Glad you like it.
The first year is going to be a rough race to get your crew and officers to level 7. Run as many as the initial proving your charter missions (the fast ones in the starting quadrant) as you can. Make sure you have your full officer component ASAP (10 officers, 6 crew). Avoid any actual fighting. Prioritize getting 2 levels on 3 jobs on your officers. Each officer is worth 3 crew, but only once you get those levels. The first 2 levels of a job are worth 5 normal levels.

I have a baseline template for the corvette crew above. Until you get your crew up, you will be failing most (all) of the deep space rolls. It's okay. It looks bad, but you can actually fly your ship just fine with almost everything destroyed. It's generally only in combat that it matters. Once you get past that first hump, it will be a much smoother ride.
Consider prioritize getting your ship officers, not your combat crew to give yourself a little bit more room.

Conceptually, this mod is exactly what I was looking for.
However, my captain keeps dying of shipboard accidents in the early game because my crew doesn't have the skill to keep the ship even halfways flying (like, if I fly more than a couple AU, the thing pretty much starts falling apart around me). Do you have any suggestions to mitigate this, other than just hiring more crew (which kind of defeats the purpose)? I can see that it will get better at higher levels, but oftentimes I die in a fire before reaching those levels...

The Main Mod is: https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2539177784
I've made changes so that the Smaller Crews mod doesn't require any other mod and has minimal changes. I've updated the description. Hopefully it helps.

@Jivebot... I feel I am in a similar boat. This mod says it does this thing, but it needs this other mod, maybe, but it is listed as this mod, which is referenced as a mod by another name which may or may not be the mod that you are looking for, depending on whether it is labeled as this other mod. In all seriousness... there are a lot of mods in this "collection", none of which are named "the main one". It feels like it could be renamed or restructured, which would cut down on the confusion.

The main mod is Merchant Marine: Fly Casual. There is also a collection with all of them included.

Descriptions
Merchant Marine: Fly Casual - The main mod. It contains general fixes and new Xeno ships.
Merchant Marine: Equipment - Contains new and rebalanced gear, armor, and weapons.
Merchant Marine: Professions - Contains new professions, job and talent rebalancing.
Merchant Marine: Assistant - Contains a contact with cheating and game testing abiltiies.
Merchant Marine: Smaller Crews - Contains the FireFly Style Gameplay changes.
Recolored MapMarks - Recolors planet icons on the sector and galaxy maps.

There's a ton of Merchant Marine mods. None of them are labeled "The Main One". Which one do I need for this?

Thanks a lot! With this, even I should be able to make that change.

You can edit the mod's files to do that. See the wiki for full modding details, but in general:

* Edit SteamLibrary\steamapps\workshop\content\335620\2856946970\data.sql.
* Find the place where I edit the maxOfficer stat. It's line 76 in my current version and looks like:
UPDATE shipType SET maxOfficer = CAST((maxLifeSupport - 6)/3 AS INT) - ((maxLifeSupport - 6)/3 > CAST((maxLifeSupport - 6)/3 AS INT)) + maxOfficer;
* To set it to double, you'd want to change it to: UPDATE shipType SET maxOFFICER = maxLifeSupport;
* Save.
* It will only impact ships that haven't already been generated. So you'll need to buy a new ship or just start a new game.
* Make a backup copy. If/when the mod is updated it will replace your changes.
* If you go to the wiki you can find instructions on how to make your own personal mod and avoid having to do any rollbacks due to changes. Likewise check out the mini-mods mod on Steam for STF. It shows how you can do a lot of things like this.

This is quite going into the direction I want to, but that's still not enough Officer places for me. Is there a way to double (or something like that) the officer capacity of ship hulls, either on your end, or on mine? I can bust open editor and make some changes with a pointer, but that's the extend of my "coding" abilities, lol.
And if not, still great work!