Let me clarify the title. Building large ship gameplay PRIMARILY around HUMAN crew likely will fail. In my view, in order for large ship gameplay to thrive, AI crew will need to be the primary focus, and human crew secondary. Why do I say this? Getting enough human players willing to abandon their own gameplay to come man turrets and play engineer on your ship, so that you can go about your day/night playing is going to be difficult. Imagine you come home from work and just want to fly your Carrack and be able to have some fun. You are going to be locked out of major gameplay unless you can get 4-6 people willing to gun and operate your ship for however long you want to play. 4-6 people is on the small end of crew requirement. Imagine trying to gather enough players to fly an Idris or Javelin. Now imagine trying to coordinate that many people in real time. Now imagine this is YOUR ship full of YOUR stuff. You better hope you trust every single one of those crew, and we know how bad players In MMO‘s can be. It’s going to be a nightmare. Large ship gameplay is going to need to be built primarily around AI crew, with human crew as secondary if this is ever going to work.