1) A question - how does the "TF" pulldown associated with the TG interact with the TOE tab? My inclination would be to deprecate the TF pulldown from the TG, or at least not have it change the TF assignment of ships within it (i.e. it only indicates which TF headquarters should be used for accessing training levels of the ships in that TG - it doesn't change the TF assignments of the ships). I realize that this would break the "you can igore this if you want" statement about the 4th tab, but I prefer using the 4th tab as the means of assigning ships to TF over using the TG, even if one doesn't put any sub-structure into the TF.
When you create a TG at the moment it was use the parent TF of whatever branch you specified. However, now you have pointed this out I realise that you can move ships from TF to TF on this tab when you move stored branches. At the moment it doesn't change the TF in that situation but that is through accident rather than design.
I am tempted to remove the loss of training points when you switch task forces and treat the training points as general fleet training rather than task force specific training. It's the training itself that is more important and I think the loss of TFTP when you switch TFs is too much micromanagement for the small gameplay benefit. This would mean that moving units between task forces becomes an admin function and you don't have to worry too much about the implications. You will still have to train ships to operate as fleets but their ultimate assignment won't affect that. In fact, this change would allow you to create a Training Task Force with appropriate officers and designate a system as the fleet training centre.
A follow up. I have removed the loss of TFTP for changing TFs so you can now swap ships between TF as much as you like, although they will still need fleet training regardless of which task force they are assigned to.
I agree that the new Naval Org Chart should be the final arbiter of TF assignment. Therefore when you assign a ship to a branch of the org chart, it's task force changes to match the parent TF of that branch. This create a small problem however. At the moment, both ships and task groups have an assigned task force and I have made sure that every ship in a task group has the same task force as that task group. The new org chart is going to make that impossible to maintain because a TG could contain ships from multiple task forces. On the basis that the Org Chart is the permament organization structure of the Navy and task groups are, as the name suggests, simply groups of ships assembled for a short-term task, I think the simplest solution is to make task groups independent of task forces. A task group would no longer have a set task force and instead individual ships within that task group could belong to different task forces.
That leaves the question of how ships in a task group benefit from their parent task force for the purposes of training, responding to orders, logistics, etc. I can see several alternatives
1) The ships in a task group could train, or respond to orders, based on the stats of their different task forces as long as they are in the same system as the TF HQ, which is a little messy.
2) Ships could be placed on detachment from their permanent task force for the purposes of training or other activites and this would be handled at the TG level. In other words, a TG would have a temporary TF designation. Not entirely happy with this though as what would be the point of the TFs in the org structure
3) Task groups are restricted to ships from the same TF (which defeats some of the cross-branch opportunities)
4) The TF function as it stands is changed to two different geographically-based functions. One is a Port Admiral function based on a planet that provides non-combat bonuses, such as logistics or improved maintenance, to all ships within a given system. The other is a Flag Bridge based function that provides combat-related bonuses to all ships in the same TG, or within a given radius in km. These two functions are independent of the Org structure and ships are no longer assigned to a TF at all, just a point on the org structure. In this case, the TF layer of the org chart would use only the Port Admiral TFs, or no TF at all. In the latter case, Task Forces become, like TGs, independent of the permanent org structure and are used to influence nearby TGs for training, combat, etc.
5) Other suggestions welcome
Steve