Making Pilots and Scientests useful again

[Windspren]

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.

[Chrismofer]

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.

[Wjolcz]

No autopilots, please.

Would be good if pilots could predict the landing site. The higher the skill the smaller predicted landing site it would show.

[zxczxczbfg]

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).

[Tourist]

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...

[mattinoz]

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.

[Murph]

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.

[Windspren]

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.