Crew Effects

Your crew will have an impact on any vessel with a running beacon. This includes IB-1s, as they're both the transiting vessel and the beacon craft. The effects are as follows:

• Scientists will decrease your base Karborundum cost as long as you have a SCU aboard and active. The costs from an HCU or AMU are not affected by your crew. Please note that the base discount a SCU offers is equivalent to a single 5-star scientist, so if you have Kerbals with less than that experience aboard (1 5-star, 1 2-star and 1 3-star, etc) it will default to giving you the hardware discount. The SCU's discount only applies when there is little to no relative motion between the two ships while the crew discount applies regardless of relative motion, so in cases where there is a drift penalty the crew bonus will apply even if it's under the SCU threshold.

• Engineers will decrease the beacon's electrical needs. There are no pieces of hardware necessary for this, although the discount will only be truly useful when you're using a GMU to move a beacon in close to a gravity well.

• Pilots will decrease the penalty due to relative motion between ships. This allows for less precise rendezvous planning in order to make a jump.

Each of these discounts maxes out at 50%. There is no benefit to having more than 5 kerbals on board with any given profession, and extras past that point will actually decrease efficiency compared to just having the five most-experienced crew aboard.