Chain of Command: Captain or HoS

[Sundance]

90% of the time the HoS has no business telling you how to run your department, so while they're higher in the chain of command than you drag your feet if you wish.
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[li]If you're not a department head, feel free to deflect any of these problems onto your department head.[/li]
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Actually, this is a really good point.

While I do think the HoS is who is trusted more and will be followed vs the Captain, they don't really have the right to say, burst into genetics and start whipping themselves up superpowers while telling the geneticists to take a hike. Unless there's some emergency security reason to do so, they can't barge into departments and order people how to do their job.

The Captain on the other hand, could do this, because they're everyone's boss.

Now, if the order is shit you should defer to your department head and if you are the head you should bring up your issues with the Captain to HoS (ideally I think this would actually be up to the HoP to settle as the HR kinda guy, but they'd probably go to the HoS anyway if the Captain refused to compromise) and if the Captain continued to be crap at the cost of the station the HoS would probably assume command and we're back to where we started.

Actually gotta lend in my support to this aswell. This is a very good example of where the HoS shouldn't poke his nose in. He has no business in demanding genetics stuff, no business in raiding QM, no business in telling the engineers to set up the engine (but can grump like the rest of the crew), no business at telling the chemists what to make, etc. The captain most definetely can try though. And so can heads of their respective department. Actually a small pet peeve is I wish heads would actually act like heads, not even from an RP sense. So the RD actually has some control over what's been researched, rather than being just a better stocked scientist. Topic for another thread perhaps...