Tweakable SAS and control UI Features

[jf0]

What I would like to see is a tweakable SAS. At the moment, in some cases, if your ship has a certain flex 'mode' (say a long thin rocket), this can make SAS unstable. It is not that the rocket is uncontrollable, because I can fly it manually fairly well, it is that the certain combination of SAS's damping/gain/whatever interacts with the ship to make a situation where it cannot hold it stable pointing in one direction, usually because SAS will saturate the control inputs.

I think at least the ability to tweak some sas parameters in the VAB would be very useful. I don't know exactly how SAS is currently coded in the game so I am not sure what kind of tweakables to suggest.

I know there are probably mods with improved SAS and I vaguely am aware that the developers said they dont want to add an 'auto pilot', but I think that now having the prograde hold options etc this does not seem like an unreasonable feature suggestion. It could be tech-tree dependant, or require a special, expensive, advanced sas module as a part for example.

You might argue that SAS is really not an automatic module but more 'letting the kerbal pilot take control' (since it requires a pilot to work), so tweaking it would not make sense. But then neither would the fact that is sometimes very unstable...

I would also like a way to see on the navball the actual setpoint for SAS when it is in stability hold mode. Not even necessarily to set it (I think this would be too close to autopilot), just to be able to see what direction it is trying to seek.

Another simple UI feature I think would be great would be adding some display that shows your rotation rate (angular velocity) in each axis. Right now we have a little display both in staging and IVA view that shows the control input in each axis. What would be far more useful is to have similar displays that show your angular velocity in these axis.

Anyway what do people think?