Turn off the light of the retracted landing gears

[NWM]

The turned on lights of the retracted landing gears just waste the FPS and shows a rendering glitch. Why not put on 'turn off' state while they are retracted - automatically?

[Azimech]

It's a bug ... but not one with a high priority.

[Alshain]

It's not a bug, it might be bad default placement though (I think it is).

Go into your action group setup, click on the Light section and remove the toggle light option from the landing gear.  Then click on the Gear Section, click on the actual landing gear, and add the toggle light back.  Make sure you turn your lights on from the tweakable menu if your landing gear are deployed by default so they start in the right position.

Just be warned that this actually screws up the default state of the Light button, which is a bug.  I reported once it and a certain moderator on the forums decided it wasn't worthy of Squad's attention and basically destroyed the thread.

Edited November 1, 2016 by Alshain

[fourfa]

Don't forget that those landing gear lights are burning EC, too. Sometimes substantial amounts. 

However I use the light all the time for self-lighting of vertical-landing ships. Gear down, surface landing lights. Gear up, illuminate the sides of the ship.  Saves part count, and the smallest retracting gear are lighter than the medium landing legs to boot. On larger ships, the landing legs are sometimes simply too small and fragile and there's little option but to use the larger retractable gear. 

I also use the gear lights as docking lights on spaceplanes, by making sure there's a docking port on the dorsal side midships. 

All that said, it shouldn't be hard to write a MM cfg to have the gear lights turn on and off with the gear extend/retract, saving the trouble of remapping them each time (not to mention what happens before unlocking action groups in career)

[TheDestroyer111]

Yep, the lights cause a big FPS drop whenever playing below "minimum" hardware requirements and they also behave very weird - although they properly light up most of Kerbin, they don't add any light at all to terrain close to the KSC, and it looks very weird when you use them to light up the runway.

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

Not that I'm against this, but is it that hard to remember to turn your lights off when closing your gear?

Seems kind of like remembering to turn the headlights off on my car when I park it.

It is weird that they shine through the casing though.

Edited November 2, 2016 by EpicSpaceTroll139

[swjr-swis]

On 11/1/2016 at 5:53 PM, NWM said:

Why not put on 'turn off' state while they are retracted - automatically?

Well, if they do this, I hope they do it right. The two larger landing gear already turn off the light automatically when retracting, but then they do not automatically turn on the light again when extending. What happens then is that the landing gear light loses sync with the Light button/action and any lights that are toggled by it.

So, if they are going to turn off lights when retracting, please also turn them back on when extending. Otherwise please stop adding half-implemented 'smart' automatic features.