[Spaceships] Crew traits...

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by GoblynByte

While I don't disagree that the Serenity crew is a fun mix, it puts some impractical demands on Wash. A ship really needs an "operator" of some nature to handle all the instrumentation while the pilot is maneuvering the ship. Otherwise that's a lot of multitasking. Especially in a combat situation. After that, it just makes sense to give the operator the navigation tasks as he can crunch the numbers and plot the courses based on the information he's collecting first hand.

To be fair, combat pilots handle much more information in shorter times than a pilot of a tramp freighter, especially when a split second means life or death. And Serenity lacked ship-grade weapons (I'm guessing the Alliance laid down the law that freighters were to be unarmed). So it's not unrealistic or even impractical; IMO, an "impractical" demand would have been to not have an autopilot for routine flights.

On the other end of the realism spectrum, the Millennium Falcon had a navicomputer that handled getting all the routine updates from the HoloNet and plotting the course itself, leaving Han or Chewie to just switch off the sublight engines and go into a hyperspace wormhole.

Both of them effectively operated on an autopilot for going from point A to point B in space, leaving the pilot to handle landing, takeoff, docking, and combat flying.