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This is absolutely inconsequential, just a question to satisfy idle curiosity.

I'm playing around with a scenario for 26b, and I've noted that many, many US warships do not have the correct commander upon deployment or introduction into the theatre. Sometimes they're just "random," other times they have been given a commander whom, so far as I can determine, never existed on the US Navy list during WW II.

As the information on ship commanders is easily found on Navsource.com or U-Boat.net, I just wonder how this happened, and who these fictional commanders are. I have this idea that they are the names of members of the design team or contributors, but there are so many of them I doubt that's accurate. What is especially weird to me, is that especially in the case of destroyers or submarines, the real commander is in the database, but has not been assigned to his ship.

Any members of the design team still around to answer my idle curiosity of how this happened?

-- Mal

It is time-consuming work to research and assign correct commanders to several hundred ships. But having a different commander is not a blocking issue. I assume that the Devs decided to release the game "as is" instead of investing time and money into perfecting a pretty minor issue. I think they also counted on the modding community to rectify such errors.

It's also likely that those databases with detailed lists of commanders were not available when the game was being developed pre-2009.