Any thoughts on how to use this to add a "passenger" crew replacer? I'm essentially just looking for a way to have a stack count against the personnel count of fleet, but not get counted for raids, colonization, etc.
i am somewhat unsure what you mean.
if you are talking about adding new 'crew' to the 'crew storage' of a fleet, I have no clue how that works, but crew replacer could likely work with it if I know how.
if you are talking about having 'crew' to crew your ships, I also don't know how that works, but crew replacer could also get that to work if I knew how.
you also mention not having a crew type count for raids and colonization (colonization is also not yet supported.). getting a 'crew' to not do a job is very simple task, as every job has its own set of 'crew' that is allowed to do said job, to allow for a lot of flexibility in deciding what a crew can do and how good at it they are. in effect, how you do this is you only add your 'crew' to jobs you want them to do.
for real though, I don't quite understand what you are asking. would you be willing to elaborate?
(also if you do happen to have any ideas at all how to do things like change the number of crew storage that is used in a fleets crew storage, or the number of available crew for ships in a fleet, I would be very grateful if you shared so I could add that to crew replacer)
You never got a reply to this from the OP, but I think I sort of understand what the OP was going for and had a similar thought.
In my mind, a "passenger" commodity could exist, which occupies personnel space capacity similar to crew and marines, but these "passengers" serve no useful functions that either crew or marines have. Instead, these "passengers" would provide a credit income per month. Perhaps not as high as a standard crew costs, but something ($2 or $5 per month maybe).
In this way, the player could operate sort of a space tourism operation. Use your excess crew space on your ships to show non-combatants the wonders of the sector, and help offset the costs of operating your fleet. You would pay a commodity cost per passenger you take on of say $100 (which in an RP sense could be thought as an insurance premium in the event the passenger is killed in action). If you no longer wanted to keep holding passengers, you could sell these off to stations. The price variability would add another RP dynamic -- buying passengers at $80 on a crappy planet and selling them for $120 at a better planet is simply a transportation fee the passenger is willing to pay to get to a better world. Operating with passengers is a gamble that A) you can keep passengers alive long enough to earn back their purchase cost in monthly income and B) that if you need the space for actual crew or marines and need to sell off passengers, that you have brought them to a world they value more than the world from which you initially acquired them.
As an example of how this could play out; your fleet is a paragon and a starliner. 350 required crew, 2500 maximum crew. Bring along 500 actual crew to operate both ships and have reserves for potential losses, at a monthly cost of $5,000. Carry 100 marines just in case for raids or bar missions, at a monthly cost of $2,000. Bring along 1900 "passengers" willing to pay $5 a month, for an income of $9,500. In total, your fleet generates $2,500 a month of income, which might be enough to pay for the paragon's officer salary.
I see NPC "tourism fleets" in my playthrough, but to be honest I have no idea if this is vanilla or Nex or IndEvo content. But the concept is already sort of operating out there already for NPCs to take advantage of, so it would make sense for this sort of secondary income stream to be available to the player too.
The main fundamental difference and challenge to what crew replacer does, is that AI retrofits creates cargo commodities, whereas it would be most appropriate to create a personnel commodity with this item type.
