Kerbals Become Smarter with Experience

[Apollo13]

As each specific Kerbal flies missions, he/she should become smarter and braver.

I envision a day when a Kerbal's Stupidity and Courage ratings effect a mission's performance.

[bdito]

As each specific Kerbal flies missions, he/she should become smarter and braver.

I envision a day when a Kerbal's Stupidity and Courage ratings effect a mission's performance.

I was thinking of this too and it could be a great addition.

It would be best if implemented with an automated flying system (similar to Mechjeb) for piloted craft. If the pilot's stupidity was too high there would be a high probability of messing up maneuvers which would put them offline or crash/do damage when landing, while a kerbal with a lot of experience and no stupidity would perform them flawlessly.

[Alshain]

I was thinking of this as well, but my thoughts were on the Final Frontier addon and having Kerbals with more ribbons be braver.

[Greenfire32]

Currently, the only thing I can think of that would utilize the Bravery/Stupidity settings is a series of automated missions. You build the craft and pick the crew like normal, but all piloting is done by the computer (The Kerbals in this case). And under that kind of scenario, I cant really think of any situation where this would be the preferred method of play versus what we have now.

I dunno. Maybe if there was a maneuver or a docking attempt that needed to be 101% accurate (for whatever reason), then I guess you could "train" your Kerbals to do the action for you when the time comes?

But like I said above, other than aesthetics and automated scenarios, I can't think of a single use for the stat meters.

[Kasuha]

As each specific Kerbal flies missions, he/she should become smarter and braver.

I envision a day when a Kerbal's Stupidity and Courage ratings effect a mission's performance.

Stupider Kerbals are happier and smile more.

And since mission performance depends completely on player's skill and the only thing Kerbals can do about it is eventual sabotaging, it should be exactly the opposite - they should not intervene at the start and perhaps only start making problems when you're already good enough to be able to compensate it.

[Pulstar]

I'm not sure how to translate bravery into gameplay unless you add some kind of morale mechanic. Then KSP could go all x-com and have Kerbals refuse tasks or worse if they start panicking due to parts exploding, the ship running out of power or pulling too many gees.

Stupidity though should be a hindrance. Perhaps kerbals with high stupidity would be unable to perform certain EVA tasks like repacking parachutes, carrying science data or doing crew reports. This would be more in line with avoiding random failures that the dev team has been adamant about.

Overall Kerbal stats needs to be expanded upon, their nice for the crew expressions but we do need reasons to pick one Kerbal over another for a mission. Other than having cooler names.

[Kasuha]

It is a question what did devs originally intend with Kerbal stats. We might see it stay as it is, actually used in the game, or removed or replaced by something else.

My idea would probably be to leave their stats as useless as they are and add a ranking system. The more you let the Kerbal fly, the higher rank he gets. Starting with something like "Rookie" when recruited all the way up to e.g. "Veteran" at which moment he retires and is no longer available for missions. Making a nice collection of veterans might be one of game's available "achievements".

Their stats might also be affecting how fast they rank up. The less stupid the faster. And courage might be optimal somewhere around the center. And badass Kerbals might come with a chance to lower their rank at random.

[Pulstar]

Personally I would hide the stupidity/courage meters if they don't impact gameplay, but leave them for the crew animations since they use that. Unless you plan adding actual gameplay mechanics that need a quantified value of "courage" or "stupidity" it makes little sense to show them. Overall courage/stupidity makes more sense as static personality/character traits of a binary nature, kind of like say "creative", "curious", "thrill-seeker", "clumsy", "athletic" that would give some kind of passive bonuses and/or penalties to proper skills that can be improved and do need a specific value (rather than a binary TRUE or FALSE).

Leave the meters/bars for skills that can be improved basically. Unless you really need to know how stupid a kerbal is because the fate of a mission may depend on it there's no point in showing more than a generic "smart" for stupidity<35 or "stupid" for stupidity>70 as part of a list if character traits.

[MR4Y]

As far as we know, the stats serve one purpose and will eventually serve the same function: Nothing.

[velve]

I'm a new player and I thought the stupidity bar influenced the amount of research gained for every mission.

Surprised was I, to learn this is not.

[dryer_lint]

Perhaps Kerbals with low courage could "chicken out" and refuse to pilot your ship?

The problem is, there needs to be reasons to pick all kinds of astro(kerbo?)nauts, because if you're just looking for ones with low stupidity and high courage then there's no strategy or anything...

[Moss]

Perhaps command pods could no longer provide SAS functionality (still torque, but no correction computer), and their ability to hold a craft on course would be dictated by the crew's stats? That way Kerbals could still operate pilots but without the "point and go" aspect of something like MechJeb.

[StrandedonEarth]

It's kind of hard to have kerbal's stats affect gameplay without it getting frustrating ("Jeb! How did you manage to crash it! I had the descent going perfectly straight down!") What I'd like to see is a Kerbal's resume, of all the places he's been.

[r4pt0r]

i do wish smarter kerbals could transmit data faster or clean the lab quicker. i dont want any stats affecting my piloting though.

[LethalDose]

It would be great to see a kerbal's stats matter, in some function, in the game. I'm hoping we'll see more development of the kerbals themselves soon. It's one of the least developed parts of the game, and the devs said they're looking at the least developed parts of the game to work on.

Or that's all jetwash.

[Pulstar]

Well Kerbals getting meaningful stats/skills is likely unless Harvester forgot that he mentioned once that he'd like to add them

Considering that Kerbal skills are pretty much nonexistent I wouldn't be surprised if that's next on the agenda, the astronaut training complex lacks the "training" part (unless all it does is tell kerbals how to put on spacesuits). With budgets, contracts and science frameworks implemented the only other major system I can think of that is missing, for the career mode side of the game, would be life support, but it's not certain whether the developers are keen on adding that.

But as usual we'll have to wait and see. It would be nice if assembling a Kerbal crew took more thought than "these guys because their names seem cool" due to meaningful gameplay effects.

Edited June 17, 2014 by Pulstar

[dryer_lint]

I think it would be cool to assign "jobs" to your Kerbals. Again, something that's just for fun, but like each Kerbal would have a job title under their name. You can set it for hired astronauts (not the original three) to something like "Space Station Manager", or, if you're evil, "Kraken Sacrifice"

[KaBob]

I could imagine having smart/brave kerbals give you a publicity boost, just like how in real life astronauts are often role models.

[Bilfr3d]

I envision something like this:

Completing a contract mission with a kerbal with low(er) stupidity and courage gives you more money, but increases the risk and difficulty of the contract (because your kerbals are stupid and don't have courage). But, if you use kerbals with higher courage, stupidity (wait, is it better if stupidity is higher or lower?? ) you woud receive either the 'normal' amount of money, or maybe a bit less, but the risk would be less and the difficulty would be less. I like the general stats thing too.

[sumghai]

My one suggestion for this is that there should be diminishing returns for consecutive missions per Kerbal (i.e. veterans should not benefit as much as rookies).

[Padishar]

I've been thinking it could just be done via the science. So the courage only affects how scared the kerbals get but this would be checked when doing science (the bits they actually do themselves, so crew report, eva report, soil sample). Either, if they get really scared then they just can't do the science at all or, make it a penalty on the amount of science earned the more scared they are. Also, if they are really scared then they could refuse to get out of the ship.

The stupidity would also affect the amount of science earned by the kerbal (again for all science they do themselves). The stupidity of the crew could also affect the amount of time the lab takes to process results and/or the bonus that processing gives. In addition, a less stupid kerbal could be more likely to get scared when things start going wrong.

I think this could make it more interesting without it being too much of a hassle though it would need the kerbals' stats to be easily visible during flight so you can pick the best one for a particular job.

[bdito]

I gotta say there are a lot of really great ideas in here.

[Pulstar]

I'd rather have courage/stupidity (as well as other and purely hypothetical personality traits) affect what skills can a Kerbal train to what level, should those get implemented and also their hiring price (poor candidates come cheap, the Jebs are expensive).

A stupid Kerbal shouldn't be able to become a good scientist or engineer, while a cowardly Kerbal would make a poor pilot or EVA explorer.

There's really a lot you can do with the Kerbals themselves if some kind of experience system got introduced. I mentioned this in another topic. You could have experience unlock new experiments for scientist crewmember Kerbals, allow them to perform more EVA tasks for Pilots/Engineers.