Allow us to save a ship in subassembly!

[Kulebron]

Subassembly becomes pretty useless if you can save only a subpart of a ship. It's much move convenient to assemble a rover alone, test and then attach it to a ship. But impossible now.

It's much more convenient to assemble a ship and then attach it to a modular expedition.

Currently I have to put a stray root part only for the purpose of saving a subassembly. And if I make a ship, I'm in trouble: I have to tear it down, make a new root part and assemble stuff from another point somehow, to make it a subassembly. Makes no sense.

I understand it can be a limitation on the logic, but then reorder parts (there are those that have attachment nodes sticking out, make those usable, for instance.)

[Mipi]

I did not tested it yet.

But if you drag and drop the commando pod /drone head into the dropzone (therefore moving the whole ship/rover/satelite), is it possible then?

[Kulebron]

No, I pulled the ship by the root part into drop zone (I have all sorts of things as root part ) and KSP rejected it.

If you pull the rest of the ship, yes, it accepts the subassembly. But I use to make a central metal plate as a root part of lander (because I don't know what I'll put around it) with parts on 4 sides of it. It's impractical do dismantle it this way.

[AceofPengwins]

Selectroot mod should* allow you to change the root piece... but I can see how it would be difficult to do this automatically, since there are some parts (such as anything with symmetry) that make it somewhat complicated to do this automatically, i.e. it would quite possibly not do what you wanted it to do. Now, I do agree that with subassemblies, selectroot's functionality should be implemented in stock...

*I haven't tested this yet in .22

Edited October 17, 2013 by AceofPengwins

[briansun1]

I just drag the the whole thing and it works... root part and all. Now I wish that they had just made the sub assembly folder common to all saves and not save based

[UbioZur]

In order to have a whole ship as a sub-assembly you need to have a free node on the root part.

So if you build your ship only up or only down it's fine, but if you build up and down, it's not anymore.

Note that the root part can be something else than a pod!

This is due to the fact that ship are stored as a single parent tree. so allowing to attach the sub assembly by something else than the root, would mean browsing all the parts, looking for free nodes, and then changing the root to the whole sub assembly, and moving all the parts to go with that new root. which can bring to some big errors.

So you kind of need to plan in advance, where do you want your ship/rover/launcher/probe to be attached by, and make that your root and build from there. It was the same system with the mod (because it's a game limit), and once you get use to it it's not so much of a problem (except if you want the root to be a Sr. Docking port since they can't be root. and in that case you have to put another part and attach from there.

[Kulebron]

Ok, that's clear now. I still have to assemble it from another part, but this is easier, thanks, UbioZur!

[KasperVld]

The easiest way to avoid this is to keep it in mind when you're building: say you're building a rover, take a root part and build the rover (including a control surface for it) underneath or above it. Then select the whole rover and save it

[ayork]

It's probably a good idea to make your "node 0" a docking port.