Umcookies

Mistakes are made, there's no way around it. Even patches that have been reviewed and tested for months can have bugs crop up when thousands of users get their hands on it. Plus I doubt they have a huge team to test every nitty gritty detail about the game every time they update something. It simply isn't efficient to test EVERYTHING when you've made changes to very specific things about the game. Now, in the case with the last couple of updates there have been rather glaring bugs, I can't defend Squad on that one but still some leeway needs to be given. In fact I believe they're still in Beta mode where they believe they can use the players as the review process for updates as that's exactly what a beta is for. In my opinion they need to adopt a similar setup to minecraft, allow people to participate in a "beta" update program, still let your dedicated users find the bugs while allowing them access to the bleeding edge versions of the game. In that case everyone wins, people can see what direction the game is going and test new parts while it doesn't effect the majority of the user base. Win-Win all around. Will they do it? I don't see a reason not too but who knows. One can hope.

Yup, I definitely wouldn't want them to release a patch for a potentially game breaking bug that could literally ruin saves, screw those people that are effected by it, hah am-i-right? The stock game works between patches, it's your choice to install the third party mods that effect the game play. Disable auto updates and live in your current version until a new patch comes out that you like, update then when all the mods you use have been updated. Why is this so hard to understand?

I glanced away for a second to check a stream I was watching, low and behold where has my plane gone? Turns out it was actually still controllable, quite easily in fact.

Pretty much nailed it, the navball rotates as your craft does. So, if you were sitting at KSC and slowly lifted off of the launch pad but rotated your craft 180 degrees pressing D will now take you West rather than East. Likewise if you rotated exactly 90 degrees pressing D will now lean your craft to the North. Rotating -90 degrees then pressing D will lean your craft South EDIT: as Dilli said, the orientation of the part you're "control from here" will effect the navball as well. It's considerably easier to pay attention to the navball exclusively, you can entirely ignore your craft as the camera's orientation will change your perception of what the controls do. To keep with using the D key as an example, pressing it will always rotate the navball (and thus your craft) to the right of the navball. In the above pictures I've rotated my lander (poorly) 90 degrees but pressing D will always rotate the navball (thus your craft) to the right.

There sure is, you've never noticed that reticle that's always in the middle of the navball? You can always orient yourself like this. If the numbers are slightly hard to read you can use that slightly orange line as that's north. Easy peasy.

Might be worth noting that you need to upgrade your tracking station for your 'blue line' to work outside of Kerbin