Here's [one of] my new player question[s]:

Based on everything I've read, my officers should only get injuries if I'm playing above Normal difficulty, right? So how did my BOff Engineer end up with bruised ribs?

I've never raised my difficulty from Normal. I've participated in one Ground Fleet Action (where I died a lot), but of course she wasn't on the ground with my captain.

My searches didn't turn up anything. I'm really concerned about her!

Were you ever on a team where the leader's difficulty was higher than normal?

Can't say I've noticed the difficulties the handful of times I've teamed, but I know the only times I've teamed have all been ship based, except for the Breaking the Planet ground fleet action. Is it possible for a BOff to get injured in either of those scenarios?

If I remember correctly, if you're in a team and you weren't the one to initiate it, then you (and your ship and Bridge Officers) automatically adapt to the difficulty level of person who did.

I.E. if you're on a team with Jack, Jill, Peter and Rip and Jack's got the difficulty on Elite and he's the one who first created the team, you and the other three automatically play on Elite, whether or not your standard difficulty level is set to that.

Yeah, what I've read says that (most) teams will automatically have you adopt the difficulty of your team leader. I was more wondering if I'm in a space battle, or if my captain's off alone, how could my BOff have gotten an injury?

In the end, the useful part of my question really boils down to: it's still true that, on normal, injuries aren't supposed to happen, right? That info isn't outdated? They're not just extremely unlikely, they simply don't happen? If so, she must have gotten injured on a team and I don't need to worry about holding onto injury-related items while soloing.

You can't get boff injuries in space - ships have their own injuries.

Even if it's hard to track back where it happened, it had to have happened on advanced/elite on the ground.

But, yeah, on normal, injuries don't happen. It's not outdated information, and you don't have to worry about injury items.

Any time you have an injury, you can get them healed at most starbases for free (ESD has one outside the shipyard and one in sickbay), so even playing on elite I generally don't carry them. As long as you don't let them keep piling up (which granted becomes a real problem in some foundry missions - a lot of authors love to doubled-up spawns) you'll be ok.