Light-Hawk
They do take a credit cut from everything you do. That said if you get an SLF pilot at "Harmless" and rank them all the way up to "Elite" they only take a 10% cut from all your profits. If you got them at "Expert" and rank them up to "Elite" they take 16%. In my opinion it's worth it to give up 10% in exchange for having an Elite SLF pilot for when you need one.

As for their rank progression, it doesn't matter what your rank is or their rank. They rank up significantly faster. On my alt accounts, I got SLF pilots immediately. In the time it took me to go from "Harmless" to "Competent," the SLF pilots went from "Harmless" to "Elite."

Light-HawkIs there a way to see our SLF pilots ranks on Inara? I'm not finding mine on here.

EpisparhNo but you can see their current progress in game.

Episparh

Light-Hawk As for their rank progression, it doesn't matter what your rank is or their rank. They rank up significantly faster. On my alt accounts, I got SLF pilots immediately. In the time it took me to go from "Harmless" to "Competent," the SLF pilots went from "Harmless" to "Elite."

That implies that:
A. Crew rank requirements are significantly lower than CMDRs' requirement.

Edit: I've checked my NPC pilot - she is at 10% while I am at 25% progress to Elite I. We both were Elite on ED: O launch so we had equal start. My greater speed can be explained with a bug. Killing scavengers or NPC on foot progress your combat rank. It is daft but I saw other CMDRs in the official forums have such observation too.

Light-HawkWhile I have not been able to validate it myself yet, I have heard from multiple sources that threat level 7 pirates have a chance to spawn NPC's who have access to weapons and engineering that players cannot get. Supposedly some can spawn in with turreted plasma accelerators that still have the damage output of the fixed versions. Have you or anyone else here encountered such a thing?

SakashiroI did see a ship firing blue phasing sequence beam lasers

KurakilBefore engineering I never used KWS. For me it was much more time efficient to spend that extra 10 seconds killing rather than scanning. You can scan in 2 seconds now with Fast Scan so that isn't as much of an issue as it used to be. If you never get below a certain threshold of shields then you may as well get some extra income with the KWS, otherwise I would keep the booster. Of course if you spend a lot of time bounty hunting in anarchy systems then there isn't much of a choice.

Burstar

The answer is A. Crew rank up faster kill for kill than the player does, however, they do not accrue combat experience when they aren't flying like they do credits. My 'proof' is that the pilot I hired Harmless when I was Dangerous reached Elite before I did. Unfortunately the logbook doesn't record this so you can take me at my word or not.

Episparh
That implies that:
A. Crew rank requirements are significantly lower than CMDRs' requirement.
B. The majority of points earned goes to crew pilot.
C. Both A and B

All 3 are highly unlikely and are the opposite of my observation. Once the NPC and CMDRs ranks are equal the progress is equal and before that the lower rank progress faster.

Do you have some proofs of that claim?

EpisparhThat implies that:
A. Crew rank requirements are significantly lower than CMDRs' requirement.
B. The majority of points earned goes to crew pilot.
C. Both A and B

Do you have some proofs of that claim?