SAS Lock Mode

[Starwhip]

If you played a version prior to about 0.22, you may remember the old "Rock-steady Hand-Of-God" ASAS. The current system is a wee bit... well, submissive. It won't hold a heading if a small percentage of your control authority won't do, and it won't even try to fix itself.

I say that there should be a little "gizmo" thing on the side of the navball, like the Prograde, Normal, etc gizmos, that activates the old system.

[Bill Phil]

The old system overcompensated, a bit. So, maybe an improved old system?

[DancesWithSquirrels]

Version 0.90: Locking SAS (basic orientation lock mode) is fine for me, but locking to anything else in the newly available list (prograde, anti-normal, target, maneuver, etc) ends up jittering all over the place. For RCS based rotations this wastes huge amounts of monopropellent, and you can watch the engine gimballing just vibrate.

My impression is that the orientations to specific vectors aren't being handled with the same PID approach and controller values as simple orientation lock, and in fact act like all-on/all-off corrections (bang-bang) with associated overshooting. Might I suggest that specific vector orientations use the same PID (proportional/integral/derivative) approach as simple orientation maintenance?

This is especially important if the reaction wheels are going to be nerfed in some fashion, as RCS (and required monopropellent) becomes far more important to the missions.