StarShip Systems

Each ship design may have different systems to accommodate a certain species, mission, or vibe but there are some things that are true no matter where you are in the galaxy or what you're trying to do.

Automation

Absolutely everything can be automated about a ship, landing/take off, docking/undocking, plotting a course, flying a course, loading/unloading cargo, life support systems, weapon systems from identifying and engaging targets and everything associated with that.

So why have ships manned at all aside from the obvious passenger ships?

This makes the most sense if you break it down into skill levels, unskilled, skilled, intermediate, expert.

Unskilled equivalent algorithms exist, and they're cheap but depending on what the ship is already outfit with it may be cheaper to have an unskilled person. The further you go up this tree of skill the more this becomes true. A skilled naval artillery technician only takes up a rack space, some consumables and be able to do other things than shoot a cannon. A skilled naval artillery algorithm will take up digital space, have a run time, and some amount of always on energy consumption. Their target selection may also look different based on default settings, orders, and what they feel is right. A person may know the technically best shot would be the easier slower moving vessel with a moderate threat ratio, but the fast moving missile will destroy them if its not destroyed, but its a harder shot. The Skilled algorithm would prefer the best technical shot, while the person would prefer to take the riskier but higher reward shot.

You can feel the cost-benefit analysis shift when you start moving to intermediate and expert systems. The person will never require more, except maybe in compensation, but the algorithm will always cost far more in either development time or out of box cost. Higher end algorithms will also cost more power, to the point where expert systems can require too much power for small ships to reasonably produce.

The end result of this is ships picking and choosing systems that are better automated, while some the ship simply won't be able to automate due to power limitations or the no-fail threshold that only people can reasonably give as electronics systems can be hacked during a conflict to render them useless.