I've just had a bit of an idea, but before I pursue much further, I just want to make sure it is possible. Can you pilot a flyer from a separate control panel, like turrets on capital ships?

Yep; just set up the remote chair thing (from stock space) like you normally would and reference the flyer or other vehicle in the area where you'd put the turret (in the chair's instance properties in ZE). Then, put this line: in your vehicle's ODF under FLYERSECTION = "BODY", and you're good to go.

Thank you. I'm going to see if I can get this working. If I can, I think I might have something promising.

Actually it's not that easy. At least I had some trouble with it.
It works very well for ground vehicles but with flyers I had one problem: It's easy to get in and control them but as soon as I left them mid-air (aka not landed) they exploded instantly so I could never get back in.
I tried using stuff like using SetProperty() to set the pilottype to vehicleself when I exited or EntityFlyerInitAsLanded() but that didn't work out for me.

Have you had success in remotely piloting a flyer type vehicle you exited it before?

If you check out the first version of RepSharpShooter's Battle Arena there's a spectator class that can access turrets that control little flying cameras. I've also toyed with using turrets to control little mini capital ships. It's certainly possible, but takes a bit of tweaking.

Locutus wrote:Actually it's not that easy. At least I had some trouble with it.
It works very well for ground vehicles but with flyers I had one problem: It's easy to get in and control them but as soon as I left them mid-air (aka not landed) they exploded instantly so I could never get back in.
I tried using stuff like using SetProperty() to set the pilottype to vehicleself when I exited or EntityFlyerInitAsLanded() but that didn't work out for me.

Have you had success in remotely piloting a flyer type vehicle you exited it before?

Right now I'm just trying to get everything set up. I'm not worried about the player exiting the flyer and then it exploding. As a matter of fact, I WANT it to explode as soon as the player exits. I'm trying something that I think is a little over my head. I want to have the player control an unmanned frigate loaded with explosives and fly in into an enemy fleet as a campaign objective. I know that having a frigate as a flyer is possible, but for now, I'm just want to make sure I can fly a star fighter remotely before I try to tackle the frigate.

EDIT: I got it working, and there are some issues, but they aren't directly related to this topic.