Simply put, a compartment will be more effective if you place a crew member in a slot he has skills in, with leadership people in the 1st slot. Experiment a bit and you will see the green bar go up and down as you move people around. Get the bars as high as you reasonably can. You can hover the mouse over the compartment bar to get an exact status reading in percent.
When you get back to port, people who gained experience in their positions they have capability and training in will get a skill boost and/or are elegible for promotions. Your next mission will have a much better crew.
If you just randomly assign people to positions, you will not have as effective a crew or get rewarded as welll when you get back to base.
To expand a bit further...
Better Control Room crew will answer the helm command faster and be more accurate with the heading and depth keeping.
Sensor crew will detect contacts further away and give better bearing and range estimates. Of course, torpedo crew will load faster.
Engine room crew effectiveness results in faster response to commands, quicker acceleration, and will keep the engines running under stress and combat. It also takes fewer crew to keep the engines running and do so quieter. Should you need to move one or two to damage control or to fill in for another dead crew, a partial crew will still be effective.
At the begining a lot of people complain about ineffective crew and damage not getting repaied fast enough etc. This is because your crews are relatively GREEN and need time and experience. A lot of people give up and rely on cheats to boost the crew so at the end of the tour, you have invincible supermen.
I propose if you are patient, keep your risk manageable in your 1st mission or two and work the sim to build your crew, you will have a very satisfying experience as you see the results of the effort and attention to detail. As the manual mentions, like a good commander, you learned your crew's capability and weakness and made the most of what you got, protecting them from harm, sinking ships, and polishing them into a strong fighting machine. This worked in SH3 and will work here too. I suspect the underlying code is largely intact in this respect. Remember, in 1941 sub crews went to war having never sunk and enemy ship. They had to learn everything by trial in fire.
-Pv-
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