Who was in operational command of Thanos's ship?

Question

In Avengers: Endgame

Thanos and his spaceship jump into the future and fight the Avengers.

Towards the end of the battle the ship's cannons rotate upwards and begin firing at the approaching

Captain Marvel.

This was a direct contradiction of the order Thanos himself gave when he commanded the ship to fire at the ground, regardless of whether he was hitting his own troops or not.

Clearly someone on board the ship had the authority to ignore the order and decide to fire somewhere else instead.

Who was it?

Presumably some information exists in the MCU about who is in charge of the ship when Thanos isn't on board.

Answer 1

Who, I don't know (yet). But regardless of who it was, this doesn't sound like an authority matter.

Someone is charging you at full speed. The orders are to keep hitting the ground.

• If you follow the orders to the letter, your ship will get destroyed, because the incoming threat shows no sign of braking. And if you survive the collision, it won't take your enemy long to figure you're only hitting the ground, and attack you from above.
• If you redirect part of the cannons on the enemy, there's a chance you will neutralize or delay the threat enough to go back into efficiently shooting the ground. You can't do that with a ship ripped in pieces. Additionally, you yourself might live longer.

And that's assuming the cannon redirection was the act of a person - for all we know, there might have been automatic defense protocols in case of incoming threat (so far, nobody was attacking the ship).

Thanos is many things but he isn't a fool; you will probably have a worse time trying to explain you were being a pedant about his orders, rather than acting rationally in a battlefield scenario.