How do I swap captains?

[Pares]

So I have a Kalis and a Bolo. I want to swap their captains, so that the Bolo can do advanced sector automine. Both ships have full crew. How do I do this? The "transfer crew" dialog seems completely useless in this case as seen in the screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rgTNg5 ... sp=sharing

No matter how I move the slider or check the checkboxes, I always get some red error message and the Confirm button is always grayed out. Why does a simple operation like this have to be such a convoluted mess? Am I stupid or is this still not easily possible? All this needs is a single button in the middle to swap captains. Is that so hard to implement?

The other thing that bothers me is if I claim a ship or get a ship as a reward without a captain (e.g. the first mission for Hatikvah), when I upgrade the ship, it is not possible to add a captain. You have to add a service crew or marine, then promote him/her to captain. Are you kidding me? And then on the opposite end when I buy a ship the captain is mandatory. Why? The checkbox for the captain is completely useless and disfunctional, how was this not fixed yet?

Seriously, this whole crew system needs a complete rethink and rework from the ground up. I feel like I'm repeating myself and others, but this is a constant source of frustration.

• Crew recruitment is tedious and doesn't make sense
  (Personally hiring random people from the streets to be your slaves forever, sometimes for stupid amounts of money, or personally injecting the "cheap ones" with anti-retardation seminars, the whole concept is just so wrong and immersion breaking. Is this how you hire people in Germany? Why are clueless people allowed to fly multimillion credit capital ships? Where is the Naval Academy? Or the interstellar version of LinkedIn?)
• Experience gain is inconsistent
  (The captain sitting behind me doing nothing while I control the ship gains XP much faster then a pilot who actually makes profit by mining and selling and doing stuff.)
• Crew transfer is annoying at best and broken at worst
  (Is there even a reason not to buy a full complement of slaves... khm, service crew for your ships all the time?)
• And dumbing down the AI is just plain stupid and only creates frustration
  (Honestly, this design decision baffles me the most, it's just unbelievable someone would intentionally dumb down the AI they wrote...)

[Panos]

So I have a Kalis and a Bolo. I want to swap their captains, so that the Bolo can do advanced sector automine. Both ships have full crew. How do I do this? The "transfer crew" dialog seems completely useless in this case as seen in the screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rgTNg5 ... sp=sharing

No matter how I move the slider or check the checkboxes, I always get some red error message and the Confirm button is always grayed out. Why does a simple operation like this have to be such a convoluted mess? Am I stupid or is this still not easily possible? All this needs is a single button in the middle to swap captains. Is that so hard to implement?

The other thing that bothers me is if I claim a ship or get a ship as a reward without a captain (e.g. the first mission for Hatikvah), when I upgrade the ship, it is not possible to add a captain. You have to add a service crew or marine, then promote him/her to captain. Are you kidding me? And then on the opposite end when I buy a ship the captain is mandatory. Why? The checkbox for the captain is completely useless and disfunctional, how was this not fixed yet?

Seriously, this whole crew system needs a complete rethink and rework from the ground up. I feel like I'm repeating myself and others, but this is a constant source of frustration.

• Crew recruitment is tedious and doesn't make sense
  (Personally hiring random people from the streets to be your slaves forever, sometimes for stupid amounts of money, or personally injecting the "cheap ones" with anti-retardation seminars, the whole concept is just so wrong and immersion breaking. Is this how you hire people in Germany? Why are clueless people allowed to fly multimillion credit capital ships? Where is the Naval Academy? Or the interstellar version of LinkedIn?)
• Experience gain is inconsistent
  (The captain sitting behind me doing nothing while I control the ship gains XP much faster then a pilot who actually makes profit by mining and selling and doing stuff.)
• Crew transfer is annoying at best and broken at worst
  (Is there even a reason not to buy a full complement of slaves... khm, service crew for your ships all the time?)
• And dumbing down the AI is just plain stupid and only creates frustration
  (Honestly, this design decision baffles me the most, it's just unbelievable someone would intentionally dumb down the AI they wrote...)

Assuming the vessels are on the same location a dirty way is to fire one service crew, demote one captain. Move the other one to the ship and then promote the other captain to the new vessel. If you are in the same station you can hire the service crew back.
Bear in mind he might cost you millions if is experienced one.

[mr.WHO]

Assuming the vessels are on the same location a dirty way is to fire one service crew, demote one captain. Move the other one to the ship and then promote the other captain to the new vessel. If you are in the same station you can hire the service crew back.
Bear in mind he might cost you millions if is experienced one.

I wish there would be an easier way to swap captains.

Mass swap for higher skill captains/pilots at HQ would be nice to, after we have pilot academy.
I can train 100 new pilots, but then I have to manually swap them 1 by 1

[TheDeliveryMan]

Use a third ship with at least one free crew slot.

[alt3rn1ty]

+1

Quite often I find all I wish to do is exchange Captains.

The only method is as Panos describes, sack someone to make room, get the Captain you want from another ship to work somewhere else (same ship you just fired possibly a valuable experienced service crewman), do the same for the old Captain to the other ship and then hire someone to fill the roll of the guy you fired.
Edit: Or as TheDeliveryMan says, use a third ship in the transfer, but that makes the whole process more tedious if you have many ships to conduct transfers.

Transfer crew is great for pretty much everything else. Though I wonder if I wanted to develop an experienced Crew of one race, say Yaki, can we pick them out individually to transfer?
I haven't done it for a while but pretty sure the Race of a crew member is not noted in the dialogue, some names are obviously Teladi, Split or Paranid, but Terran Argon and Yaki are not so easy to differentiate.

[Pares]

Assuming the vessels are on the same location a dirty way is to fire one service crew, demote one captain. Move the other one to the ship and then promote the other captain to the new vessel. If you are in the same station you can hire the service crew back.
Bear in mind he might cost you millions if is experienced one.

Use a third ship with at least one free crew slot.

Do you know when did I figure these out? Almost three years ago! So since then they created the transfer crew dialog in the game, but forgot to put the option to swap captains in it? Why? How? Is the code base so messed up that it would need a major refactor to implement it, or what?

[-=SiR KiLLaLoT=-]

In the case of 2 ships:

I transform any service personnel as a captain.
I transform a captain who becomes service personnel as a marine.
I do the same procedure on the other ship.
I exchange the two marines.
I wait for them to take places in ships.
I promote the two marines to captain.

[Dj_FRedy]

Easier still. No redundancies are necessary. What you need to do is to promote any one service crew member to captain, for both vessels. Transfer those two captains, now service crew, one to each vessel and now with the option ticked in the checkbox to replace captain.

[Falcrack]

I really, REALLY wish Egosoft would add an option for swapping captains, and not just crew, in the transfer crew command. There are many many times when I've wished this.

[Pares]

Easier still. No redundancies are necessary. What you need to do is to promote any one service crew member to captain, for both vessels. Transfer those two captains, now service crew, one to each vessel and now with the option ticked in the checkbox to replace captain.

This seems to be the best workaround for now, thanks.