Better UI for deleting craft

[Snark]

Currently, the only way to delete a ship in KSP is via the red button in the tracking station.  It works, but it has some rough edges.  There are three things in particular that I think would be helpful to add:

 

1. Show the vessel name in the confirmation dialog.

When you're in the tracking station and you click the delete button, it pops up a warning dialog to the effect that "the ship will be destroyed, are you sure?"  My ask is, prominently show the vessel name there.

Rationale:  What if the player accidentally selected the wrong ship and didn't notice it?  Making sure the player has an immediate visual indication of just which ship will be deleted would be a nice safeguard.  Every time I click this red button, I always get an unpleasant nervous feeling and have to force myself to double- and triple-check.  A simple name display would really help with this.

 

2. Show a different warning for crewed versus uncrewed ships.

The warning that it shows just says, this will be deleted and any crew on board will be killed.  Well, are there any crew?  If I delete this ship, am I killing anyone?  Another source of stress and uncertainty, and again, every time I delete any ship I have to force myself to go back and double-check the crew content before deleting.  It would be much more friendly to have two different warnings.

Uncrewed ships will say something like:  Unmanned vessel "SnarkProbe II" will be deleted. Confirm?

Crewed ships would say something like:  WARNING!  Vessel "Snarxplorer" has 3 kerbals aboard.  Deleting will KILL these kerbals.  Are you really sure?

...or words to that general effect.  As long as the wording is different, and the visual appearance of the dialog is significantly different enough that when you're expecting the uncrewed version to pop up, and the crewed version pops up instead, it makes you notice and go "whoa".

 

3.  Have some way in the flight UI to delete the current vessel.

Right now, the only way to delete a vessel is from the tracking station.  This has a couple of issues.

First issue: when I have a whole lot of active ships, I may not be able to remember for sure which one is the right one to delete-- just seeing it in the map view in the tracking station may not be enough.  I want to go to the ship and see for myself, first.  So right now what I have to do is: 1. go to the tracking station, 2. rummage around through the ship list to find the one that I think is the right one, 3. switch to it to confirm visually, 4. make a careful note of the name (maybe even write it down, if there are a lot of similarly named ships), 5. switch back to the tracking station again, 6. find the ship in the list again, 7. press the delete button, 8. fight a horrible sinking sense of dread that maybe I've got the wrong ship, 9. confirm.  If I could just go to the ship, see it, and then decided on the spot "delete this ship" (which would take me back to KSC), that would really be helpful.

Second issue:  There are situations in KSC where the game won't let the player switch to another ship or return to KSC, i.e. when flying in atmosphere.  This can lead to a situation where the player is "trapped" on the current ship and can't do anything at all to escape for several minutes.  For example, suppose I drop an expendable probe into Jool's atmosphere.  It takes its science measurements, transmits them, then I'm done with it.  As far as I'm concerned, I can destroy it and go on with life.  Except that the game has no way to destroy it from the in-flight UI, and it won't let me return to KSC or switch to another ship because I'm in atmosphere.  All I can do is just stare helplessly at the ship for the next many minutes, waiting for it to fall all the way through Jool's atmosphere until it gets to the "surface" and is destroyed.  That takes a long time, and there's absolutely nothing I can do.  It's just infuriating.

Anyway, this ask is to have some way to avoid the above two issues.  Obviously it's not something that should take up a lot of screen UI or be at all possible to activate by accident, or add to the clutter of the screen, so some careful thought would need to go into just how it's designed.  But surely there must be some way to work it in.  A "destroy" button next to the "abort" button from the top center pull-down, perhaps?  (With confirmation dialog, of course.)  I don't really care what the UI looks like, as long as there is one.

I'd also be fine with not adding an in-flight delete button if some other workaround could be found for the above two issues.  For example, if the "return to KSC" button always works.  If you try to do it while in atmosphere, it could pop up a big ugly warning "going back to KSC right now will kill this ship" and then allow you to confirm.  Or something.

Edited February 2, 2016 by Snark

[AbacusWizard]

Related: it would also be nice if the Tracking Station could show a thumbnail image of each craft in the list in much the same way that the Load menu does in the VAB/SPH interface.

[pandaman]

@Snark @AbacusWizard

Both you guys have suggested stuff here that I thought was missing for ages, but for some reason didn't get round to suggesting (I've no idea why).

Have a cookie, each (it's not fair to make you share one).

[Hannu2]

Good idea. There should also be an easy option to mark craft as a debris. It should be possible also by right click without power or command pod at all.

[marcello639]

Also after click with mouse on craft in tracking station it should be deleted by pressing on keyboard DEL and ENTER. Clicking all this with mouse are so frustrating when deleting 50 debris. 

[Snark]

7 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

Good idea. There should also be an easy option to mark craft as a debris. It should be possible also by right click without power or command pod at all.

It's already possible to mark as debris for any craft with a command pod, even if they're out of power.  Just right-click and choose "Rename".  I do this all the time.

Yes, it's a bit problematic for things that don't have a command pod on them, but in my experience that doesn't come up much and in those cases I'm fine with just destroying the object.  It's enough of an edge case (with a reasonable workaround) that I'm not sure it'd be worth the return on investment to add a "mark thing without command pod as debris" feature.

[Hannu2]

14 hours ago, Snark said:

It's already possible to mark as debris for any craft with a command pod, even if they're out of power.  Just right-click and choose "Rename".  I do this all the time.

Yes, it's a bit problematic for things that don't have a command pod on them, but in my experience that doesn't come up much and in those cases I'm fine with just destroying the object.  It's enough of an edge case (with a reasonable workaround) that I'm not sure it'd be worth the return on investment to add a "mark thing without command pod as debris" feature.

Thanks for the information. They have changed it. I tried (many versions ago) but then renaming needed power.

I agree that marking things as debris is not at very high position on the list of annoying things but it also does not take many lines of code to fix it. Of course it is no reasonable to do only it but if they do some kind of management functions overhaul it would be near free to implement.

 

[Ruedii]

Yes.

I'd also like to see a better recovery GUI.

For instance, it should prompt you if you want to recover nearby vessels, Kerbals and debris  (a nice check list).  This should indicate vessel type, whether the parts are manned, how many seats they have and if they have a probe core, so you can quickly identify the thing(s) you want to recover, and leave anything you want to keep out there (such as a base or a flag).

This would save a lot of time recovering debris of a vessel that suffered an unplanned disassembly during lithobreaking. 

[StarManta]

On February 2, 2016 at 10:22 AM, Snark said:

Yes, it's a bit problematic for things that don't have a command pod on them,

Wouldn't that already be marked as debris anyway?

[Snark]

2 hours ago, StarManta said:

Wouldn't that already be marked as debris anyway?

 

Many such parts would be, yes.  The problem is that there are parts that are crewed, but aren't command pods.  Hitchhiker, science lab, Mk1 crew cabin, that sort of thing.

KSP never automatically marks a piece as debris if it has a crewable part on it.  However, you can only rename if there's a command pod.  So for the few crewable-but-not-command parts, there's a hole there-- can't really do anything except destroy them from the tracking station.

[AbacusWizard]

You can rename them from the tracking station whether they have a command pod or not.

[Snark]

8 hours ago, AbacusWizard said:

You can rename them from the tracking station whether they have a command pod or not.

Thanks, good to know.!   Had no idea that renaming was actually an option in the tracking station.

But then, if I'm in the tracking station, I could just delete them instead of renaming-as-debris anyway.  Right now, a big part of the reason I rename-as-debris from the flight view is precisely because there's no way to delete them from there.

[AbacusWizard]

Yeah, that's true. I decided a little while ago to stop using the delete button as a way to challenge myself to design "tidier" launches that jettison all expendable stages before reaching orbit (or while on a temporary collision course with the destination). This also led to the development of the H-Wing, a two-seat craft with a KAS harpoon gun for grabbing debris and towing it onto a suborbital trajectory, which has been an awful lot of fun to fly!

[Ruedii]

I think the idea here is to make a universal controller to mark large clumps of items debris or delete.
A quick "mark as debris" button would be VERY useful in the the Space Center, and a prompt regarding nearby objects would be useful as well. 

I don't know how many times it takes me far to long to clear a debris field of parts marked as probes or pods, and I don't know how many times it takes me too long to recover similar debris fields left littering the surface of Kerbin.

[Enceos]

Since Squad is currently searching the discussion threads for promising ideas, this one definitely needs an upvote.

[cfds]

Slightly related: Does the feature of recovering/deleting the vessel that sits in the list under the button due to through-click still work?

[magnemoe]

One issue with deleting stuff is that decopled stuff like an fuel tank or fairing base on top of an docking port tend to be named ship, not junk and its no way to change it. Getting part count and crew members in the tracking station would be an huge help here. 

[AbacusWizard]

23 hours ago, magnemoe said:

One issue with deleting stuff is that decopled stuff like an fuel tank or fairing base on top of an docking port tend to be named ship, not junk and its no way to change it.

You can actually do that in the Tracking Station; select the ship (or decoupled stage or whatever), click on the Info button, and click on the name of the ship. That will let you change its name and icon... or at least it did before 1.1.x accidentally broke that feature. Not sure if it's been fixed yet.

 

23 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Getting part count and crew members in the tracking station would be an huge help here. 

Again, select the ship and click on the Info button.

[AlamoVampire]

Count me as a supporter of this.

[pandaman]

8 hours ago, AbacusWizard said:

You can actually do that in the Tracking Station; select the ship (or decoupled stage or whatever), click on the Info button, and click on the name of the ship. That will let you change its name and icon... or at least it did before 1.1.x accidentally broke that feature. Not sure if it's been fixed yet.

 

Again, select the ship and click on the Info button.

No, not fixed yet unfortunately.  Not a game breaker by a long way, but a bit inconvenient.

[Aperture Science Employee]

I agree, the deleting craft UI needs to be gutted. I feel as if the spacecraft just enters the Kermuda Triangle when I press delete. That's what really happens.