Ship Loading Tab improvements - Declutter to Museums

[Fendoburn]

Though usable, the current ship loading tab with only the SPH and VAB menus is very limited. Can we have some extra or renameable tabs please? Perhaps an Archive or Historic tab for ships that we don't really need anymore, but want to keep for whatever reason would be nice. This would really help to declutter the current ship lists and gives some other choices than just deleting our works of love. Although a drag and drop feature will need to be developed.

One day this could be improved into a Kerbal Space History Museum being built at the Space Centre along side all the other buildings. This museum could show achievements from the Mission Control Archives, the Science Archives, parts/remains of returned rockets or pieces new built in the VAB. The museum's size would depend on the funds invested and could perhaps provide a profit or loss depending on it's visitors.

Thanks for all the hard work so far and the bug fixes.

Fen

[Snark]

Hello, and welcome to the forums!

Having a better in-game way to organize our ships would certainly come in handy.

Until and unless such functionality becomes available, though... I suppose one hacky and somewhat inconvenient way you could achieve (mostly) the same effect would be to just alt-tab out of KSP, make your own folder in your ships directory (alongside "VAB" and "SPH"), and just move the .craft files you want to "archive" in there.  Voilà, you've decluttered the tabs and made the ships vanish from the game's UI.  When you want them back, move them out of your folder back to SPH or VAB as appropriate.

(You can do this without having to quit/restart KSP, or even exit/leave the VAB.  I believe that it reads the folder for available .craft files each time the load-ship dialog pops up.)

Yah, it's clunky, and not as nice as being able to browse in-game with an appropriate UI.  Perhaps better than nothing, though.

[septemberWaves]

This is a good point. I use that sort of external folder system, with various sorted ship folders in my KSP backup folder, but it would be nice to have some sort of configurable system to organize vehicles in-game. Along the same lines, it would be nice to have a way to transfer subassemblies between saves without having to copy the file into the new ships folder, then load up that ship and transfer it into the chosen subassemblies folder manually. I think in general the way vehicles are organized in-game could use some improvements for ease of use.

[DerekL1963]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

I believe that it reads the folder for available .craft files each time the load-ship dialog pops up.

I can confirm it does.   I use your method all the time to move ships between my current game and the sandbox (because I can't simulate a full Duna mission in a campaign save for example) and back again without exiting KSP.

[TheEpicSquared]

Welcome to the forums @Fendoburn, and I really like your idea. I'd also like a search bar to quickly be able to find ships. It may be easy at first, when we don't have many ships in the VAB/SPH, but it really gets annoying trying to find one ship out of hundreds later in the game.  

[CosmicCharlie]

Sort? By last modified for example?

[Fendoburn]

Thanks for the replies guys and the suggestion Snark. I may well try it, though coding tends to backfire with me.

Fen