Artist's commentary
The Child Admiral Has Debuted: Side Story 128
The time has finally come where I can touch on this. In panel 2, they're talking about what happened around #75 of the main story.
As I brought up a long while back, when playing the original game normally, you're supposed to have a greater number of ships by the time training advances this far, but if I reflected that situation as-is, the character introduction strips would just go on forever, so in this series, I've understated the rate of ship-girl acquisition to about what you've seen so far, advancing the story by emphasizing interactions over introductions. For now.