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.

who is in my fighter bay Ask Nothing to set up. Your crew comes out of the journal. Each one keeps their own voice and their own way of talking.

2 Address them by name.

Vasquez, how is the fighter holding up? [VASQUEZ] Still flying, Commander. Wing took a knock. Start with the name and the turn goes to them instead of the ship's AI.

! The one that stops people.

Only the crew you have actually hired can answer. A name that is not on your roster reaches the ship AI, which will say so rather than invent somebody.
Why it works this way

The pilots you have hired, and how to talk to one of them instead of your ship's AI.

1 The name has to be at the front.

“Vance, what’s the fighter looking like?” → goes to Vance “What does Vance think of the fighter?” → goes to your ship’s AI That is a real difference, not a parsing quirk. A bare name works too — it is how you get somebody’s attention. Matching costs nothing and uses no model.

2 They are people you hired, not another Guardian core.

A GUARDIAN CORE a million years old, with tools and tables SOMEBODY YOU HIRED at a station, last week no tools, no database Asked something they cannot see from where they sit, they say so.

They speak in their own voice, kept for the session like any other. Unlike the cores, they share the active persona's transcript — the cores cannot know about each other, but the crew and the ship's AI are aboard the same ship and plainly do.

3 The roster is short because Elite's is.

WHAT ELITE WRITES name · combat rating on duty, or off the books and that is all of it WHAT IT DOES NOT no engineer no gunner 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 the confident wrong answer the guardrails exist to prevent.

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

Address one of them by name to talk to them directly, for example "Vance Ilo, status".

Talking to one of them

Open with their name and the turn goes to them instead of your ship’s AI.

“Vance, what’s the fighter looking like?”

The name has to be at the front. “What does Vance think of the fighter” is a question for your ship’s AI about Vance, and that is a real difference rather than a parsing quirk.

A bare name works too — it is how you get somebody’s attention.

Matching is done without the model, against the names in your journal. That means it costs nothing, it cannot pick the wrong person, and it does not need a model to know who you are talking to — only to have them answer.

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.

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.

The tool surface, for contributors

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}

Addressing is resolved before the turn runs, in CrewAddressing.Match, against the closed set of names the journal supplied — the same shape the keyword router uses. The crew brief replaces the persona block for that turn only and is restored in a scope’s Dispose, so a crew turn cannot leak the wrong persona into the next one.

Crew share the active persona’s transcript rather than owning their own. That is the opposite of the rule for the Guardian cores, and deliberately: the cores cannot know about each other, but the crew and the ship’s AI are aboard the same ship and plainly do.