"Out of electrical power" message when trying to control a dead craft.

[Dunbaratu]

I didn't see this on the already-suggested list, so I figured I'd mention it. It's a really simple thing: Time and time again we've all seen the post made by a player new to the game asking why their spaceship controls suddenly stopped working partway into the flight. The new player is confused, doesn't know what's happening, and every experienced player immediately knows to suggest "check your battery power level" as the first likely culprit. This is because we've all made this mistake at least once when first playing the game and remember our own confusion over not knowing what was going on and why it was "bugged" all of a sudden.

So.... why not have an on-screen bit of text that appears when the game cancels an attempt by the player to perform a maneuver in which the cancellation is due to having no electrical power? It could be shown to the user in the same way as the little status message that says "cannot switch vessels while throttled up".

Suggestions:

"Cannot perform action. Out of electricity."

"No electrical power available."

"Not enough electrical power remaining."

That way you still preserve that feeling of being a newbie making the "fun" first mistake of not putting rechargers on your ship (or not putting batteries on your ship), (which I think should be preserved as that is especially "Kerbalistic" to make that error once). But at the same time the first time a person makes the mistake they will immediately know what happened and why, without asking the same exact question yet again, "why did my controls stop working?".

[Cby]

I agree, it would definitely help out new players and even some older ones.

Edited August 15, 2013 by Cby
Typo

[Mr. Scruffy]

Extent that to any reason input is ignored. Like timewarp. Like yesterday, i maneuvered around Duna with a multi-docked contraption bringing a station into its orbit. After a 180° turn, i had to go to the john and set the timewarp to a mere 10x. Came back and wanted to do some maneuvers, but the controls wouldnt respond. I was panicing, thinking the last turn might have been too hard for the docking ports. ´Let´s try to switch command pods and see if that helps´, i thought. But the pods wouldnt offer the option to switch. I was like ´OMG- i totally broke the ship!´ And just before my face would be covered in tears and snot, i figured i was in timewarp. D´uh. A simple message ´time warp is on´, in the style and place of all the time-warp messages, would have helped alot. So devs: Please add a message to all if-statements currently just returning for any keys bound.