If "serving time" or "transmission of control stuff" were the only things needed for being Veteran and/or Chain of Command, Aleph would be filled with, specially ALL the named Greeks XD Wu Ming. Then they "manage to defect (with no help whatsoever)" to Ikari ;) Live long enough as a hero, you can only end up as a villain.
That reasoning would prevent a recovery from LoL, frankly. I would say, however, that a Chain of Command is a trooper running his comms suite (of which all soldiers have one) either in paralell with the Lt, or with pre-granted privileges for inputting, while the regular soldiers can only "read" the HUD and input what they see, but not issue orders. The delay of one turn would be Mission Control reassigning "command privileges" to the selected trooper, and/or said trooper getting up to speed on the whole situation.
I'm pretty sure Defiance isn't about fixing the ship. (While that is rather exciting for participants, it's not very interesting to wargame)
That depends on the number of Xenomorphs trying to kill your team, of course. And the consequences of said defeat for the rest of the Human Sphere. Now... what if the human team is the attacker? The only thing I was never totally happy with in Star Trek was the huge corridors and rooms in the ships, but the Jeffries tubes had that Alien option... Ah, Drozana Station (the Devidian-related missions in the dark bowels of the station were, along with the Hearts & Minds Friday 13th special mission were my all-time favourites from Star Trek Online).
