How to use it
Two steps to talking to somebody other than the ship.
1 Hire a pilot in the game. D47 reads your roster.
Hire a pilot in the game, then say "who is in my fighter bay".
D47 names the crew from your journal roster, each with their own voice.
2 Select them on the Crew channel, then use the comms key.
Say "comms Vasquez", then hold the comms push-to-talk and say "how is the fighter holding up".
The crew member answers, and answers every comms question while they stay selected.
! The one that stops people.
Use the name of a crew member you have hired.
That crew member answers; any other name reaches the core, which says they are not aboard.
Why it works this way
The pilots you have hired, and how to talk to one of them instead of your core.
1 The name has to be at the front.
2 They are people you hired, not another Guardian core.
They speak in their own voice, kept for the session like any other. Each keeps their own conversation, the way the carrier's captain does, and the core is told each exchange as one it overheard rather than one it had — it can refer to what was said, but the pilot's answers are never added to its own conversation.
3 They stay on comms while selected.
4 The roster is short because Elite's is.
A posting to a particular ship is derived, not reported: Elite's assignment event names no ship, so Directive 47 remembers which hull you were sitting in when you assigned somebody. A roster it has never seen says so, rather than saying you have no crew — those are different answers, and only one of them is true.
The details
The pilots you have hired, and how to talk to them.
Ask for it
“who is aboard” “who is on duty” “crew roster”
2 pilot(s) on the books:
Vance Ilo (Expert) — on duty in the fighter bay, assigned aboard Long Way Home
Ilse Bruhn (Competent) — off duty
Select one on the Crew comms channel and use the comms key to talk to them directly, for example "comms Vance Ilo".
Talking to one of them
Select them on the Crew comms channel, then speak on the comms push-to-talk, and the turn goes to them instead of your core.
“comms Vance”, then on the comms key: “what’s the fighter looking like?”
Push-to-talk goes to your core, so “Vance, what’s the fighter looking like?” on it is a question for your core about Vance.
They speak in their own voice, kept for the session like any other. They are people you hired at a station, not another Guardian core: they are not a million years old, they have no tools, no database and no way to look anything up, and asked something they cannot see from where they sit they will say so.
An intercom does not fade the way the carrier’s captain does over distance. Every comms question reaches the same pilot while they stay selected. The core is told each exchange as one it overheard, so it can refer to what was said, but a pilot’s answers are never added to the core’s own conversation.
What Directive 47 actually knows about your crew
Only what Elite writes down, which is less than you might expect:
| Known | From |
|---|---|
| Name | CrewHire |
| Combat rating | CrewHire, updated by NpcCrewRank |
| On duty or on shore leave | CrewAssign |
| Off the books | CrewFire |
There is no engineer, no gunner and no navigator. Elite’s hired crew are fighter pilots and nothing else, so that is the whole roster. Inventing posts to fill it out would be exactly the confident wrong answer the anti-invention guardrails exist to prevent.
“Per-ship rosters”, and what they actually are
Elite’s CrewAssign names no ship. Your hired crew are a pool that belongs to you, and
whichever one is on duty flies in whatever hull you happen to be sitting in.
So the posting shown above is derived, not reported: where Directive 47 saw you assign somebody, it remembers which ship you were in at the time. A ship it never saw an assignment aboard reports nobody rather than everybody, and crew hired before Directive 47 was watching have no posting at all until you next reassign them.
If a roster has never been seen, it says that rather than saying you have no crew — those are different answers, and only one of them is true.
A picture for each pilot
Each hired pilot’s row on Fleet › Crew has Change picture and Use the default. The picture is kept under the pilot’s game crew id, not their name, so two pilots with the same name keep separate pictures. It shows beside that pilot’s turns on the Conversation page. A pilot you fire keeps their file, and a rehire with the same crew id gets it back.
People of your own
This page covers the pilots you hire in the game. People you name yourself, aboard or elsewhere, are
characters: see Characters. Crew seats from earlier versions became characters the
first time this version loaded, one per name, aboard, with the seat’s role in their notes, and their
callouts went back to the core. The old seat file is kept as data\crew-seats.migrated.json.
The tool surface, for contributors
The pilot speaks when the fighter moves
The pilot in the fighter bay speaks, unprompted, when the fighter launches, docks, is destroyed or is rebuilt. The lines are fixed phrases, not model output, and state only what the journal event says. With no pilot assigned nothing is said. See Fighter pilot.
describe_crew
Reports the hired pilots, their combat ranks, who is in the fighter bay and which hull each was assigned aboard. Takes no arguments.
{"type":"object","properties":{},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}
CrewLine answers a comms turn while the Crew channel selects a pilot by CrewId, the way
CaptainLine answers for the captain on the Carrier channel, with no tool offered on any of those
turns.
Each pilot keeps their own transcript, one per CrewId, rather than sharing the core’s. The
core is told each exchange as overheard rather than reading it from a shared history, so a
pilot’s words are never mistaken for its own.