acting-Captain of the starship the new Captain has selected, and to everyone on the newly-promoted Captain's friends list.

Once this has occurred, the newly-promoted Captain's former vessel cannot take on any missions until that character has disembarked. Similarly, the Captain's new vessel cannot take on any missions until her new Captain is aboard (the new captain and the vessel's acting-captain(s) are each temporarily added to each others' friends lists, to facilitate the transfer).