michelcolman

When I started using SAS, I was a bit surprised how poorly it hunts for the intended target, often overshooting it, especially on craft with poor attitude control. I often have to help it and actually counteract its inputs, slowing it down as it approaches the target while SAS is still trying to accelerate towards it. It looks like the system's gains are tuned for high performance attitude control (working well using vectored engine thrust, with RCS or on very light craft with sufficiently large reaction wheels) but are woefully wrong when control is more limited. I can see it continue to accelerate towards the target while it's totally obvious it's going to overshoot and it ought to be slowing down. It would be nice if SAS would take the available torque into account so it stopped accelerating towards the target and started decelerating a lot earlier to avoid overshooting.

I may admit to using the instant rotation freeze "feature", but it has also annoyed me a lot more often. I often make rockets without RCS and just the absolute minimum of reaction wheels, and would like to just start a tiny rotation and then warp forward as the craft slowly rotates to the new orientation (as it probably works in real life, with attitude corrections taking hours to use as little electricity and RCS as possible). But now you have to start the correction and then wait for the craft to slowly rotate. If you warp, the rotation stops. That's quite frustrating. And just plain unrealistic.

Excellent idea. My main problems with the current maneuver nodes are: - Moving a node along the orbit is very hard to do because you often grab one of the handles instead. You have to zoom in (losing sight of the new orbit) and possibly change the camera angle just to be able to hover the mouse over just the right spot so the node circle is illuminated and not one of the handles. Often requires pixel perfect mouse alignment, and the thing is not even standing still so you end up clicking on the wrong part anyway as the handle lit up a fraction of a second before you click. - It's hard to find a camera angle where you can adjust the node and also see the resulting orbit. For example, to plan a Mun capture, you need to have the Mun and the node in view at the same time, so it's impossible to precisely change the location of the node. A one pixel change gives a totally different result. So you need to zoom in, make an adjustment, zoom out again, etc... However, I can think of one alternative that might be even more useful and versatile: split screen so you can have two seperate views. Focus one on the intercept, and the other view on the maneuver node. This would have many other uses, and would make changes to the maneuver node system unnecessary.

Indeed, SAS should continue to work and, with SAS off, rotations should continue. I do understand that physics don't work during warp, but they could keep the attitude fixed to the SAS target (if it's already kind of close to it, so you can't cheat by quickly going in and out of warp to instantly align to the SAS target) and keep rotating the craft at its last rotation rate if SAS is off. Rotation doesn't require physics, they can just rotate the coordinates and attitudes of all the components of the craft in a matter of nanoseconds without needing the physics engine. And low battery warnings during time warp would be nice to have, too. Time warp should slow to 1x and give a warning when you approach zero battery and are consuming energy.

I've experienced it several times already: warp throughout the solar system without any trouble (batteries hardly losing any charge at all), then warp with SAS on and boom, all empty. A few times I caught it just on time with the batteries only half depleted and then continued the journey with SAS off and not using any power. So I'm pretty sure SAS is using electricity during warp. Nothing else was consuming energy anyway, just a kerbal in a basic module. I haven't tried any mods yet, but I'll certainly have a look at those. Thanks!

Hi, I've been playing KSP for a few weeks now, and I'm new to these forums. Forgive me if this issue might have been discussed before, but I couldn't find it in the first 10 pages or so. When the craft is rotating when you activate time warp, it suddenly stops rotating (only doing an apparent rotation relative to the body you're orbiting because the absolute attitude remains the same). I admit I often use this glitch to cheat a little bit on craft that don't have a lot of attitude control (start rotation to desired attitude and then press "." and "," to instantly stop the rotation) but it kind of feels wrong. Maybe there's a good technical reason for this, but if at all possible, it would be nice if this could be changed. Also, SAS does not work during time warp but it DOES contiue to use energy! I have often found myself with dead batteries after timewarping through the solar system with SAS accidentally left on. It should either be officially off (and not use energy) or actually work if it does remain on. Right now it's the worst of both worlds, draining energy while not working. Also, some kind of warning or auto-off feature would be welcome for SAS. It's really easy to time warp through a multi-month solar system excursion and then realise that you just completely drained your batteries. Can trash an entire mission in a few seconds of inattention. Thanks, Michel