Jump to content

Making Pilots and Scientests useful again


Recommended Posts

So, at the moment, pilots become useless once you get a good probe core, and Scientests have no use once you max out the tech tree.

What if pilots could have limited "autopilot" capabilities? Once they reached 5 stars, they could have the ability to land at a certain spot, or guide a spaceplane.

What if you needed science to discover asteroids? This could be a relatively high number, like 50 or 75, depending on the asteroids size.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

wow- there are a few mods that can do landings, I think that's an excellent idea- or what if all pilots have a landing option, but depending on stupidity/star rating they land better or worse? like a four star doesn't land in the center of a runway, a three star over or under shoots, a 2 star crashes at low velocity, a 1 star crashes at high velocity, perhaps killing the pilot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think an "auto-execute maneuver" feature for pilots would be nice, but any other sort of autopilot would be a breach of the spirit of the game (seriously, if you bring up integrating autopilot into stock, you get burned at the stake by the manual piloting purists).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing you could do is make it so that pilots buff reputation. So if you craft contains a pilot, a multiplier is applied to reputation gains. In my head cannon it works like this. Engineers fix things... obviously. Scientist increase the amount of science you get, because of their keen scientific observations in situ. Pilots are the charismatic, heroic, mission commanders, who do live TV broadcasts to school kids back on Kerbals, are interviewed by Walter Kermankite and appear before committees.

Of course then you have to make reputation more meaningful late game, but still...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't understand why autonomous pilots as a trainable skill is considered such a bad thing. Sure single super pilots with all the ability of mechJeb should either non-existent or really hard to earn. Still there is a big range of scope for pilot to have some useful skills that could be highly limited. You could break mechJeb into lots of discrete skills then assign them around different levels of Pilots even tie some to engineers or scientists so that you a combination.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So, at the moment, pilots become useless once you get a good probe core, and Scientests have no use once you max out the tech tree.

What if pilots could have limited "autopilot" capabilities? Once they reached 5 stars, they could have the ability to land at a certain spot, or guide a spaceplane.

What if you needed science to discover asteroids? This could be a relatively high number, like 50 or 75, depending on the asteroids size.

That's not really true about scientists. Science has a useful purpose once the the tech tree is complete. Tech tree is only supposed to be early game. In the late/end game, science is a useful additional source of income.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

But then it feels more like the early career grind, just getting science and not doing anything fun with it. The auto-execute maneuver thing sounds cool, though. And maybe it could be dependent on the Pilot's stars, like how a 3 star Pilot might not get the burn exactly right, but a 5 star Pilot would ace it. The reputation thing sounds good. Maybe if they ever add maintenance costs for the KSC, it would lower the cost to run it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...