As we all know AI are a royal pain at times, either ruining the plans of a main engineer or shooting the wrong guns despite efforts made, obviously it'd be wrong to make them more efficient in their artificial intelligence as people would then sooner have ai crews.
Thus I would suggest adding the F4 practice command to turn AI off into the game itself this giving pilots more direct control of the AI allowing for timed repairs and timed shooting without causing the ai to get in the way and frustrate players on the ship.
Simple yet effective and still leaving AI the lower option of actual players, a great benefit to those of us who play on the less active periods of time when you're just unable to fill ships fully.