Suggestion: To improve staging handling after docking

[jclovis3]

The problem is, when you dock two vessels together each having stages remaining, say a ship going to land on a moon or planet, and another ship designed to get it there, the stages suddenly get mixed up in a terrible way and you may not want your lander to stage anything at all along the way there while your delivery hauler may need to. This can become very cumbersome when there are a lot of sepratons involved.

Idea 1:
After coupling is complete, the game pauses automatically and puts the staging of one ship along side the other in a different color but in a single block. You can swap which one is primary (blue and on the right) and which one is to be merged (orange and on the left of primary). Then, you can edit the primary to create a stage, say at the top or anywhere in between, and insert the secondary into that stage. The secondary will resume remaining as a unified block until you click a button to merge. At this point, the unified block is released as it's individual stages all inserted over the new empty stage you created. Having only a primary left, you can now edit this as you see fit before unpausing.

Idea 2:
Similar to Idea one, only you can't insert the secondary into the primary. You simply show two groups, primary and secondary, with secondary on top of primary and a button to swap them, which would move secondary down and primary up and swap colors, making one the other and such. When you click a button to finalize, the groups are merged in serial order and all one primary blue color. Then you can unpause.

In both scenarios, you should not be able to unpause until you have resolved this staging decision.

[DaveLChgo]

Good morning all!   

Staging ..... when undocking and then redocking....  the staging gets totally "F'd" up.  I think the staging is being merged instead of appended.   Everything from the 1st stage of each craft gets combined into the new 1st stage.   Everything from the 2nd stage from each craft gets combine into a new 2nd stage. And so on....   "Wrong - Wrong"   On so many levels Wrong.   It should be something similar to this, All stages of the.... target craft or lighter craft or smaller craft.... gets put above or below the stages of the docking craft.   Two sets of pics below illustrate the "merging" of stages currently.

• Set one

1. Before seperation
2. CM after
3. LM after
4. After Dock  - a mess of staging now. 
   1. Oh lets also massively reduce the size of or simply toggle off the completion screens.....  "Please!!!"  Look at the big mostly empty  grey box that covers a third of my screen pop up and tell me that something happened.  "Yes I know... we just docked.  Now go back to your room."

  

• Set Two.

1.  Before Separation
2.  CM after
3.  LM after
4.  After Dock  - a mess of staging now. 

In the last pic I want to use the decoupler below the LM to separate from the booster.  But the staging has that merged with the decoupler in the CM.  Its coincidence that they happen to have the same stage number after sep so now that are mashed together after dock.  Now the manual task of select the correct decoupler and moving it to an empty stage.  I don't remember this behavior in KSP1.  Thanks for listening!

Edited January 8 by DaveLChgo