Hey Solari! My name is Oscar, and I’m the programmer on the HMS Marulken project. I read your comment, and you make many good points. I’ll try to explain why the game works the way it does!
The intelligence officer is indeed not supposed to steer the ship. This was a last minute change we made, since the intelligence officer didn’t have much to do in the old version of the game. This is mostly because we made the intel officer last, so very little time was spent on making that position work well.
The time spent traveling will of course depend on the mission, but a big part of the game is navigating the sea.
The role of the Engineer is not really to repair the ship, it’s mainly a resource management role (ie managing the ship’s batteries, making sure you have enough oxygen etc). The game won’t have any NPC crew members.
The reason you play a Swedish sub, and not for example a German one, is that we wanted to give the game a lighter tone. We wanted to make an alt-history game because it opens up new possibilities for interesting scenarios, but also because it distances the game from the tragedy of the second world war.
The reason we are running a Kickstarter is that the game is in an alpha stage, and we want to give it a lot more depth and content than we could in the short time we worked on it in university.
I will be happy to answer any further questions you have about the game.
/Oscar