Right now, when you engage autopilot, the time immediately goes fast-forward at 5x. I think there should be a smoother transition where the time scale goes from 1x to 2x to 3x to 4x to 5x over the period of a second or two.
Maybe the autopilot should be active as long as the button is held down so that the player can smoothly skip past medium distances with one press.
Given the average distance between stations in a sparse system, I think there should be a higher limit to the autopilot speed - somewhere around 8x or 10x. When I cross systems frequently, I end up waiting on autopilot a lot of the time.
I do not want to hold the button to maintain autopilot. I do not want to hold an extra button while I want to go fast, with the way keyboards are. Did that with the Doom games back in the day. Toggle is nice.
Maybe autopilot speed can be adjustable, but I like x5 speed, especially when a fight is decided but will take a while to finish. If I want to switch speed, instant response is nice.
In short, I like autopilot the way it is, except I want autopilot to remain at autopilot if armor is struck if I pilot ships who rely mostly on armor (and regeneration), like Manticore, for defense.
Maybe tap to enable autopilot, double-tap to enable superfast autopilot?
I can see some logic in wanting to make the transition into autopilot faster, but I think it's still going to be fairly jarring at any transition speed that isn't annoyingly slow.
A couple of random ideas:
Maybe keydown accelerates to 2x speed and keyup goes to 5x. Coming out of autopilot would stay the same as now. I believe this would be indistinguishable from today's behavior for most people, but if you wanted a slightly slower autopilot, you could hold down A.
Another idea is to accept some keys while in autopilot to accelerate/decelerate. E.g., while in autopilot, maybe left/right arrows (or whatever) speed up and slow down autopilot. Again, this would be mostly compatible with how people play today.
I like the second idea most. Enabling autopilot and then using another set of keys to accelerate/decelerate.