Disable staging for fairings

[NeoFatalis]

I think It would be nice to have option to disable staging for fairings because many people use fairings for other reasons (for example when building a soyuz replica or something) also we already have this option for decouplers so I don't think that it would be a big problem to implement it...

[Alshain]

I agree, I think you should be able to disable staging on anything you want and it should be that way in stock.

However, in the meantime stock does already have the ability it just isn't turned on.  You can find a mod here to make it work if you are on the PC version.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Alshain

[Temeter]

Seems just like an oversight that we can't.

[Alshain]

1 hour ago, Temeter said:

Seems just like an oversight that we can't.

No it is not an oversight.  Back when Squad added it, I requested it be added to fairings before release.  The response I got from the Squad employee that developed the feature was that I could just mod it.  They intentionally chose not to allow you to disable staging on fairings despite the fact that it would literally have no consequences.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Alshain

[Temeter]

20 minutes ago, Alshain said:

No it is not an oversight.  Back when Squad added it, I requested it be added to fairings before release.  The response I got from the Squad employee that developed the feature was that I could just mod it.  They intentionally chose not to allow you to disable staging on fairings despite the fact that it would literally have no consequences.

Now that's underestimating your fans.

[Alshain]

3 minutes ago, Temeter said:

Now that's underestimating your fans.

I have a very similar experience for the service bay door deploy limiter.  They showed it in Squadcast on the cargo bays, I made a thread here suggesting it be added to the service bays.  The developer that did it said I could just mod it.  It's just sad because there is no inherent difficulty change in it, and the feature is already developed.  Why not give the users the choice?

Edited September 9, 2016 by Alshain

[Temeter]

6 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I have a very similar experience for the service bay door deploy limiter.  They showed it in Squadcast on the cargo bays, I made a thread here suggesting it be added to the service bays.  The developer that did it said I could just mod it.  It's just sad because there is no inherent difficulty change in it, and the feature is already developed.  Why not give the users the choice?

I guess at those points devs are just overloaded with other work and don't really want to expand their works beyond what they are imagining, even if it's something quite easy.

E.g. those service bays (and their colliders) have been a bit buggy for a while and might have needed more thoroughly checking, or maybe even a rework at that points. Might be that said employee also didn't want to do something half-hearted with them.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Temeter

[Alshain]

Just now, Temeter said:

I guess at those points devs are just overloaded with other work and don't really want to expand their works beyond what they are imagining, even if it's something quite easy.

E.g. those service bays (and their colliders) have been a bit buggy for a while and might have needed more thoroughly checking, or maybe even a rework at that points.

There is no collider on the service bay doors.  If you don't have the deploy limiter it simply clips into the craft.  It still works, it just looks awful.  The deploy limiter just allows you to prevent that.  Anyway, the deploy limiter is a bit off topic, but it's just another example of something they developed and unnecessarily restricted when it could be much more useful with a simple config change, just like staging.

[Temeter]

1 minute ago, Alshain said:

There is no collider on the service bay doors.  If you don't have the deploy limiter it simply clips into the craft.  It still works, it just looks awful.  The deploy limiter just allows you to prevent that.  Anyway, the deploy limiter is a bit off topic, but it's just another example of something they developed and unnecessarily restricted when it could be much more useful with a simple config change, just like staging.

I mean, they had issues at some point in the past. Did scary things to some of my crafts.^^

Edited September 9, 2016 by Temeter

[Alshain]

1 minute ago, Temeter said:

I mean, they had issues at some point in the past. Did scary things to some of my crafts.^^

Ah, well I don't recall that, but it hasn't had a collider since they implemented the deploy limiter on cargo bays because it was the first thing I did when I downloaded the update.  It did take a bit of experimentation to get the limiter to work correctly (the reverse clamp direction was a bit confusing), but now I have it done and they could just copy the settings I have in my MM patch.

[Red Iron Crown]

3 hours ago, Alshain said:

There is no collider on the service bay doors.

There most certainly is (though it's a bit wonky), observe:

Spoiler

 

Not that that's a good reason to not have limiters on them. The doors not being able to collide with the craft itself is expected behavior, almost all parts ignore collisions with the same vessel (I think wheels, landing legs and docking ports are exceptions, there might be others).

As for the OP's suggestion, I think it's a good one. I sometimes use fairings as nosecones on spaceplanes (they're great for this), would be nice to prevent accidentally staging them away. Plus I know players use them for a big variety of aesthetic functions, given they're one of the few procedural parts in stock.

[Alshain]

@Red Iron Crown That is kind of strange.  It's almost like they only have partial colliders.  Anyway, that's actually more of a reason to have the deploy limiter, to let you prevent problems like that.

[Red Iron Crown]

I think the collider for them is likely very simple, complex collider shapes are computationally expensive physics-wise (and hollow parts have fairly complex colliders to start with). I think the door actually colliding with another vessel or the surface is a bit of an edge case as few ships are made that way, though I certainly wouldn't object to a deploy limiter for them.

[Temeter]

I think they disabled the doors collision with the craft they're on. That caused some issues in the past.

[panzer1b]

Its about time for squad to allow every single stock part to have its staging disabled through the right click menu.  Fairings arent necessarily used as fairings exclusively (myself ive used em for structural parts, fuselages, ect where you never want the thing to be deployable). 

Even for stuff you expect to be stageable (like engines) there are too many occasions where i want something to be manually enabled.  For most VTOL designs i prefer to have the dedicated VTOL engine out of the staging menu since its something that is situational and i dont want it to activate until i hit the action group.

 

TLDR, please allow us the choice to disable staging on every component if we want to do it that way, its already possible to do it with part cfg mods (so little no no effort to do this), and it would really open up more options (and save us the trouble of accidentally staging stuff that should never get staged). 

Edited September 10, 2016 by panzer1b

[Alshain]

@panzer1b  That is my feeling as well.  The staging patch I have for disabling launch clamps for example.  I have no clue why you would want that, but I imagine someone out there is probably going find a reason.  Squad shouldn't make the assumption nobody will want it, especially since it is an option and would have no development time associated.

Edited September 10, 2016 by Alshain

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Yes. And parachutes. And engines.

[lajoswinkler]

I'd add such option into the menu. Sometimes you don't need it and it just takes space in the staging column. Also, you could accidentally stage them which isn't something you'd want.

[Scientia1423]

Thumbs up for suggestion! And also the fairings need the ability to attach stuff to (eg struts on the outside to stabilise the rocket).

Although sometimes I send it in to space to use it as a nose cone then send it back to kerbin, stage then parachute.

[Red Iron Crown]

OP's suggestion appears to have been implemented in 1.2.