Custom Action Groups on console

[kevnuke]

I'm currently designing a multipurpose rocket destined for Minmus. It's actually a ship, a science space station and a science rover, all on the same rocket. The issue I have is that there are not enough custom action groups (CAGs) to cover all the things i need to do on all three craft. I had a few ideas for workarounds but was wondering if anyone could save me some time and maybe explain how things work behind the scenes.

I'd considered that building the science station and science rover as separate craft, configuring the CAGs and then merging them with the main rocket might store the CAG configuration for later when they separated and became independent spacecraft again, but I don't know if KSP is that sophisticated.

I'm also unsure of the exact behavior of the preset action groups (PAGs). I know that the game automatically adds things like toggles for landing gear and lights to the appropriate groups, but even when there is nothing visible in the RCS action group, it toggles all relevant devices on/off. Does it only do this when nothing is explicitly added to that group or will it always do that in addition to the actions added to it. Do any other action groups act that way, as well, such as Stage? I just don't want to find out mid-mission that activating the Stage action group will blow off a stage in addition to whatever other actions I configured in that action group.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

[bewing]

The preset action groups perform default actions in addition to any that you assign. So yes, adding something to "stage" will blow off a stage when you hit space -- as well as performing your additional actions.

However: lights, gear, brakes, RCS, abort, & etc are usually pretty harmless when it comes to their default actions. Especially if you make them an action group for a sub-vessel that has no brakes, gear, RCS, etc.

Of course, most action groups only serve to avoid doing a few repetitive keystrokes. So if you really do end up short of action groups, you can look them over and figure out which action group is the least useful, and then do that one by hand instead.

 

[kevnuke]

22 minutes ago, bewing said:

The preset action groups perform default actions in addition to any that you assign. So yes, adding something to "stage" will blow off a stage when you hit space -- as well as performing your additional actions.

However: lights, gear, brakes, RCS, abort, & etc are usually pretty harmless when it comes to their default actions. Especially if you make them an action group for a sub-vessel that has no brakes, gear, RCS, etc.

Of course, most action groups only serve to avoid doing a few repetitive keystrokes. So if you really do end up short of action groups, you can look them over and figure out which action group is the least useful, and then do that one by hand instead.

Thank you for the quick reply. You saved me a lot of testing, which is a huge pain on console.

My only remaining concern is what would happen if I were to assign the toggle for both the landing struts of the main rocket and the small landing gear for the rover to the same action group. I don't know if it's been patched, but I heard about a bug where doing such a thing procs both actions even after the two craft are separated. I assume if it's still an issue it would only do it if they are within physics distance of each other. Or even worse, the sub-vessel doesn't inherit the action groups of the parent vessel, minus the devices it's no longer attached to.

My actual use of this (on craft with science experiments..which is almost everything) is to use CAG 1 for running every experiment on the vessel. If I were to test this on my current rocket, I'd have to do that for both the science station and the science rover and hope it only runs the experiments attached to the currently controlled vessel. Although if this bug is still present I'm sure this "spooky action at a distance" could be exploited somehow.

[bewing]

Well, even on console (at least with the proper preset) you have fairly quick access to 10 custom action groups. So that really should be enough for most things. And you shouldn't need to assign the landing legs to the "gear" group -- that should happen automatically, I think. That bug has never existed on the PC version that I know of ... so if it ever happened on consoles, then it's exclusive to consoles and the rest of us would never know about it.