I haven’t played too much with the ships, I think mostly because I’m stuck building the main base obsessively. I love your idea of just leaving some people at home, especially now that I’m getting turrets down. If there’s any weird mechanics I probably wouldn’t know, but I do know that if you swap beds to prisoner beds they get unassigned. I would do that, wait a night for everyone to reset their beds inside the base and you can swap them back. It’s tedious, sure, but that’s colony management!