Nelson v1.1.0 — Ship Crew System

Introduces a three-tier agent hierarchy: Admiral → Captain → Crew. Captains can now muster specialist crew members within their ships, enabling deeper task decomposition without inflating the squadron.

What's new

Crew system

• Seven crew roles: Executive Officer (XO), Principal Warfare Officer (PWO), Navigating Officer (NO), Marine Engineering Officer (MEO), Weapon Engineering Officer (WEO), Logistics Officer (LOGO), and Coxswain (COX) — each with a defined function and subagent type
• Crew-or-direct decision tree: Structured rules for when a captain should implement directly (atomic tasks) vs. muster 1–4 crew members
• Ship name registry: Named vessels grouped by class — Frigates, Destroyers, Patrol Vessels, Historic Flagships, and Submarines — matched to task weight
• Read-only roles: NO and COX use the Explore subagent type and cannot modify files, enforcing separation of research from implementation

New standing orders

• Captain at the Capstan — Captain must not implement when crew are mustered
• All Hands on Deck — Do not crew roles the task does not need
• Skeleton Crew — Do not spawn a single crew member for an atomic task
• Pressed Crew — Do not assign crew work outside their designated role

New damage control procedures

• Crew Overrun — Recovery when too many crew are active on a ship
• Man Overboard — Recovery when a crew member fails or goes unresponsive

Other changes

• Ship manifest template added for captains to declare crew composition
• Battle plan template updated with crew fields
• Squadron composition updated — squadron cap of 10 agents, plus up to 4 crew per captain
• README updated with crew system docs and chain of command diagram
• Battleships demo expanded significantly

Installation

Open Claude Code and say:

Install skills from https://github.com/harrymunro/nelson

Or install manually — see the README for details.