Change Default Rotation in the VAB

[MaximumThrust]

Is possible to change the default rotation in the VAB to be 90 degrees to the right? So the vessels start with the "bottom" pointing to the ocean, and the gravity turn can be done pitching down (pressing W). For me the default rotation don't make any sense.

I know, I can rotate them, but this is very confusing with command pods that are symmetrical (you can't identifies it's sides) and time consuming.

Many thanks!

[Gargamel]

Grab your root part and hit Q or E.  That will rotate the entire ship 90*.    It'll take a couple tries till you get it, since it's pretty much trial and error.

 

But once you've done it a couple few times, you'll know which way to rotate the pod when you first grab it. 

Edited March 21, 2018 by Gargamel

[Snark]

9 hours ago, MaximumThrust said:

Is possible to change the default rotation in the VAB to be 90 degrees to the right?

Short answer is "no" (though I suppose it would be possible for a mod to do this... hmm, maybe I should make one...) 

This is a thing that has always bugged me.  It makes absolutely no sense to me to have "yaw right" as the thing that a rocket does-- it should pitch down.  This is especially true when a rocket is bilaterally symmetric, which is a fairly common case.

As far as I'm concerned, that should simply be the global default for KSP itself.  However, no doubt that's because of my own preferences-- one thing to bear in mind is that different players have very different ways of approaching or thinking about the game.  For example, even though "default position should be facing east, not north" seems dead obvious to me... for others it is dead obvious the other way.  The counterargument I've heard (i.e. "keep it facing north") is that there are players who think of the turn as being to the right, because they look at it from that side and want to see the rocket tipping over, and use that as their visual orientation.  (As opposed to the way I do it, which is that the navball is the one "real" thing that I use to orient myself during launch, and the camera view is just a thing I rotate around for eye candy, not piloting.)

That said, though... seems to me that KSP could have its cake and eat it, too.  I really, really wish there were a gameplay setting so you could pick "default vessel orientation in VAB" as either north or east.  That way the player could pick whichever one they're comfortable with.

Until and unless either KSP adds that or someone makes a mod for it, though, is to do what I've been doing with basically every ship I've ever launched:  build it the default way (facing north) in the editor, until I've completely finished building it; then, rotate the ship (by rotating the root part).

Personally, I do this by using the rotate widget rather than @Gargamel's suggested method of grabbing it and then hitting Q, but that's only because I'm OCD about wanting to keep the ship's axis precisely centered on the VAB center, and there's no easy way to grab-and-hit-Q without accidentally nudging the ship off-center if the mouse moves even a millimeter while I've got the root part grabbed.  There's no gameplay reason to care about that, it's just my OCD talking. 

[MaximumThrust]

2 minutes ago, Snark said:

Short answer is "no" (though I suppose it would be possible for a mod to do this... hmm, maybe I should make one...) 

This is a thing that has always bugged me.  It makes absolutely no sense to me to have "yaw right" as the thing that a rocket does-- it should pitch down.  This is especially true when a rocket is bilaterally symmetric, which is a fairly common case.

As far as I'm concerned, that should simply be the global default for KSP itself.  However, no doubt that's because of my own preferences-- one thing to bear in mind is that different players have very different ways of approaching or thinking about the game.  For example, even though "default position should be facing east, not north" seems dead obvious to me... for others it is dead obvious the other way.  The counterargument I've heard (i.e. "keep it facing north") is that there are players who think of the turn as being to the right, because they look at it from that side and want to see the rocket tipping over, and use that as their visual orientation.  (As opposed to the way I do it, which is that the navball is the one "real" thing that I use to orient myself during launch, and the camera view is just a thing I rotate around for eye candy, not piloting.)

That said, though... seems to me that KSP could have its cake and eat it, too.  I really, really wish there were a gameplay setting so you could pick "default vessel orientation in VAB" as either north or east.  That way the player could pick whichever one they're comfortable with.

Until and unless either KSP adds that or someone makes a mod for it, though, is to do what I've been doing with basically every ship I've ever launched:  build it the default way (facing north) in the editor, until I've completely finished building it; then, rotate the ship (by rotating the root part).

Personally, I do this by using the rotate widget rather than @Gargamel's suggested method of grabbing it and then hitting Q, but that's only because I'm OCD about wanting to keep the ship's axis precisely centered on the VAB center, and there's no easy way to grab-and-hit-Q without accidentally nudging the ship off-center if the mouse moves even a millimeter while I've got the root part grabbed.  There's no gameplay reason to care about that, it's just my OCD talking. 

I would like it very much this mod, if you make, I hope it will be compatible with 1.3.1. How would be possible to change that? A .dll plugin, a MM Patch, Custom Barn Kit config? Just curious.

For now, I would be happy with at least some roll indicator in the VAB. Things can get really confusing. Sometimes the rocket is the correct position, but the command pod don't. The orientations gets all messed when merging vessels to attach the launch vehicles to the payloads. When I think everything is correct, it's 180 degrees, and not 0 (and I need to revert to editor again).

 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, MaximumThrust said:

I would like it very much this mod, if you make, I hope it will be compatible with 1.3.1.

Well, if I do end up making a mod like this myself, one thing I've got to tell you is that I will be making zero effort to make it backwards compatible with 1.3.1.  I live on current-KSP, I play on current-KSP, and trying to design and test a mod for older KSP versions is something I simply have no bandwidth for or interest in.  It would be a large investment of my effort for a thing that provides zero benefit to me, and would help only a small fraction of the KSP community that chooses not to upgrade.  (And I suspect you'll find that's true of most modders.  Occasionally you'll see someone who goes out of their way to backport their mods to previous versions, but my experience has been that that's very much the exception rather than the rule.)

I'm sorry about that, since it would leave you pretty much out in the cold if you're still on 1.3.1.    But it's just how things are.

That said:  Even if the mod were to be written for 1.4.1... I suspect there's a good possibility that it would work on 1.3.1 anyway.  There wasn't a lot of API change in KSP between 1.3.1 and 1.4.  For example, most of my mods that were running just fine on 1.3.1 didn't require any code updates at all when moving to 1.4; they just worked, as-is.  So, as long as a newly written mod isn't using any new KSP features that are specific to 1.4.1, my guess is that it'll probably end up working in 1.3.1 anyway, so you may be fine.  Time will tell.

But, of course, the big "if" here is if such a mod even gets written in the first place.  You've piqued my curiosity, but I'm pretty busy IRL these days so I don't know if I'll have the bandwidth to implement this, myself-- or, if I do, I don't know when.  So, no promises. 

1 hour ago, MaximumThrust said:

How would be possible to change that? A .dll plugin, a MM Patch, Custom Barn Kit config?

I'm thinking plugin code-- basically, a little plugin routine that runs in the VAB, which would hook onto the "new part picked" event and rotate the part by the desired amount.  My guess is that the code wouldn't be too complicated.  However, that's only a guess-- as always with coding, the devil's in the details, and until one actually sets out to do it, there's no telling what hidden gotchas might be lurking that could make this into a more difficult problem than one might think.

However... I'm guessing it's probably not that big a deal. 

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

Personally, I do this by using the rotate widget rather than @Gargamel's suggested method of grabbing it and then hitting Q, but that's only because I'm OCD about wanting to keep the ship's axis precisely centered on the VAB center, and there's no easy way to grab-and-hit-Q without accidentally nudging the ship off-center if the mouse moves even a millimeter while I've got the root part grabbed.  There's no gameplay reason to care about that, it's just my OCD talking. 

After rotating with Q you could translate the pod with snap on. It should snap to 0,0 just by clicking one of the arrows.

At least, it should if the root part works the same as child parts do. I use this method to center radial parts on top of a rocket all the time.

Edited March 21, 2018 by 5thHorseman

[Snark]

50 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

After rotating with Q you could translate the pod with snap on. It should snap to 0,0 just by clicking one of the arrows.

At least, it should if the root part works the same as child parts do. I use this method to center radial parts on top of a rocket all the time.

Yes, it works, and in fact I use that technique myself for centering things on top of rockets.  But it has a couple of drawbacks when applied to an entire rocket via the root part:

• it adds another step, so I might as well have used the rotate widget in the first place anyway
• it only works if the random oops-I-dragged-it error happens to be less than one grid-snap interval; otherwise I have to blindly hunt around to try to get it back to the origin again.  (It's fine for centering a part on the rocket, since I have the rocket itself as a visual reference point for center; it's ugly for when the whole rocket's involved, because there's no convenient visual "landmark" to know when I've centered it).

Which is to say "yes, I tried that, the rotate widget works better for me". 

Honestly, I wish that the VAB were implemented such that the root part is nailed in place at X=0, Z=0, so that the only possible motion is constrained to move vertically along the Y axis.  I never ever under any circumstances ever-- by which I mean, "not once in 4 years of playing KSP"-- want to have an off-center rocket in the VAB.  So I really wish it would simply constrain the root part to stay along the central axis so that I wouldn't have the annoying possibility all the time of accidentally knocking the rocket off-center.

(Hmm, maybe that could make an interesting mod, too...)

I'm sure that other players have valid use cases of their own for wanting to move things around the VAB, but I myself never do.

[Snark]

Okay, here ya go, @MaximumThrust. 

As promised, I haven't even slightly checked to see whether it will run on 1.3.1.  But I rather suspect that it'll run just fine.

[MaximumThrust]

2 minutes ago, Snark said:

Okay, here ya go, @MaximumThrust. 

As promised, I haven't even slightly checked to see whether it will run on 1.3.1.  But I rather suspect that it'll run just fine.

Thanks! I did a basic test, seems to be working fine in the 1.3.1. This topic don't have any purpose anymore, feel free to closed it.

About the updates, I totally understand if a modder choose to support only the last version, because there are lots of older versions, would be a nightmare to keep backward compatibility. I cannot demand this (or anything), only hope it works or the modders have this interest. I don't want to start a discussion, but I highly disliked the 1.3.1 > 1.4.1 update. The only reason I still play KSP is for the mods, and I see this update only as trouble, without adding almost nothing that interested me or the mods didn't do much better for years (and some absurd bugs and other unwanted things). Gladly for me, most of the most important mods I use still didn't update (so I don't even bother considering to update or having doubts), and a bug fix I was waiting had backward compatibility. The way things are going, If I update, will probably be in some version after the 1.4.1.

[Kerbal101]

Thread locked per OP request.