Frederf

Heck, when are all in the same hemisphere of the solar angle?

You would make a horrible engineer. "User testing reveals that a significant fraction of users experience a negative experience with the design." "The design is perfect and unchangeable! The users are bad people and should feel bad!" I know it's hyperbolic, but it's how you come off. You're white-knighting the status quo without a semblance of objectivity. You might have considered your position carefully but it's not apparent. When examining the design of a system you must divorce yourself from the current implementation. Imaging that the system works in any and all ways simultaneously and pick out the practical best design uninformed by history. If you oppose a change check your conclusion by framing it as the change has already occurred and you suggest that it be changed back. "The navball mode persists until user input to do so. I suggest that at an undocumented consistent round number that it automatically change modes without user input with minimal visual clues."

If you're out of plane and have different orbital dimensions there is a minimum separation in most cases. If you reduce your inclinatation relative you'll find you can get much closer approaches. That said 2-3km is plenty close for a quick scoot to co-location.

0 Dry mass Squad fuselage tanks are a persistent issue even after applying the fix a few posts above. Dividing by zero is bad.

Resonant orbits like Faark mentions is the way.

Crossfeed capable only transfers fuel if the structure of your part connections is suitable for that resource flow. The hierarchy of flow dictates a certain path (X drains from Y drains from Z), crossfeed capable simply allows it.

Different surface properties would be quite interesting. Right now it's hard/wet flat/sloped yes?

I imagined backpack fuel would come from RCS reserves eventually.

Drag and drop will shuffle icons around between stage numbers. If you have many many stage numbers there's no way to organize them for visual compactness. Considering these are escape pods you might want to collapse them down into parallel stages. If you have 10 escape pods with 3 stages, put all the similar stages together. Once the craft separates the other pods will drop out. You can always reconfigure staging in space.

Ron it still makes me chuckle every time you call Kerbin Kerban. Aerobraking is not calculated for inactive vessels. A 100x24km orbit will never decay. A 100x22km orbit will disappear the craft as it descends below 23km.

I think new SAS doesn't appear to use RCS because the inputs are so small that the RCS puffs aren't visible.

There are quite a few reasons to set a target other than rendezvous. Targetting the Mun in Kerbin orbit tells you your absolute inclination. Getting coplanar with a space station before beginning a landing descent. Adjusting orbit to achieve a closer rendezvous (still want orbital info). Getting a position vector on a landing site only. Putting satellites in a constellation. I must agree that the silent and automatic change on a primary flight instrument is a poor design. It doesn't look different or make a beep or tell you in any way. What happens is the markers change angles and the speed readout changes numerical value with exactly no way to tell that a change has occurred except the values displayed which isn't reliable. All that you need to recognize that there is a genuine problem is the number of cases where a user has unwittingly used the navball values unaware that the context has changed. That's all the proof you need.

From discussion before it's possible to make a part not listed in the VAB but it will still load the assets which has the penalties of loading time and RAM usage.

I've never heard of parts breaking without them breaking off or exploding. Can you confirm this is a non-functioning part in situ?

It doesn't have to be over one necessarily. Depending on your lift and per rocket profile.

The problem is the massive magical magnetism associated with docking so players don't have to be so precise. No matter how slowly you approach, you will impact with some minimum violence due to this "helper" system. Things get really destructive if the resulting wobble clips some parts together which will react with the force of a thousand suns. I suggest sas off rcs off and time accel just after to freeze physics.

I try for less than Mach 1.

I thought it did, just very slowly? I know that any control input captures a new "home" attitude.

nhnifong, pretty sure it's in seconds (or rather time) so you want to increase the value to weaken the effect.

I've been meaning to test the functionality of this cfg value. Is that what it does, ramp up speed or is it a delay between deploying and the parachute pop?

Excellent. As stated repeatedly variable content via MFS or similar is greatly desired. Regarding texturing, is it possible to tile or modularize and not stretch? Maybe a texture top and bottom with a stretched or tiled filler between? I don't know what's really possible here.

Without intervention the magic altitude to have your debris deleted by atmospheric reentry is 23km. If you have the will to make them the active vessel and watch babysit them with physics you can do this a lot higher (35 km on a single orbit, 50 km on several). Assuming your station is in a 100km circular you need 68.3 m/s retro to lower your pe to 23km. Since dV = Isp*g0*ln(M/m) you want your mass fraction to be about 2% fuel for the deorbit burn.

Certain craft are not stable within the control authority available to either the player or the SAS. In such cases it's not the computer's fault that it's impossible. However the SAS is quite weak and reactionary. Often corrections build too late since the disruptive forces increase with the steering error. I find the SAS only suitable in less dynamic situations like orbit or airplane flight.

I wish the "fine control" would lower the usable range of the control input to 1/e and 1/e^2 (or even 10%, 1%) of full authority. The slower ramp up time is OK but it's still ugly to have to keyboard tap things into place.

It would be nice to have RCS thrusters to be activated via staging so you could put RCS components and not worry about them doing anything until their stage was activated. Action groups are perfectly usable (although I find some times I have to hit the group twice the first time) they aren't very convenient.