Alex, regarding the patch note about Stations and Officers:
I know planting an Alpha Core on a station is a pretty large benefit overall to a station and currently the only way to add an "officer" to a station for the player. (Until the next release.) With the change you're proposing, have you ever considered letting the player manually assign an officer from his active fleet to a station?
My thoughts on this would be that doing so would freeze the officer's growth (so no leveling up) while freeing up an officer slot in the fleet. The officer would still count against the player for payroll.
Actually, maybe even increase the payroll cost by some percentage. Managing a station and overseeing/organizing its defense can't be easy. Said officer would essentially be a fleet commander at this point.
And speaking of officers: will there be a better way to manage them? I currently have to open the fleet screen and then click on an officer box to access the officer management screen when I want to review/level my officers. Or am I missing an interface function to directly go to that screen? (Though that screen doubles as the officer assignment screen, which I sometimes dislike as I can easily and readily re-assign officers to ships accidently while trying to manage them.)
I feel like the player character and officer management screens should be integrated somehow. (I'm kinda biased towards your typical party management menu in RPGs and the like, where the player character is just another, if unique, party member.)
I also feel like I should be able to pick an officer and assign a ship to him/her, not just pick a ship and assign an officer. (i.e. I should be able to either match an officer to a ship or a ship to an officer.) This point is something minor, but I find myself more often wanting to give an officer a certain ship rather than give a ship a certain officer.