I had an idea lately that the respawn time should be lowered for an understaffed ship.
tl;dr: I would suggest a factor of $crew_size/$max_ship_size
to the current respawn time function.
I'm mainly a solo slooper and I doubt that anyone would disagree that this is the "hardmode" in SoT for various reasons.
One of them is if your pirate dies in naval combat your ship likely sinks too. All it takes is one lucky cannon shot from your opponents and to Davy Jones locker you go.
The method suggested above would be a small way to balance this out a bit. It would also help understaffed crews on bigger ships.
In the table below are the factors based on crew size and ship size.
crew size| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
==========================
sloop|1/2| 1 | - | - |
brig|1/3|2/3| 1 | - |
galleon|1/4|1/2|3/4| 1 |
E.g. a solo slooper would be able to respawn twice as fast; a 2-pirate brig respawn would take a third less, etc.
I think it should just be based on players in the crew and not based on crew members on the ship to make it hard to exploit the system.
What do you think about it?