Manage control of vessels with Kerbals instead of vessels directly.

[shimmythejj]

This suggestion is meant to give an interesting way of having multiple people be able to view a ship but make only one control it.

Every manned ship has a Kerbal in command, and whoever is "controlling" that Kerbal gains command of the vessel. Command could be delegated by the current Kerbal commander to give another player command of the vessel if needed.

For example one player could be "controlling" Bob Kerman who is the current commander of a space station, another player could view the station as Bill Kerman who is also crewed on that station. However since Bob is in charge, only the player controlling him will be able to have control of the vessel. Once the player in control of Bob switches focus to something else or manually gives command to Bill, the player in control of Bill now has control authority over the vessel.

Unmanned vessels could be done the way it is done now, only one person able to view/control it at a time.

I am unsure how the managing mechanics of Kerbal control, maybe a button or two placed over the portraits in the lower right?

[godarklight]

This has been mostly addressed in the dev version and will be in the next release. If you try to fly a vessel already in use instead of saying 'no', it will go into spectate mode

[TehGimp]

The one aspect we're missing, which I had hoped to have in the initial version of spectating but which didn't pan out, is the ability to view crew while spectating (and as a result, you can't [for example] do any IVA stuff, etc). Since it seems unlikely that we'd ever locate a good way to allow the user to see the crew while spectating a private vessel without them being able to EVA the crew (which we don't want, since the vessel owner might not be pleased about it), I think what we'll end up doing for spectating rev2 (no timeline yet) is:

• Crew will generally remain invisible as in the current implementation
  • BUT if the vessel is public and there is more than 1 Kerbal on board, then Kerbals will be visible to spectators (both for IVA and EVA purposes), but will become invisible again if only one Kerbal is available (in order to ensure the pilot is affected)

The only major obstacle to this suggestion that I can immediately think of are mainly just with ensuring the pilot's version of the vessel is updated if a spectator takes a co-pilot Kerbal on EVA.