Leaving Command Seat Forces Kerbals On Top Of Craft

[HvP]

I've been having some frustration building utility craft with external command seats that I want to dock inside of cargo bays. Everything is fine except that when I have the Kerbal leave the command seat he or she is forced to spawn on top of any surface that may be directly above their head, no matter how much space they have above them.

If I orient the rover so that the cargo bay doors are above it then the Kerbal will leave the seat normally and stand directly in front of the seat on the floor of the bay only if the doors are left open. If I have the doors closed then the Kerbal will end up standing outside of my craft on top of the exterior of the closed doors. If I want to have a Kerbal exit a command seat from within the bay with the cargo ramp then it will always spawn outside of my craft. Frustrating.

I'm assuming this is intended behavior so as to not risk Kerbals becoming trapped between inaccessible parts within a spacecraft, but you can exit from any command pod without this complication. I guess it has something to do with the fact that Kerbals in a command seat exist in a quasi state between being on EVA and also in command of a vessel.

Is this normal behavior for everyone else? I am running a heavily modded install, but the only mod that sounds like it would impact this behavior might be Take Command which I have tried running without with the same results. Has anyone worked out any building techniques that overcome this problem? Is there a config setting that alters the check for structures around the Kerbal that can be modified? Will this behavior possibly change in 1.1 I wonder?

[Snark]

I don't have KSP in front of me right now, so can't test, but I'm not super surprised.  I doubt that it's deliberately designed behavior, so I seriously doubt that there's a config setting for it. Sounds more like a bug, and unless they've specifically targeted it for 1.1, I expect it'll stick around.

Unless someone tells them about it... hint, hint. 

We have no way of knowing what the game's internal code is doing, of course, but if I had to guess, I'd suppose it's probably something like this:  The external command seat has been part of the game for a long time-- it was around long before all the nifty Porkjet spaceplane parts arrived, with their fancy cargo bays.  So back in the dim mists of ancient time, whatever programmer was creating the command seat was operating in a universe where cargo bays did not exist and it was not physically possible for one part to be inside another (hollow) part.  So "make the kerbal just snap to the top of the ship" may have made perfect sense, then:  it's simple, it's fairly intuitive, maybe it neatly solved various troublesome potential edge cases.  And then, much later, Porkjet's stuff came around, and it may be that simply nobody thought to look at that particular interaction, and a solution that used to make sense suddenly no longer did so.

It's the kind of thing that happens all the time in software development:  bugs creep in not because any one person did anything stupid or foolish or absentminded, but because there are so many different moving parts all talking to each other that it's very easy to miss when the addition of a new element of a system makes a new type of interaction possible that nobody thought about.

TL;DR:  software is hard. 

Edited March 3, 2016 by Snark

[HvP]

18 hours ago, Snark said:

I don't have KSP in front of me right now, so can't test, but I'm not super surprised.  I doubt that it's deliberately designed behavior, so I seriously doubt that there's a config setting for it. Sounds more like a bug, and unless they've specifically targeted it for 1.1, I expect it'll stick around.

Unless someone tells them about it... hint, hint. 

...

TL;DR:  software is hard. 

OK thanks for the link and the thoughts.

I checked for it at the bugtracker and it looks like the same thing was reported two years ago back in the 0.21 days.

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/1170

It was downgraded to low priority, which I agree it is but its behavior seems out of sorts to me. I don't know if it's worth making a duplicate report considering it doesn't seem to be the kind of thing the Squad team is concerned about and I can live with if I have to. Although I guess now would be the time, huh.

Edited March 3, 2016 by HvP
added link

[Superfluous J]

I've bumped into this one several times, too. Also, if you plant a flag under an overhang (Bridges in the space center for example) the flag goes on top of the highest thing.

I suppose it could be just "how Unity does it" and "how Unity does it" might have changed in version 5. We'll know in a few weeks. Or, if anybody who has Steam gets the prerelease version when it comes out and tries it, and reports back here.

[Snark]

3 minutes ago, HvP said:

OK thanks for the link and the thoughts.

I checked for it at the bugtracker and it looks like the same thing was reported two years ago back in the 0.21 days.

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/1170

It was downgraded to low priority, which I agree it is but its behavior seems out of sorts to me. I don't know if it's worth making a duplicate report considering it doesn't seem to be the kind of thing the Squad team is concerned about and I can live with if I have to. Although I guess now would be the time, huh.

Kudos for looking for a known issue first, and actually finding it! 

Well, don't be too quick to give up.  They downgraded it two years ago, i.e. before cargo bays existed.  Their justification for downgrading it then was basically that it's a rare, unlikely edge case that's unlikely to bite players in normal gameplay.

And that may have been a correct judgment, then, but now that cargo bays are around, it's a much more intrusive problem.  So their reason for downgrading may have become obsolete, and it may be justifiable to escalate it back up to a higher priority again.

However, I don't think that we lowly mortals have the ability to escalate a bug in the tracking system-- we can log new ones, but can't do much (any?) editing of existing ones.

My suggestion would be to just log a new bug, with a title that's more relevant to today, e.g. something like "Leaving command seat while in cargo bay places kerbal on top of vehicle."  Include whatever relevant info, and definitely provide a link to the previous bug 1170, with a comment that "this looks like the same issue, but it impacts players more nowadays, because of cargo bays."

Then Squad can decide what to do with it (and close out one of the bugs as a duplicate if they so choose.)

[HvP]

Nice to hear back from you both so quickly. I appreciate the feedback. I'll give it another day to see who else encounters this topic and then I'll see about submitting a bug report if a duplicate is justified.

Thanks again.

[moogoob]

I have one rover that has a roof over the command seat - every time I get out, the Kerbal pops up onto the roof. Not a game-killer, but pretty silly nonetheless.

[KmartKomandr]

I actually used this bug to make a teleporter.