Kerbalnaut Override

[kevnuke]

Is it just me, or has anyone else launched a vehicle only to find that the wrong crew is in it after you manually assigned which crew you wanted in it AND saved that vehicle afterwards?

I'm like, no KSP, I'm not an idiot, stop trying to replace my scientist with a pilot!

Is this intended behavior or a bug?

#HalfwayToMun

[Spricigo]

Jeb will use any chance he have to sneak to seat00. A theory is that he only got accepted as kerbonaut after the attempts to get ride of him by crashing the rocket showed to be ineffective.

 

 

[bewing]

Saving the vessel does not save the crew selection. 10 launches later when you want to use the vessel, you may not have the same crew available in your roster.

 

[Snark]

8 hours ago, kevnuke said:

Is it just me, or has anyone else launched a vehicle only to find that the wrong crew is in it after you manually assigned which crew you wanted in it AND saved that vehicle afterwards?

The game never saves crew assignments with the ship.  What you want is a feature that doesn't exist.

Yes, this can be aggravating.  I used to get bitten by this all the time.  What was even more aggravating for me than "accidentally launch with Jeb instead of <someone else>" was when I was doing an orbital rescue mission, and meant to launch my rescue ship empty, and didn't discover that Jeb had stowed away until the hapless would-be rescuee was clinging to the ladder and hammering on the door wanting to get in. 

Apparently I'm genetically incapable of learning to check the roster every time on launch.

Eventually it got so bothersome to me, after the Nth time this happened, that I got sufficiently fed up that I wrote a mod so this would never, ever happen to me again.  Ever.  Here it is, in case you may find it useful:

What it does is pretty much exactly what you want, and then some.  It not only saves your choices, but it also does a best effort to provide sensible defaults on those occasions when either you haven't made a choice or else your choice isn't possible.

For example, if you save a ship with Bob in the cockpit, then the next time it launches, it will put Bob there.  Unless Bob's not available, in which case it will put a scientist (since Bob's a scientist, and it assumes you chose Bob for a reason).  Or, if you're deliberately launching a ship empty, it will remember that and launch it empty in the future.  Or, if you're launching a brand-new ship and you haven't said whom you want in the cockpit, and the new ship has no probe cores, it makes sure to choose a pilot.  Or if the ship has a probe core, and also has a Science Jr. on it, it'll try to choose a scientist.  Or you've got a science lab on the ship-- it'll try to staff it with scientists.  Or if you've got drills and ISRU, it'll try to pick an engineer.  You get the idea.

It does everything automatically, with no UI whatsoever.  It "just works".

Anyway, it's a mod designed to solve precisely the problem you've brought up, so perhaps it may be useful to you. 

[Geonovast]

@Snark does it have an option to "Never auto-fill any craft for any reason whatsoever?

[Snark]

21 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

@Snark does it have an option to "Never auto-fill any craft for any reason whatsoever?

Not via any UI, but yes, you can make it do that if you're willing to tinker a bit with ModuleManager config.  The behavior is fully customizable via config.

Technobabble details in spoiler section below.

Spoiler

The module is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible-- that's why there's no UI whatsoever.  I designed it simply to make the game act, by default, the way I wish it would act.  So, having a "never auto-fill ever" option would require UI, and I wanted it to have no UI, so that option isn't there by default.  Q.E.D.

However, it does all its work via ModuleManager config-- the behavior's not hard-coded.  For example, the fact that it wants to fill the science lab with scientists is because the mod includes a bit of ModuleManager config that decorates the science module with config that says "I want scientists".  You can see the config it uses here.  The config file includes a fair number of comments to explain how it works.

If for whatever reason you prefer a different default behavior than the ones I've chosen, therefore, you can customize the behavior the same way the mod itself does:  via ModuleManager config.

So, for example, in your own personal gameplay, if you want to make it so that nothing is ever auto-filled by default, you can just add your own .cfg file somewhere in GameData, and put in config that looks like this:

@PART[*]:HAS[MODULE[ModuleCrewAssignment]]:AFTER[BetterCrewAssignment] {
    @MODULE[ModuleCrewAssignment] {
        @defaultAssignment = Empty
    }
}

...I'm not in front of a KSP computer at the moment, so I'm not in a position to test this right now... but I believe the above ought to do the trick.  (If I've gotten it not quite right and the above doesn't do the trick, then definitely it is doable, it's just a matter of getting MM sorted out.)

Probably best to take further discussion about this mod over to the BetterCrewAssignment thread, though. 

[Geonovast]

Excellent.  Will definitely install when I get home.