Disable control surfaces

[blubbermonkeys]

When flying hyper-sonic aircraft and you are travelling at some 600m/s and you have lots of control surfaces, the SAS tends to make the aircraft wobble because of the fast speeds.

So my idea is that you can disable control surfaces or assign them to SAS so that it will only use the control surfaces you assigned.

edit: Disable the control surfaces just as how you would disable motors or steering on a rover or using action groups.

Edited September 7, 2013 by blubbermonkeys

[brainsalad]

Seconded! Additionally, it would be nice if I could prevent control surfaces from dementedly flapping around like a wounded chicken when the craft is in vacuum.

[tntristan12]

Agree. This would be useful, and consistent as you can already disable things on rover wheels. In the meantime, FAR allows you to specify for what purposes you want to use a control surface. The downside is it overhauls the aerodynamics model, which I guess isn't really a downside but it does make a lot of pre-existing rockets that work fine in stock KSP fail... So really it's up to you how badly you want this feature.

[spectrhz]

Yes! For me, I was coasting my ssto through the atmosphere to prepare for landing, but one of my canards was blown off from docking, I figured I could already disable the intact canard so it didn't pitch, however I couldn't, and a flat-spinning I went! Slamming into the runway at 250 m/s instead of landing

[blubbermonkeys]

This would also be useful for for a SSTO to Duna, because when flying through kerbin you wouldn't need as many control surfaces than Duna.

So you can just turn them on and off

[leax256]

Yes! For me, I was coasting my ssto through the atmosphere to prepare for landing, but one of my canards was blown off from docking, I figured I could already disable the intact canard so it didn't pitch, however I couldn't, and a flat-spinning I went! Slamming into the runway at 250 m/s instead of landing

you know the lack of one canard would make the craft unstable both aerodynamically and COM wise, it would have failed with or without this feature.