Finished the quest and went to decommission my fleet. I went through each ship that showed a non-zero number of crew and dismissed them. Interface shows all ships having zero crew, but still shows my fleet as having two ships.
I eventually managed to decommission my fleet by boarding the two ships flying with me, seeing which crew was on the ship and then going back into the fleet mngt tool and doing the following:
1. Assigned the discovered, phantom, crew member to some other ship
2. Went to that other ship (which now showed non-zero crew) and dismissed the crew
Had to do this for all the phantom crew assignments that I found, but once I did that my fleet was then completely decommissioned.
I suspect the issue stems from another, well, I guess one would call it a "design flaw", or maybe a bug, in the fleet mngt UI. When assigning crew to ships, it displays a list of all crew - including those that are currently assigned to other ships. It gives no indication that the crew are already assigned to other ships. If one assigns such a crew member to a new ship, it removes them from the old ship and might actually, silently, decommission the old ship if there are no more crew assigned to the old ship. I know that I ran into this more than once as I was trying to assign crew to a new larger fleet and would find that some ships were being decommissioned by accidentally removing their crew during assignment to a new ship. This is particularly easy to do when one has generic crew members with no way to tell one "ballistic specialist" from another. I suspect that something in that process of accidentally removing crew from a ship by assigning to a new ship, and consequently accidentally decommissioning a ship results in a state management problem where the number of assigned crew to a given ship does not track properly.
I eventually managed to decommission my fleet by boarding the two ships flying with me, seeing which crew was on the ship and then going back into the fleet mngt tool and doing the following:
1. Assigned the discovered, phantom, crew member to some other ship
2. Went to that other ship (which now showed non-zero crew) and dismissed the crew
Had to do this for all the phantom crew assignments that I found, but once I did that my fleet was then completely decommissioned.
I suspect the issue stems from another, well, I guess one would call it a "design flaw", or maybe a bug, in the fleet mngt UI. When assigning crew to ships, it displays a list of all crew - including those that are currently assigned to other ships. It gives no indication that the crew are already assigned to other ships. If one assigns such a crew member to a new ship, it removes them from the old ship and might actually, silently, decommission the old ship if there are no more crew assigned to the old ship. I know that I ran into this more than once as I was trying to assign crew to a new larger fleet and would find that some ships were being decommissioned by accidentally removing their crew during assignment to a new ship. This is particularly easy to do when one has generic crew members with no way to tell one "ballistic specialist" from another. I suspect that something in that process of accidentally removing crew from a ship by assigning to a new ship, and consequently accidentally decommissioning a ship results in a state management problem where the number of assigned crew to a given ship does not track properly.
