[1.12.x] VABReorienter v1.2: Pick a different VAB orientation (not just north)

[Geonovast]

10 minutes ago, Snark said:

Except that, like any sane person, I'm using the navball and not the camera view to figure out my pitch, which is all that matters. 

Well.  Me too.   Now anyway

I played the game for several weeks without even looking at it.  I'd never used one, I didn't know how.  I had no clue what any of the SAS symbols meant.  Frankly, it was intimidating.  It may not be a preference thing to fly by the magic floating camera outside, but may be the only option.

12 minutes ago, Snark said:

My gosh, you're absolutely right!  And by the same logic, we should petition Squad to launch spaceplanes by default so that they're lying on their right side rather than right-side up

Well, no.  The idea with the rockets does seem to fall apart with the planes.  But I'd say it's far more likely that people understand the basic controls of a plane more than a rocket.  Especially when you've got one of the most well known spacecraft being a plane strapped to a rocket.

It would make more sense for the default camera view to be "from behind" when launching from the runway, though.  Even though, for some reason I can't even explain to myself, I launch planes right-left with the camera facing from the North...

16 minutes ago, Snark said:

So to my mind, the thing that's wrong here is not that "KSP faces rockets the wrong direction", but that it doesn't let the player choose

I agree, I think this is the big thing, and the source of a lot of issues.  Given the timeframe you wrote this mod in (I saw the posts where the idea was snarked), it seems it wouldn't have been too much trouble to work it in at some point.

 

I can just see where the logic for the defaults come from.  New player, no experience with spacecraft or flight controls.  You have a little blurb telling you need to go up and right.  The engines make you go up, you need to go right.  Given the standardization of WASD... "D" makes sense.  Until you know what you're doing, anyway.

On 3/22/2018 at 3:24 PM, MaximumThrust said:

To everyone using 1.3.1, seems to be working perfectly.

Awesome!  I still haven't made the transition on my main mod install.  I'll get this into 1.3.1 right away too.

[DerekL1963]

2 hours ago, Capt. Hunt said:

I believe that is why NASA used a roll maneuver in all their launches.

Long story short, NASA used a roll maneuver to align the rocket's axes with the stable platforms axes.  Back in the days of analog computers and control systems this made life MUCH easier.  They don't need to anymore, but they still do because rocket engineers are conservative stick-in-the-muds.

[Capt. Hunt]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

So to my mind, the thing that's wrong here is not that "KSP faces rockets the wrong direction", but that it doesn't let the player choose. To me, clearly the right thing to do is to just add a game option so the player can pick whichever way they like.  And then everyone wins.

To be fair, nothing is stopping the player from rotating their rocket to face whichever way they want in the VAB.  By default the big door is facing east, and it loads on the pad exactly the same orientation you build it with in the VAB.

6 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Long story short, NASA used a roll maneuver to align the rocket's axes with the stable platforms axes.  Back in the days of analog computers and control systems this made life MUCH easier.  They don't need to anymore, but they still do because rocket engineers are conservative stick-in-the-muds.

If I recall correctly, the pads had to be built in a certain orientation in part because of the terrain on Merritt Island

[DerekL1963]

6 minutes ago, Capt. Hunt said:

If I recall correctly, the pads had to be built in a certain orientation in part because of the terrain on Merritt Island

Merritt Island aren't the only pads at the Cape, and the Saturn V's weren't the only rocket to us a roll maneuver.

[Tyko]

8 hours ago, Capt. Hunt said:

To be fair, nothing is stopping the player from rotating their rocket to face whichever way they want in the VAB.  By default the big door is facing east, and it loads on the pad exactly the same orientation you build it with in the VAB.

To be fair - this isn't really a great solution.

Firstly, ever single core part you attach has to be rotated manually This is particularly an issue with probe cores since you can throw an entire mission off because one of your deployable components has it's probe core off the primary axis.

Second, even if you do remember to rotate every part, the game likes to rotate parts back to the default direction. If you click on a part and re-attach it it'll rotate. You click on a part in the stack and the game rotates it and everything attached to it back to North. So you have to scrutinize every part move to make sure something wasn't rotated - you're fighting the game's default behavior through the entire build process.

8 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

I believe that is why NASA used a roll maneuver in all their launches.

Many space launches execute roll maneuvers to get them on the correct inclination. Early Russian Soyuz family rockets couldn't execute roll maneuvers so they had to be set up on the pad in the correct orientation. At Cape Canaveral the launch pads aren't even oriented to a cardinal direction. Instead their orientation is impacted by terrain issues at each site and a need for a Transporter road that doesn't have any tight direction changes. From looking at Google Earth it looks like only the two big launch platforms (39A and 39B) at Kennedy Space Center are actually oriented toward North.

So....the mod is actually really helpful to builders and it's not breaking any sense of reality or immersion by giving players a choice of direction - just like real world designers had.

Edited March 30, 2018 by Tyko

[Snark]

On 3/29/2018 at 11:10 PM, Capt. Hunt said:

To be fair, nothing is stopping the player from rotating their rocket to face whichever way they want in the VAB.  By default the big door is facing east, and it loads on the pad exactly the same orientation you build it with in the VAB.

Yes.  Of course.  Which is what I've been doing on every gosh-darn rocket every single blessed time I build something, for the last several years.

After about the 837th time I've had to do that, it got kind of old, thus the mod so it just does by default what I want it to do.

It gets especially old because it's such a massive pain in the butt to me to rotate the rocket.  I'm OCD about wanting to keep the rocket perfectly centered on the Y axis, which means "click on the root part and hit Q" isn't an option for me because invariably it will mean the rocket gets nudged out of position.  So the only "safe" way I can rotate the rocket is to hit 3, click on the root part, caaaaarefully rotate it 1-2-3-4-5-6 clicks, and there it goes.

And even then, it's still kinda broken.  If I ever need to tinker with the rocket-- e.g. detach the bottom half so I can insert a part in the middle before re-attaching it-- the moment I detach, the detached part instantly snaps to the default facing-north orientation, which screws up things like docking port and probe core orientation, often in a way that's difficult to diagnose visually.  And if I ever want to attach any parts with bilateral symmetry-- which does come up from time to time-- then that's hard-coded to use the default orientation's plane as the plane of mirror symmetry, which means I'd have to go through the whole tedious business of rotating the craft back to facing north, then attach whatever-it-is I'm attaching, then the whole tedious process of rotating the craft back to east again.

Basically, there's a pervasive directional bias built into the way the VAB works.  And there's nothing wrong with that... as long as the bias is in the direction I want it to be.  Otherwise, it's swimming against the stream and just gets irritating.

If it doesn't irritate you, then great!  Count yourself among the walking fortunate.    ...in which case, this mod probably wouldn't be super useful to you.  But it really, really helps me, which is why I wrote it.

Just to put things in perspective for you:

Imagine if the SPH were designed so that, by default, every spaceplane is built lying on its right side instead of right-side up.  That's how it appears by default, and that's basically how you have to build everything because it will mirror everything around a horizontal plane.  And also when it launches to the runway, it'll be lying on its right side there, too.  So every single time you launch a plane, you have to manually rotate it right-side up as a final step.  And if you ever want to edit it after you've done that, you have to flip it back on its side, do the edit, and then flip it right side up again.

That would be kind of irritating, wouldn't it?  People would say "gosh that's aggravating, I wish they'd just make the airplane appear right-side up because that's how I like to fly it."  And that would be a perfectly valid point.  And to anyone thus irritated, saying "well, you can just rotate the craft right-side up before you launch" probably wouldn't do much to placate them. 

For folks who are used to north-facing rockets and don't seem to mind them much... I understand that it may be difficult to grasp that north-facing default rockets are every bit as irritating to me as a default lying-on-its-right-side orientation would be in the SPH.  But it is.  Thus this mod.

[MaximumThrust]

26 minutes ago, Snark said:

Yes.  Of course.  Which is what I've been doing on every gosh-darn rocket every single blessed time I build something, for the last several years.

After about the 837th time I've had to do that, it got kind of old, thus the mod so it just does by default what I want it to do.

It gets especially old because it's such a massive pain in the butt to me to rotate the rocket.  I'm OCD about wanting to keep the rocket perfectly centered on the Y axis, which means "click on the root part and hit Q" isn't an option for me because invariably it will mean the rocket gets nudged out of position.  So the only "safe" way I can rotate the rocket is to hit 3, click on the root part, caaaaarefully rotate it 1-2-3-4-5-6 clicks, and there it goes.

And even then, it's still kinda broken.  If I ever need to tinker with the rocket-- e.g. detach the bottom half so I can insert a part in the middle before re-attaching it-- the moment I detach, the detached part instantly snaps to the default facing-north orientation, which screws up things like docking port and probe core orientation, often in a way that's difficult to diagnose visually.  And if I ever want to attach any parts with bilateral symmetry-- which does come up from time to time-- then that's hard-coded to use the default orientation's plane as the plane of mirror symmetry, which means I'd have to go through the whole tedious business of rotating the craft back to facing north, then attach whatever-it-is I'm attaching, then the whole tedious process of rotating the craft back to east again.

Basically, there's a pervasive directional bias built into the way the VAB works.  And there's nothing wrong with that... as long as the bias is in the direction I want it to be.  Otherwise, it's swimming against the stream and just gets irritating.

If it doesn't irritate you, then great!  Count yourself among the walking fortunate.    ...in which case, this mod probably wouldn't be super useful to you.  But it really, really helps me, which is why I wrote it.

Just to put things in perspective for you:

Imagine if the SPH were designed so that, by default, every spaceplane is built lying on its right side instead of right-side up.  That's how it appears by default, and that's basically how you have to build everything because it will mirror everything around a horizontal plane.  And also when it launches to the runway, it'll be lying on its right side there, too.  So every single time you launch a plane, you have to manually rotate it right-side up as a final step.  And if you ever want to edit it after you've done that, you have to flip it back on its side, do the edit, and then flip it right side up again.

That would be kind of irritating, wouldn't it?  People would say "gosh that's aggravating, I wish they'd just make the airplane appear right-side up because that's how I like to fly it."  And that would be a perfectly valid point.  And to anyone thus irritated, saying "well, you can just rotate the craft right-side up before you launch" probably wouldn't do much to placate them. 

For folks who are used to north-facing rockets and don't seem to mind them much... I understand that it may be difficult to grasp that north-facing default rockets are every bit as irritating to me as a default lying-on-its-right-side orientation would be in the SPH.  But it is.  Thus this mod.

For me the biggest problem is not being able to easily identify what the orientation of the rocket. Sometimes the rocket is where I want, but the command pod don't, so I have to remove the rocket, rotate the command pod in the right way, and then attach the rocket back. Things get very frustrating when dealing with merged payloads and launch vehicles, where both have their own command pods. 

But thanks to Snark this is a thing from the past.

[Gordon Dry]

@Snark @magico13 is it possible that either VABReorienter or KerbalConstructionTime recognize that the other mod is also installed and on reverting a vessel via KCT and then editing it the orientation in VAB is set to the default of VABReorienter, not the stock orientation?

[Beetlecat]

The last few comments and @fourfa 's got me curious (and googling) -- The real-world roll was for a few reasons, mainly to transition from a strict NSEW-oriented launch pad to whatever actual inclination was wanted for orbit (or to reach the moon). Shuttles had to do it so they could face the right way 'round (upside down for orbit) and so their antenna was facing the ground. They couldn't just launch from the angle they wanted, because the control towers were on the north side of the pads.

Interestingly, the Apollo rockets were mounted with the command module "up" facing east (so upon launch, we'd be pulling *up* to head east). SSTs were mounted with the top facing south, so a full 90 degree roll would be needed to "face" east.

Stock behavior sort of mimics the NASA limitation of only having one "direction" you could mount rockets on the pad -- though if it was consistent, it would be the direction the rockets approach from the VAB from, and the towers would be on the EAST side of the pad.

Of course, a tower on the east would suck--a fix for that would be to re-do the KSC to include a 90° left turn on the crawlerway (similar to the real KSC).

Thankfully, this mod sorts all of that nonsense out and lets us just pick what way we want to launch from.

Edited April 19, 2018 by Beetlecat

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Gordon Dry said:

is it possible that either VABReorienter or KerbalConstructionTime recognize that the other mod is also installed and on reverting a vessel via KCT and then editing it the orientation in VAB is set to the default of VABReorienter, not the stock orientation?

No idea on this side.  VABReorienter is a simple little mod that simply adjusts the stock VAB's default orientation, nothing more.  I have no idea how KCT does what it does (it's not a mod that I happen to run, myself), and don't really have the bandwidth to investigate it.

Without knowing anything at all about KCT, I would guess that one of the following would pertain:

• Either it uses the VAB orientation, in which case I would expect that it would work perfectly fine with VABReorienter,
• or else it doesn't and uses its own, in which case the only way to make it work would be to add code there to do the same thing that VABReorienter does.

That's just a guess, though.  In any case, VABReorienter doesn't have any clue about any other mod, and I don't really have any plans to make it so-- it's just a little convenience mod, and it works fine with all the mods that I happen to use. 

[RobertJPowell]

I've been using both together with no issue.

[Gordon Dry]

15 minutes ago, RobertJPowell said:

I've been using both together with no issue.

I have no issue, but when I recover with KCT (no stock recover) and choose to edit the vessel with KCT, it's oriented north aka. stock.

You can also see that the vessel hovers in the middle of the VAB, when you placed it barely above ground on saving.

[RobertJPowell]

Hrmm interesting, always retains East for me. Perhaps something for both @Snark and @magico13 to look into if you can supply the relevant log files @Gordon Dry

[Gordon Dry]

@RobertJPowell Well, yeah, this could be something:

 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Gordon Dry said:

Well, yeah, this could be something:

Looking at the log file, looks as though KCT is throwing an exception, yeah.  So I guess the thing to do is to follow up there, as you've done.

[Gordon Dry]

Can anybody tell if this is known as compatible to KK (Kerbal Konstructs)?

Edit:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/efqkoehnyxnlddy/2018-05-10_3 KSP.log.7z?dl=1

Edited May 10, 2018 by Gordon Dry

[Ruedii]

A million thanks!

On 3/22/2018 at 5:09 PM, Gordon Dry said:

I know why the devs decided to orient north ... you look at the screen and it looks so "natural" if you look from south - to north, so yawing right is looking "good"... somehow.

It's like you read a text from left to right as long as you was born and raised in an english speaking or european county... 

Yep, all westerners were raised with North as their cardinal direction, and think left to right.

[Snark]

Hi gang,

Just a note that I've released VABReorienter v1.2.  No new features, just a compatibility update for KSP 1.8.

[razark]

43 minutes ago, Snark said:

Just a note that I've released VABReorienter v1.2.  No new features, just a compatibility update for KSP 1.8.

Thanks!  This is one of those little ones that doesn't do much and isn't really noticeable until it's missing. I mean that in the nicest way, of course.  A great little quality of life addition.

[CreepyShadow]

Just a heads up for people downloading this mod. It doesn't work together with Kronal Vessel Viewer. If both are installed then the tilt function of KVV will stop working or behaving very weird.

@SnarkI only tested this in 1.12.2 as of now so maybe it works in earlier releases and I don't know which mods fault it is, but just to be sure I'm mentioning it here too.

Just spent ages reinstalling a lot of mods over and over again, one by one to see what broke KVV and I want to spare anyone else from that anguish.