I see this topic come up from time to time, and I want to comment on it. Multi-crew gameplay - as a concept - is bad. Its not going to work out, and we shouldn't want it to work out. We should yearn for the death of multi-crew gameplay. And the way we kill it, is with crew NPCs. Multi-crew gameplay requires an actual human being to act as someone's turret gunner. I get that some people like to do this from time to time, and there might even be a few - very rare - souls out there that don't mind turret gunning full time... but for most players being a turret gunner is boring. Its just less fun to man someone's turret than it is to pilot your own ship in combat. I used to play a game called "Atlas". Atlas, has a lot of similarities to Star Citizen, and one of them is that it includes large vehicles (ships in Atlas' case) that have turrets that can be manned by players. And I played Atlas back before Atlas added NPC crewmen, and it was terrible. You'd get on someone's ship, and be bored out of your mind. You'd watch them make mistakes and be trapped in their ship and doomed to die due to those mistakes. Every once in a while you'd get to shoot at something, but for the most part... it was a boring terrible experience. The moment the game got NPC crew, everyone stopped manning turrets. It was amazing, suddenly everyone had a ship, and could run their own ship themselves, and most ships would have no more than 2 players on them, a Captain and a co-Captain for when the Captain had to use the bathroom or got bored on a long journey. No person wanted to be a turret gunner anymore, because why do that when you could have your own adventures? And that - I believe - is the future of Star Citizen... for the vast majority of ships. And that is good, because we were happy in Atlas when we didn't have to man someone's damn turret, and we'll be happy in Star Citizen when we don't have to man someone's turret (or find people willing to man our turrets). So multi-crew gameplay... its going to die, and more importantly... it deserves to die. And I know some of you are thinking "But I have this dream, where I'm going to have a crew on my Hurricane/Redeemer/Hammerhead/Idris/Javelin and I'm going to be the Captain and my faithful crew will man my ship like in Star Trek". And I'm sorry, but that's not likely to happen at all... its a bad dream, because it requires other people to spend their free time in a game acting as your subordinates... its a selfish dream. That said, I do have good news for you. I think it WILL be possible to be a Captain, and have people live on your ship, and play with you if that's really what you want. You can still be the Captain. But to do that, you need to buy a carrier. You're not going to find a bunch of full time turret gunners to run your ships, but... you might find people willing to live part time on your carrier. The trick is that they're not serving you as a turret slave, performing a bad gameplay role to enable your dream in that case. In that case, you're enabling their dream, by allowing them to move around and fight and play and not worry about the logistics of getting their stuff from A to B. So the dream lives on... although in a slightly different form. TLDR: NPC crews will kill the dream of multi-crew ships, but that's okay, because multi-crew was never a good idea anyway.