Re: [Space] Emergency Drills
 

It seems to me the obvious game mechanical benefit of drills is it lets you spend character points on stuff related to the drills, and counts as study time toward acquiring more points in the skills drilled.

Admittedly many players would insist they were using the entire flight time to study some skill or other, so those 200 hours of drills that got them a point of Spacer are 200 hours they could have spent on their favorite skill instead, but most normal people are not that fanatically studeous.

Re: [Space] Emergency Drills
 

This is true, but I think part of the problem is that GURPS makes self-study insufficiently inefficient compared to studying under a competent teacher, and also doesn't take into account the quality of the fixed facilities and the quality and quantity of the ressources consumed during training (an example of the later being huge amount of ammunition fired off during elite military training).

I don't yet know how inefficient I want self-study to be compared to studying under a teacher in a classroom situation (studying under a teacher being his sole pupil is obviously even more efficient), in Sagatafl, but it'll be much less than 50%.