You should have a human on your ship. Several, if possible. It doesn’t matter if there’s some sort of fundamental incompatibility between species, they can smooth that over.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like them, you need a human on your ship. Everyone does. Ask any statistician, any logistician, any military official, scientist or mathematician, and they’ll agree: you need a human or several on your ship.

Humans can smooth the incompatibilities, they can make it work. But a ship with a human is statistically more likely to survive than one without. Yes, they’re weak. Yes, they have terrible manners. We’re all aware they’re not the brightest stars in the nebula.

But humans make a ship more likely to survive and thrive. Humans can make anything work. We’ve been trying to figure out how they do it since first contact, but we still don’t know any more now than when we started.

There are too many verifiable stories of ships beyond saving making it to the end of their journey because of human crew members. Patches with no integrity, repairs with no function. As soon as they’re no longer necessary, there is absolutely no evidence showing that they can do what they did. But the ships made it back to berth.

You need a human on board. Somehow, reality bends to their whims, to their unwillingness to simply let things happen. Somehow, a human makes things better.

Some of them call it “luck”. Others call it “jury rigging”. It’s all the same. Humans don’t operate the way we do, and we all benefit from it. What they do is, simply put, not possible.

I’m sure you’ve seen the occasional strange ship at berth. A freighter that somehow limped in missing half their hull, or a fighter that came in with no source of propulsion. A cruiser with no life support, and a living crew.

Humans, all of them. You need a human on your ship because to not have one leaves you vulnerable. Yes, you can still die if you have one. But somehow, they make “hopeless” scenarios shrink into the distance and fade away. The universe itself seems to bend over backwards to please them.

There isn’t any other way to say this. If you have a ship, you need a human on board.