It wouldn't matter if the player remained logged in. When somebody wants to take the CV, the program would only consider the Ranks at THAT moment. The decision is made when you open the Task group list. The program checks your CURRENT rank against the Commander's CURRENT rank and then activates the "take command" feature. The CV has no "memory"
I think what he is saying is when you take control of a CV, your current rank is captured in the server somewhere. It appears that as long as you hold that CV, that is the rank that incoming players ranks are used to evaluate against. As it turns out in this case, the players rank was 4 when he took it, but now, a day later, his rank is 148.
All this is conjecture of course, but it would explain why Cane wasn't able to take command of the CV even though his rank was higher than the current owner of the CV.
Make sense?
Perhaps this should be in the bug report forum as it seems like a bug