MajorNr01

I support this. Definitely useful for streaming. It should be the job of the OS to allow for this, but Windows.

I would greatly appreciate an SAS mode that holds the navball orientation at the horizon, perhaps locking all remaining degrees of freedom (like roll and rotation along the horizon). This would allow aircraft to fly long distances across the planet without player intervention, which would be especially useful for long flights to contract related sites, e.g. on Kerbin. I do think it is reasonably simplistic to warrant being an SAS feature.

Farewell HarvesteR! KSP is my all time favourite video game and I am sure it will remain so far into the future!

The plugin itself can be found here: http://kerbal.curseforge.com/projects/rename-vessel-in-tracking-station I uploaded the source code aswell (just a single file) but that has yet to be approved.

Sure, but I personally prefer not to delete vessels. Too unrealistic. Especially considering that it is very well possible to collect and clear space junk. That is why I made a small plugin to replace the broken feature so I can continue playing the way I preferred to play before: http://kerbal.curseforge.com/projects/rename-vessel-in-tracking-station-zip-archive (Hopefully this one gets approved soon...)

And I thought, I was going insane. Glad to know this bug is already being dealt with! I frequently re-classify vessels as debris. Satellites from contracts, empty capsules from rescue contracts and some other stuff. Otherwise my tracking station would get extremely crowded!

The LY-01 and LY-05 landing gears are barely usable. It took me around 20 tries to land a plane on them until I realized how slow you need to be going. If you are willing to spam wings on your plane, then it is possible, but I was wondering what other people think of this? For me, the problem is that they make the plane wobble left and right when going any faster than 30 m/s on the ground. Is this the way the are meant to work, or is there something wrong?

The fixed landing gear is not working at all for me. I can take off, but I have yet to land any plane with it. I get a touch down but then the oscillations kick in. At that point the break button might aswell be a suicide button.

That makes sense. I'd still love to simply get all the contracts instead of a fixed number of contracts, no matter how many possible contracts your space program qualifies for. You'd need some way to organize and search your contracts, but why not add such a feature anyway?

So it is already possible. Well, **** me for not finding it...

EDIT: This is actually already possible. Though it is a bit hidden. I would very much appreciate if I could change the type of a vessel (debris, probe, ship, station, etc.) from the tacking station, instead of just from a vessels control module. The problem I encountered is that I sometimes get uncontrollable debris (decouplers and stuff) labeled as a probe (for some reason). I cannot re-label them as they don't have control modules, meaning that they will crowd up my map screen, unless I disable visibility of ALL probes. And I thought to myself: What's wrong with allowing renaming and re-labeling of vessels from the tracking station (or map screen for that matter)? Isn't it the guys at mission control, who decide, what a spacecraft is called and what it's classified as? Why does the craft itself need to have some specific part in order to allow them to call it by a different name?

TL;DR: I want to keep receiving contracts like "Get this Tourist to Kerbin orbit and back.", even long after I've been to the Mun or Duna or wherever. I've recently started a new career mode and found out that I can make reasonably sized mountains of Funds by bracketing multiple "Tourism" contracts together, i.e. sending 5 tourists to Kerbin orbit and back in one rocket. This was a very practical way of gaining around 100,000 funds on hard difficulty in a single launch as it only required going to Kerbin orbit and back which is a relatively short trip. Then I sent my first craft to fly by the Mun and realized that I was effectively punished for the progress, as I no longer received contracts to take tourists into Kerbin orbit, but rather to the Mun. It seems to me that, as it stands, you only get "frontier" contracts, meaning contracts that take your space program to the edge of its demonstrated capabilities. I would like to make the point that this is bad for two reasons: 1. It has the potential to punish players for their progress, as described above. 2. It simply doesn't make sense: My space program manages to go to the Mun and all the sudden all tourists want to go to the Mun, while any interest in a faster and cheaper flight just to Kerbin orbit vanishes. Though I am unsure how other types of contracts, like satellite launches, are affected by your progress. I would prefer if "outdated" contracts, like taking tourists to kerbin orbin when you could go to the Mun, kept appearing, instead of getting replaced by "frontier" alternatives. This obviously means that you would get alot more contracts, but that makes sense to me: Your progress unlocks a greater variety of choices for how you want to fund your space program. A better categorization and sorting interface for your contracts could be added deal with large numbers of available contracts. What do you guys think? Is it just a coincidence that I haven't gotten simpler contracts in a while? Do you think that heaps of available contracts are a bad idea?

It's true that the whole purpose of struts is to rigidly connect parts. But as I said, using them can sometimes be difficult, especially if you want to attach parts together, that are already close to each other (wings). Perhaps this could be an additional feature of the struts (somehow, derp :| ) that makes it easier to just weld touching parts together, using struts.

Long but self-explanatory title: I would love to see an editor tool that attaches two (or more) parts together so that they are constrained the same way they would be if you were to connect them with a strut, BUT obviously without placing a strut. You would simply sort of "weld" (Garry's mod style) parts together by just clicking on them. Obviously this should only work on parts that touch or are fairly close to each other (should be easily decidably, from a technical standpoint). I am well aware that as of now, the strut part can actually serve this purpose, but it seems a bit clumsy in certain cases where I would need this functionality most. One example is when building large wing surfaces: You would want the whole wing to stick together and act as one surface, but instead if you just attach multiple wings to the center of your craft, they usually bend and move apart in certain flight situations. Attaching a strut between these kinds of wings is pretty tedious and sometimes you have to "cheat" around with the translation tool, to make placing it possible at all! So that's my overall proposition: An editor tool that allows you to click one part and then another part that touches it, welding the two parts together to create an attachment constraint, pretty much exactly as if the parts were connected by a strut. This seems to be a very essential construction feature, to me!

Suggestion is simple as that: One or maybe multiple parts to create cargo carrying spaceplanes. With a rocket, you would simply stack your payload on top (not even any need for fairings yet, cause of incomplete aerodynamics), but with a plane you have balance issues. What's needed then is a means of placing your cargo somewhere near your spaceplanes center of mass in order to maintain CoM to CoL balance (mainly). I know of a good handful of mods that provide cargo bays or even cargo bay construction systems (I made one myself) but as we now have SCIENCE! I feel discouraged from using modded parts (even more than I used to), because they might not be properly integrated into the science tree. I simply feel like the need is arising at this point, because SSTOs (especially spaceplanes) are in fact a viable option for a launch system and likely to be the future of space in reality. Without a structural part that enables you to place your cargo in line with your entire craft, whilst not having to stack it on top of the plane's nose, making an SSTO spaceplane launch system proves to be very impractical. I am under the impression that such a part would come up at some point in the future, but I am interested in how much of priority this feature has at the moment. Thank you, for your time!

Certainly. Except for the home-made cargo-bay, this is a full-stock SSTO with a payload capacity of something beyond 10 tonnes (probably with up to 15t you will still get into an orbit above 70km). This brilliant piece of technology is the result of a prolonged and heavily funded research project, involving dozens of test failures and massive damage (destruction) costs. However, as you may notice, because the spacecraft was designed to be unmanned, the research team boasts a project-casualty count below one hundred. The cargo-bay is a purely structural element, whose primary purpose consists of reducing the craft's part count significantly. Tugging cargo into orbit is possible without the cargo bay (i.e. 100% stock craft), with the aid of a beam of strut cubes and a ton of struts, however this may result in up to 100 additional parts (but actually a lighter craft, because struts have zero mass).

@John FX You will have to turn SAS off and back on again, otherwise it will revert to the original orientation. The reason for this is, that the part internally stores an integral value, which determines the orientation that ASAS is trying to maintain, and this value only resets, when SAS is turned off and on again. Also keep in mind, that all which ASAS does is use the control inputs to steer the craft for you. I am not sure, what you were trying to say, but you still need a means of actually controlling your space craft, such as a torque providing part or RCS thrusters. You can, however, trim the ASAS appropriately to basically (almost) stop using RCS fuel, once your ship is pointing in the target direction.

Ok, so a PID-Controler is a concept for controling a process or a value. The value controled by the ASAS is the ship's angular momentum (basically the rotational speed). The values of Kp, Ki and Kd determine, how strongly it should respond to this value (Kp), the integral of this value (Ki) and the derivative (Kd). Practically speaking: Kp determines, how strong the ASAS responds to the ship actually spinning fast. The larger Kp, the stronger the control input of the ASAS as the ship is spinning. Ki is about the integral: The integral of angular momentum is actually your orientation (!). Change Ki to 0 and you will notice that the ASAS will actually no longer hold your orientation, but just kill rotation (the normal, old SAS works exactly the same way as the ASAS, but it has a Ki of 0). So the larger Ki, the stronger the ASAS will respond to your ships orientation wandering off the orientation that it had, when ASAS was turned on. Kd is about the derivative: The derivative of angular momentum is, well angular acceleration, or the change of your angular momentum over time. So the larger Kd the more the ASAS responds to your angular velocity changing. Some examples: Ki = 1, Kp = 0, Kd = 0 will try to hold your ship's orientation, without attempting to actually kill velocity. This will cause oscillations around the target orientation (the ship will turn back and forth (up and down, whatever) continuously). Ki = 0, Kp = 1, Kd = 0 will try to kill your ship's rotation. This might work, as long as the actual input is not too strong. However it does not respond to accelerations. Might work in empty space, but e.g. for atmospheric flight, this won't hold long. Ki = 0, Kp = 0, Kd = 1 will try to hold your ship's angular momentum (rotation speed) constant. This produces no input in empty space, because the rotational rate of your ship usually does not change in space. Combinations of these values will eventually produce something that will properly hold your orientation, without oscillations. However, one thing I experienced is, that a too large value for Ki will cause unstable oscillations, which means that it will turn up and down further everytime. If you have a large Ki, you usually need to compensate for it with a sufficiently large Kp. Finally, the setup that I use the most is the following: Kp = 0.3 Ki = 0.2 Kd = 1.5 I found out, that a large Kd helps to kill rotation quickly, without the ship oscillating up and down too much, before it stops. Also, you can adjust a Damping value, which simply determines, how strong the control input of the ASAS is. With certain larger ships, you might want to turn it down to 0.5 or 0.1. Low Damping values help make a controler that produces less wobbling and will actually hold your orientation.

This Plugin allows the player to change the parameters of the PID-Controler, namely the values of Kp, Ki and Kd. Additionally it seperates the algorithm so that there are different Kp, Ki and Kd for pitch, yaw and roll respectively. I originally made this plugin for myself and it has become invaluable as it enables using ASAS on any ship. Any ship whatsoever. With correctly trimmed values and a proper Damping value you can even have the ASAS control a vessel on RCS without wobbling or wasting any RCS fuel. Get it from the Space Port: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/trimmable-asas/

I just so happen to possess a plugin that allows tuning the PID values in flight. I have already uploaded it to the Space Port but it always takes its time to actually appear anywhere in the addon lists. Probably pending approval or something... It doesn't utilize sliders, just punching in numbers but that already pretty much does the trick. With this little baby I usually manage to control any kind of space-craft. You just have to find a good combination of PID parameters and adjust the overall damping properly and voilà, ASAS works like a charm, keeping my space-craft pointed in the right direction. It is so useful in fact, that you can even use it on entire space-stations!

It is actually just the ASAS being badly configured. SAS in general works on the basis of a concept called PID-Controller. This controller can be configured with three parameters, generally called Ki, Kp and Kd. The game does not allow it, but you could actually change these parameters to suit any spacecraft and even large space stations. For myself I have made a plugin that adds a configurable ASAS and with it, I can easily trim the ASAS to perfectly control any craft. I think it is time to upload it to the Space Port...