A few "low-hanging fruit" suggestions

[swjr-swis]

FLO (fruit in low orbit).

Some of the things mentioned can be done with config files and I'm very comfortable doing that, so I'm fine with it.

Just for the sake of consistency alone though, some of these really should be stock. I mean, why are some actions 'action-group-worthy', but many others not? If it can be triggered by a probe core or remotely (I mean, that's what supposedly happens when you click a widget anyway), it should be pre-programmable too, per default. Someone needs to explain to me one day why that one is still somehow optional or chosen-by-committee, per part.

[Wyzard]

14 hours ago, Enceos said:

Kerbals get experience on landing. Flag planting boosts exp by 1 point on planets outside Kerbin SOI. You can get the Portrait Stats mod to see the current flight experience.

Oops, my memory was a little off — it's been awhile since I did a non-flag landing.  :-)

Point is, none of the experience should be based on flags.  Planting a flag isn't a challenge — not even a little one — and I have more kerbals than I want flags.

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah Im still hoping experience gets a nice overhaul soon. Tiers 4 and 5 don't have skills yet so Im sure they have plans for down the road.

[Alshain]

10 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yeah Im still hoping experience gets a nice overhaul soon. Tiers 4 and 5 don't have skills yet so Im sure they have plans for down the road.

I keep dreaming the resource system will get an overhaul.... but I think as far as the experience, career progression, tech progression, resources, and stuff like that goes, I think it's probably as far as they will take it.  You may see some balancing here and there but in all likelihood, what you have now is what you will always have.

[Enceos]

18 hours ago, Alshain said:

Are there mods add disappearing nodes?  I'm kinda curious to see that.

The Procedural Thrust plate from Procedural Fairings adds and deletes nodes on demand.

[Starwaster]

On 4/21/2016 at 4:33 AM, Enceos said:

Squad will not bother with things we can tweak ourselves.

That is definitely not true and it is not cool to come into a forum thread whose very purpose is the making of suggestions and tell people that they should just do it themselves. No matter what your personal opinion on the matter is. 

Edited April 22, 2016 by Starwaster

[Enceos]

3 minutes ago, Starwaster said:

That is definitely not true and it is not cool to come into a forum thread whose very purpose is the making of suggestions and tell people that they should just do it themselves. No matter what your personal opinion on the matter is. Some

Why did you omit the last part of the post? )

EDIT: @Starwaster My bad, it was in another post. As far as I can tell from my experience with squad, things have taken a turnaround after RoverDude, NathanKell and Claw joined the team. Before that we were doing it all ourselves.

Edited April 22, 2016 by Enceos

[monstah]

9 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yeah Im still hoping experience gets a nice overhaul soon. Tiers 4 and 5 don't have skills yet so Im sure they have plans for down the road.

I wish the whole experience system was more open to .cfg tweaking as opposed to compiling mods, however small and simple they might be.

[Pthigrivi]

Okay this is the tiniest thing that drives me crazy: the .0625m stack decoupler indicator arrow is not aligned. I have to tweak them every time I put them on because I have ocd.

[fireblade274]

Make an option in settings to have windows always be transparent.

[Hodari]

On 4/21/2016 at 11:41 AM, Alshain said:

 But I agree, having every single Kerbal on your mission get out and plant another flag is a bit overkill.

Yeah, it also adds a lot of unnecessary clutter, especially if you want to use the "fly-by Mun, plant flag on Minmus, escape to solar orbit" training mission to get ALL of your Kerbals up to level 3+ before sending them on any interplanetary missions.  And if you're planning on putting bases or space stations in a lot of places, that could end up being a LOT of Kerbals and a LOT of flags.

[monstah]

18 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Okay this is the tiniest thing that drives me crazy: the .0625m stack decoupler indicator arrow is not aligned. I have to tweak them every time I put them on because I have ocd.

talking about that, all pod hatches should be aligned 45 degrees off as the Mk1-2 does, so we can put RCS where it belongs and not have to build handrails going around it

[Alshain]

On 04/23/16 at 1:45 PM, monstah said:

talking about that, all pod hatches should be aligned 45 degrees off as the Mk1-2 does, so we can put RCS where it belongs and not have to build handrails going around it

There are better alternatives to this.  5-way RCS ports or 45 degree angled RCS ports (or both) would be much more versatile.

[Snark]

On 04/23/2016 at 5:21 PM, Pthigrivi said:

Okay this is the tiniest thing that drives me crazy: the .0625m stack decoupler indicator arrow is not aligned. I have to tweak them every time I put them on because I have ocd.

Yeah, that kinda bugs me, too. Would be nice to have a fix in stock, but fortunately in the meantime it's easily fixable with a couple of lines of ModuleManager config.

[Snark]

On 4/23/2016 at 11:45 AM, monstah said:

talking about that, all pod hatches should be aligned 45 degrees off as the Mk1-2 does, so we can put RCS where it belongs and not have to build handrails going around it

Actually, that's the exact diametric opposite of what I would want. For me, it's the Mk1-2 pod with its cockeyed hatch that drives me nuts. Ladder doesn't match up with any other pods, makes lander design awkward, hatch always getting in the way of radially attached parts... it's absolutely infuriating.

Fortunately, it's so extraordinarily overweight (five times the mass of a one-kerbal pod? really?) that I end up almost never using it anyway.

What I'd much prefer to see would be for it to have its hatch repositioned to be consistent with all the other parts, and its mass reduced by 1400kg or so.

[monstah]

9 hours ago, Alshain said:

There are better alternatives to this.  5-way RCS ports or 45 degree angled RCS ports (or both) would be much more versatile.

ACtually, that idea is better than mine. Angle tweakables for the RCS ports would make it even better.

[IncongruousGoat]

Here's a thing that would be useful: An option to turn probe cores on and off. Turning a probe core off would make it stop consuming ElectricCharge. However, a pilot would have to board the vessel (or possibly an engineer from the exterior) to turn it back on and re-establish control.

 

I don't know if anyone else would find this useful, or use it ever, but I would certainly use it all the time.

[Chakat Firepaw]

2 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Here's a thing that would be useful: An option to turn probe cores on and off. Turning a probe core off would make it stop consuming ElectricCharge. However, a pilot would have to board the vessel (or possibly an engineer from the exterior) to turn it back on and re-establish control.

I don't know if anyone else would find this useful, or use it ever, but I would certainly use it all the time.

I can see a very obvious use for this, but you need to allow one probe core to turn another probe core on.

When you have a multi-target unkerbaled mission, say an Eve probe that will be deploying a satellite around both Eve and Gilly while landing a probe on Gilly and dropping several on Eve, you can save power on the extra cores.  No sense in powering up a drop probe during launch when it isn't going to do anything until being released to land on Eve.

[IncongruousGoat]

2 hours ago, Chakat Firepaw said:

I can see a very obvious use for this, but you need to allow one probe core to turn another probe core on.

When you have a multi-target unkerbaled mission, say an Eve probe that will be deploying a satellite around both Eve and Gilly while landing a probe on Gilly and dropping several on Eve, you can save power on the extra cores.  No sense in powering up a drop probe during launch when it isn't going to do anything until being released to land on Eve.

My intended use was for transfer stages that run on alternators, or chair landers running on probe cores. But that works too. Saving power on duplicate probes would useful for operations out at Jool, where sunlight, and therefore power, is limited.

And yeah, I see no reason one probe core could not turn another one on or off.

[zarakon]

On 4/21/2016 at 10:01 PM, Wyzard said:

Add a "Close" button to the "Review Stored Data" window

When I click "Review Stored Data" on a part that contains science results, I get a window that shows details for each stored result.  As far as I can tell, the only way to close that window is to click the "Keep", "Transmit", or "Discard" button on each individual result, which can take awhile if there are lots of them.  I have an orbiting science lab that holds 47 science results, and to keep the lab well-stocked with research data, I have to periodically click through them all again to pick out one or two more to research.  It'd be useful to have a button in the corner to close the window immediately, as if I'd clicked "Keep" on all the remaining results.

Please, yes!

 

Tweakable Reaction Wheel Torque

When using small cheap probes in career mode, even the smallest reaction wheel provides way too much torque.  It would be great to be able to tune them down a bit.

 

 

Edited April 25, 2016 by zarakon

[Wyzard]

One more idea:

Sort the items in the "Continue Saved Game" dialog by date (or provide an option to do so)

(To be clear, I'm referring to the window accessed from the KSC screen where you choose an individual SFS file, not the one from the main menu where you choose a whole save folder.)

The items currently seem to be listed in alphabetical order, which has its uses, but when I'm loading a save, I usually want one of the most recent ones, and I don't always remember which one that is.  (Is quicksave #3 the one from ten minutes ago?  Or was that #2, and #3 is left over from an hour ago when I was working on something else?)  In 1.0, I had to alt-tab out of the game and check the file timestamps manually; I'm very glad that 1.1 now shows the each save's timestamp in the UI.  But I still have to visually compare them to see which are more recent than others.

I generally use numbered quicksaves rather than descriptive names because I use them to represent levels of risk:  #1 is the last time all my kerbals were completely safe, #2 is progress on a significant mission that's going well so far, #3 is some risky stuff during the #2 mission, and so on.  If the risky stuff works out then I overwrite #2 with the new progress.  I got into this habit during 1.0 where there was no way in-game to delete saves, so I wanted to keep overwriting rather than creating lots of individual descriptive names; now that 1.1 has a delete button in the load window, I could probably switch to descriptive names and have less trouble remembering which save I want to load.  But sorting by date would still be handy since the player is more likely to want a recent save than an older one.

(The reason I thought of this just now is that the game crashed and didn't autosave, so I needed to load my last manual save — which was from yesterday, since I'd just started playing today, so I couldn't remember which one it was.)

Edited April 26, 2016 by Wyzard

[Pthigrivi]

Oh I thought of HUGE one. Just make the narrow-band scanner a continuous feed. Having to break to refresh is not nearly as fun and intuitive as seeing the feed in the corner of your eye as you navigate your landing.

[Biff Space]

On 4/25/2016 at 6:55 PM, IncongruousGoat said:

Here's a thing that would be useful: An option to turn probe cores on and off. Turning a probe core off would make it stop consuming ElectricCharge. However, a pilot would have to board the vessel (or possibly an engineer from the exterior) to turn it back on and re-establish control.

 

I don't know if anyone else would find this useful, or use it ever, but I would certainly use it all the time.

I've just done something which takes a different approach to this problem:

Battery Activator

I liked the old (pre 1.1) functionality where you could switch the batteries' flowstates off, and then switch them back on, even on unmanned vessels. This changed recently so that you can't switch the batteries on if there is no available power. 

My mod puts up a tiny GUI with one button to turn on all batteries, if the vessel is unmanned and has no available power but some electrical charge in locked batteries. Think of it as the probe being programmed to go dormant until it arrives or something.

I also did a mod to jettison resources:

Jettison

It provides a right-click menu button to dump some kinds of resource (monoprop,liquid fuel, oxidizer, xenon, and (it should work for) resources from other mods.

 

 

 

 

 

[Wyzard]

Just wanted to bump this, since the last devnote mentions that Squad is looking for ideas, and the stuff here is likely to be implementable "sooner" rather than "later".

[DaveSteadman]

1 - +1 for the 5-way RCS port suggestion.

2 - Longer service bays parts; launching satellites from 1m and 2.5m rockets, or just hiding more science/battery/RCS items from the parts count.

3 - Incorporating the fuel-swap mod on tanks would make it easier to balance some space-planes parts where we have to have oxidizer.

4 - Tweak-scale on non-functional (i.e. tanks or engines) parts.

5 - The space-plane fuel tanks having the same capacity as the 1m tanks sucks. Should they be at least a little higher?

6 - Seeing the current day/night in the VAB would be a nice continuity touch.

7 - Putting a basic ladder at the start of the career tech tree, so Kerbals can climb back into early vehicles.

8 - Tweakable landing gear height, so we can line up landed base elements.

9 - Is asking for a gravity-well overlay in the solar-system view too much?