SMS includes an award system for recognizing crew members for accomplishments. These awards can created by the CO of the ship, or can be that fleet's awards, it's up to the CO. By default, SMS does not come with any awards are images, but they can easily be added by the CO of the ship by following these easy steps.
Whether you create the images yourself or get them from your fleet, the first step is to acquire the images and put them some place on your local computer. The best place for them is probably your desktop. It's important that if you aren't creating the images or they don't come from your fleet that you first obtain permission to use the images. We recommend two versions of each award image: one large image and one small image. These different versions are explained in the next section.
SMS requires award images to be hosted on the same server as SMS. This is done to prevent people from hot linking to award images from another server. Once you have the images and are ready to use them, open the FTP editor of your choice and upload them to your SMS site. In the images directory, you will find a sub-directory called awards where you will store all your award images. Upload the images to that folder.
SMS displays the award images on playing characters' biographies (SMS 2.5 introduced some logic so that NPCs will not have the awards section displayed). If you so choose, you can provide a large version of each award image. The large image can be used by the page that lists all the available awards. Effective in SMS 2.6, the system will be smart enough to check for that large version of the award image, and if it doesn't exist, fall back to the smaller version.
With your award images uploaded to your server, login to SMS and go the Awards Management page (found under Control Panel > Manage). If you have never added awards, the page will be blank except for the add section at the top. From there, you can create the order, title, image location and description of the award. Once you've provided all the information for your first award, click Create and your first award is done. Continue through all your awards in the same manner until they're finished.
Once everything is set up, you'll now be able to use the Give Crew Award option in the menu. From there you can give any of the awards in the system to a member of your crew.