You can balance vehicles with or without a pilot suit. If you balance it with the suit you require all pilots to wear it to be balanced and it becomes yet another SP and ISK sink.

If you balance without it, you can't introduce it into the game without unbalancing vehicles again.

So pilot suits are simply a bad idea.

I don't think you understand. Pilot suits would simply add yet another skill tree that pilots would have to climb in order to fly effectively. We already have Vehicle Upgrades, Turrets, and Vehicle Command. We need a pilot suit tree like we need another hole in our heads and our wallets.

I have 17 mil SP in Dropsuit Upgrades tree and its not done yet, plus my suits and weapons. We all have our SP sinks. I understand how much you put into vehicles as I've put 5 mil into them and have a long way to go.

Pilots should demand their suits to set them even farther apart from the infantry. Your suit should make you even better than some scrub running militia gear.

Sounds like all the non pilots are in favor of another SP sink for pilots.

I suppose we could do the same with infantry and require a special AV suit separate from the rest of the suit skill tree to properly use AV.

l would love a way to separate dedicated pilots from militia users, but you can do that with the existing skill trees.

There are issues with putting skills into the suit rather than the vehicle itself. The first is you have to decide if the bonus is tied to the skill level or to the actual suit itself. That makes a difference because having to risk a prototype suit on top of the vehicle inflates the ISK cost dramatically. If it's a bonus you can run the basic and get the full skill benefit. In that case it's an SP sink but not a huge ISK sink.

Then you have to figure out what differences there are between different racial suits and how many suits you are going to have to skill up. If you fly both the Python and the Incubus do you need to skill two suits to prototype?