Crew Rotation suggestion

[Kurtvw]

Thanks so much for .22, its been a blast, and runs really well.

A couple suggestions though...

Can we speak for a moment about Jeb being first in crew rotation on EVERY MISSION? Many other qualified Kerbals get stuffed off of the best missions because Jeb is always given first priority. I like Jeb, but sometimes I want to see someone be SCARED. Good solutions would be if I could save crew to a ship, or if crew would rotate. If I assign a Kerbal to a flight, I expect him to stay assigned, but if I revert to Assembly, its always Jeb... I have to manually go reset another Kerbal. It gets really tiring if I want Richoly on a mission, and I need to revert then on the pad next time I see who? Jeb! Watching Jeb smile like he has a prostitute under the camera view is fun sometimes... But other times, I want to watch Bob be nervous... It really sucks to get on the pad and find Jeb in the seat and have to revert AGAIN...

Another crew management issue is that even if I kill a kerbal, they reappear in my active roster pretty much immediately. I killed Jeb the other day because he jumped (by default) on to a flight I wanted Bob to fly (when I reverted). Frankly I'd had enough of him robbing his fellow pilots of glory, so I crashed him into Eve and made sure he was dead. When I returned to Space Center, who was front and center in my rotation... JEB?! ZOMBIE JEB? I would understand if he was in the recruit pool, but no... He was in my active roster. Pretty buggy, and pretty annoying.

Can't complain about .22 other than that, its been grand (tech tree is too easy to move though tho...).. But please, rotate crew... Or at least save them with the AutoSave last ship, so I don't have to always reset.

[UbioZur]

Can we speak for a moment about Jeb being first in crew rotation on EVERY MISSION? Many other qualified Kerbals get stuffed off of the best missions because Jeb is always given first priority. I like Jeb, but sometimes I want to see someone be SCARED. Good solutions would be if I could save crew to a ship, or if crew would rotate. If I assign a Kerbal to a flight, I expect him to stay assigned, but if I revert to Assembly, its always Jeb... I have to manually go reset another Kerbal. It gets really tiring if I want Richoly on a mission, and I need to revert then on the pad next time I see who? Jeb! Watching Jeb smile like he has a prostitute under the camera view is fun sometimes... But other times, I want to watch Bob be nervous... It really sucks to get on the pad and find Jeb in the seat and have to revert AGAIN...

I have to agree that looks like a flaw in the code, the revert should (have to) revert you back to the same state, and so the same crew.

Another crew management issue is that even if I kill a kerbal, they reappear in my active roster pretty much immediately. I killed Jeb the other day because he jumped (by default) on to a flight I wanted Bob to fly (when I reverted). Frankly I'd had enough of him robbing his fellow pilots of glory, so I crashed him into Eve and made sure he was dead. When I returned to Space Center, who was front and center in my rotation... JEB?! ZOMBIE JEB? I would understand if he was in the recruit pool, but no... He was in my active roster. Pretty buggy, and pretty annoying.

You need to edit your save file and find the MissingCrewsRespawn = True and change it to False. Those are option that are already in game, they just don't have GUI to select them.

[Cby]

I just abanded Jeb on a spacestation. That works too.

[Renegrade]

...or if crew would rotate.

^ This here is pretty much what I want. I would really love it if crew could rotate, such that when a ship returned to Kerbin, the crew would be placed at the BOTTOM of the list, instead of wherever they were selected from.

That way, if you never manually assigned crew (given the issues there, I generally avoid manual assignment except in some very special cases), it would slowly rotate through your entire roster, giving all Kerbals a chance to explode violently explore the universe.

Example:

Roster: Jeb, Bill, and Bob are waiting in the roster.

Jeb is sent up in a mission. After he returns, he's placed at the END of the roster.

Roster: Bill, Bob, and Jeb.

Bill is sent up in a mission. After he returns, placed at end etc.

Roster: Bob, Jeb, and Bill

The user manually picks Jeb for the next mission. After he returns, he ends up at the end of the roster. (he's had the most recent flight experience and skipped the queue)

Roster: Bob, Bill, and Jeb.

In coding terms, a very simple LRU algorithm. Depending on KSP's internal structures, this may very well be a trivial change.

(I hope people don't mind the necro, but I didn't want to post a duplicate...)

[Red Iron Crown]

There's a mod that assigns random crews to ships instead of defaulting to Jeb, Bob, and Bill: RandomCrew.

[Renegrade]

There's a mod that assigns random crews to ships instead of defaulting to Jeb, Bob, and Bill: RandomCrew.

Thanks, I'll have to check that out.

However, it would be nice if that functionality, or proper LRU rotation, could end up in the base game.. For example, as 0.24 comes up, mod compatibility will be once more up in the air...

[LethalDose]

Thanks, I'll have to check that out.

However, it would be nice if that functionality, or proper LRU rotation, could end up in the base game.. For example, as 0.24 comes up, mod compatibility will be once more up in the air...

Agreed. I think the persistence file just needs a "LastKerbonautLaunched" parameter saved. The way the game handles the crew loading makes it kinda difficult to work with when I tried to create this.

[Renegrade]

Agreed. I think the persistence file just needs a "LastKerbonautLaunched" parameter saved. The way the game handles the crew loading makes it kinda difficult to work with when I tried to create this.

If you just stored one though, it would just flip between the first two kerbals for 1-man missions... better than default, but still kinda eeh..

I'm *assuming* the kerbals are on some sort of .. linked list or array or somesuch .. and simply returning/moving them to the end of the list during recovery would result in the whole list(array..hash..b-tree..eggplant..whatever) slowly rotating through.

Jeb's gotta stop hogging the glory, man! Besides, the insurer doesn't want to cover his life insurance anymore for some reason >.>

[Superfluous J]

Agreed. I think the persistence file just needs a "LastKerbonautLaunched" parameter saved. The way the game handles the crew loading makes it kinda difficult to work with when I tried to create this.

If you just stored one though, it would just flip between the first two kerbals for 1-man missions...

Not necessarily. You could set the Kerbal on the next launch to be the (available) Kerbal in the persistence file AFTER the Kerbal on the last launch, wrapping back to the first if necessary.

[Renegrade]

Not necessarily. You could set the Kerbal on the next launch to be the (available) Kerbal in the persistence file AFTER the Kerbal on the last launch, wrapping back to the first if necessary.

That's true, if it's like a numeric index or such.. that would be better phrased though, "NextKerbonautLaunched". That would definitely suit the requirement.

(I tend to favor the rotating list thing in my own work and projects, as it's fairly fast and requires no bounds checking. I'm not sure what these new fangled C#/Mono programs do though)

What would everybody think of a way of dismissing kerbals, while we're on the topic of the Kerbonaut Roster? I tend to try to hire the dumbest ones for test subjects pilots and the smartest ones for the mobile lab, and over time the quality gets better and better as I collect 'em.. but then I might be left with ones with 3/4 stupidity that aren't quite dumb enough to climb into the Kerbal Cannon Mk7....

[Red Iron Crown]

Thinking on this topic a bit more, I suspect that a straight rotation might not be the best strategy once kerbal stats actually mean something and affect the game somehow. Hopefully we'll be able to have specialist kerbals for different tasks that we assign to missions as their skills are needed.

[Renegrade]

Thinking on this topic a bit more, I suspect that a straight rotation might not be the best strategy once kerbal stats actually mean something and affect the game somehow. Hopefully we'll be able to have specialist kerbals for different tasks that we assign to missions as their skills are needed.

Well, at that point, I'd hope we'd have an even better roster that could be drag and drop sorted, and that ships would make a better effort to remember crew assignments during editing/etc.

[prophet_01]

What do u think about assigning a group of kerbals as a crew? Reduces rhe whole dragndrop management. Just put 2-5 kerbals into each crew and decide which crew u prefer or if u want rotation.

[Renegrade]

What do u think about assigning a group of kerbals as a crew? Reduces rhe whole dragndrop management. Just put 2-5 kerbals into each crew and decide which crew u prefer or if u want rotation.

Well, having a full-on personnel management system would be cool, but given the things piling up on Squad's plate, I'd just be happy having any sort of basic rotation.

Managed to kill Jeb in my ironman-type 0.24 playthrough ... poor Jeb, only fatality to date.. Would have most likely been someone else if we had rotation