Can't asparagus anymore -- what gives?

[Snark]

47 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I still don't quite understand how the new tank priority system works, but I'll figure it out.

1. Tanks with higher numbers drain before tanks with lower numbers.
2. By default, all the tanks on a stage have the same priority, unless you tinker with it manually.
3. They've done a clever thing:
   • The actual number that a tank gets is the sum of two things:  a "stage" component, and a "manual" component.
   • The "stage" component is a multiple of 10, and is purely controlled by "what numbered stage is it on".  The higher the stage number, the higher the number.  10, 20, 30, 40, etc.
   • The "manual" component is the delta you apply by clicking the + and - buttons.  Each click is 1.
   • So, if a tank had a priority of 30 (because of the stage it was on), and you click the + button, now it has 31.

That "manual + stage" idea is remarkably clever, IMO.  It means that in most cases, things just naturally do what you want:  for example, if you attach a tank radially with a radial decoupler, and enable crossfeed on the decoupler, then the radial tank will drain first and then you can jettison it-- which is almost certainly what you want.  It also means that you can tinker with settings, and they get preserved if you change the staging on your ship.  Let's say you have a stack of two tanks and you want the bottom one to drain first, so you give it a +1.  Then you change your mind and you move the whole stack to a different stage of the ship:  they all change wholesale by 10, 20, 30 etc. so they have the right overall sequence number relative to the other stages on the ship, but it still preserves "bottom one drains first" because it still has that +1 on it that you gave it.  And if a rare oddball case comes up where you actually want a higher-numbered stage to drain *after* a lower-numbered stage, you can just click the +/- button a lot to give it any priority you want.

I really like how they've set it up.  It means that most of the time, I don't have to mess with it at all and it just naturally does what I'd want it to do anyway.  The few times I do use it are when I've got two or more fuel tanks stacked vertically, and I want the bottom one to drain first (for stability's sake); so then I just put a +1 on the bottom tank and I'm done.

[Jarin]

On 9/29/2017 at 8:29 PM, Snark said:

That "manual + stage" idea is remarkably clever, IMO.  It means that in most cases, things just naturally do what you want:  for example, if you attach a tank radially with a radial decoupler, and enable crossfeed on the decoupler, then the radial tank will drain first and then you can jettison it-- which is almost certainly what you want.  It also means that you can tinker with settings, and they get preserved if you change the staging on your ship.  Let's say you have a stack of two tanks and you want the bottom one to drain first, so you give it a +1.  Then you change your mind and you move the whole stack to a different stage of the ship:  they all change wholesale by 10, 20, 30 etc. so they have the right overall sequence number relative to the other stages on the ship, but it still preserves "bottom one drains first" because it still has that +1 on it that you gave it.  And if a rare oddball case comes up where you actually want a higher-numbered stage to drain *after* a lower-numbered stage, you can just click the +/- button a lot to give it any priority you want.

 

Huh... is that new with 1.3? I don't remember the priority system doing that when it was introduced...