VAB declaration of stages as vessels and by type.

[glen.mack]

In this weeks dev notes, Romfarer talked about issues with defining errors where there are non by design.

Jim (Romfarer): This week i’ve been fixing more bugs the QA team found in the Engineer’s Report. For the most part this work has been involving fixing non critical ui related issues and spelling errors. I also haven’t seen any real programming exceptions with the ui yet, which is a good thing, because those tend to crash the game for silly reasons.

The hardest part of writing tests for this system is to figure out what constitutes a design concern. It gets tricky fast because whether it is an error or not depends on what you intend to use the rocket for. Consider missing parachutes. There is no way to determine whether a vessel is never supposed to land (ie. no parachute required in the first place). Or the case where you use a single docking port on your vessel to release a probe Not an error in itself, but the released probe will likely not have docking capabilities. Still not an error because it could be a satellite. And what if you intended to land that “thingâ€Â. Luckily we have an awesome QA team.

Why not give us a means to pick up a bunch of parts and label it "probe" or "rover", then re-attach it to the vessel main stage thusly when you make your lander or rover in the VAB/SPH the correct Engineering algorithms can be applied, and when it is deployed in flight, it is already marked as the correct vessel type.

Any thoughts on this?

[nothingSpecial]

I do like this. And I do like to have similar mechanic in docking - when I attach, for example, lander called "Munar Excursion Module" to spacecraft called "Khoebus", I want to have result labeled as Khoebus spacecraft, and then when I undock my lander, it is once again called Munar Excursion Module and recognized as lander.

[worir4]

This is a good idea! It would save me time re-naming stuff. This could also be useful to split up sub assemblies into categories such as launcher, lander ect.

[nothingSpecial]

Oh, forgot to mention: my additional suggestion about docking is too late. It's already there.

[Guest]

Good ideas.