Multi-crew is where another player joins your ship using remote telepresence, or you join someone else's ship, once there they can run turreted weapons or the SLF or observe on the cockpit. I could be wrong about what can be done as it is not an area of the game I have tried.
Nah, you are right. Multicrew means that other players can join on your ship, till all seats are full. The additional crew members can use the roles of gunner and SLF pilot. For the gunnery role, the ship needs to have turrets. If a ship only carries fixed or gimballed weapons, the gunner has little to do. For the SLF pilot role, the ship needs to have a SLF hangar installed. And all in all, i only find the SLF role to be worth it.
A ship has a certain number of hardpoints, no matter if there's a gunner or not. So generally, the pilot has to give up like half of his weapons to have turrets there. So in the end, both gunner and pilot feel like they have only half a ship for them, while they could each have a complete ship when flying in a wing.
In contrast, SLFs are actually enjoyable. The carrying ship still gives up an internal slot of class 5 or 6, but many ships can afford that. With a class 6 or higher SLF hangar on your ship, you can even deploy two fighters at the same time. So the pilot still has his own ship, while both players joining his ship can fly a fighter of their own. And these small fighters are a joy to fly and even pack a punch. They're worth having them along, as long as the one using it doesn't get shot down too often.
Loosing a few even is fine. When you loose a fighter, a replacement is reconstructed. On a class 6 hangar, you can have two different kinds of fighters stored, with 8 of each available. It just takes a minute of getting the next fighter ready for launch, when you loose one. But if only one player is using the SLFs, he can even immediately launch the other line of fighters, if one is destroyed. Alternatively, even with only one player as crew member, a NPC allows you to deploy two fighters at the same time.
Outside of that, multicrew has one big advantage and one big issue. The advantage is that it works from anywhere. When one of my rarely playing friends finds time for ED, he just logs in, we go multi-crew and he flies my fighters. No need to fly for half an hour or more till we are at one place and can actually start doing things together. The disadvantage is that when the crew member has a much lower combat rank than the pilot, his payment is reduced a lot.
