[Tutorial] Improve your Subassemblies

[Col_Jessep]

Hello fellow rocket engineer!

Hopefully this little trick can safe you some time and annoying fixing of stages by hand when you use lifter subassemblies:

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Thanks for your attention!

Note: The lander/interplanetary stage are just placeholders. I wouldn't send something like this into space in case you were wondering....

Edited November 22, 2013 by Col_Jessep

[Kulebron]

Do you mean the stages get mixed up when adding subassemblies? This merits a bug report, because it's a bad implementation.

[Col_Jessep]

Yup. I don't know if Squad would classify it as a bug. It certainly could use some improvement. My Eve lander combined with interplanetary stage and detachable legs/parachutes has 12 stages or something. So instead of fiddling all the staging apart or rebuilding the whole launch stage I came up with this. I thought it might help somebody who ran into similar problems, hence the tut.

[Superfluous J]

You can also just add the extra stages manually without decouplers or sepratrons.

And yeah I think it's a bug. However I'm not sure how best to fix it. Putting the sub-assembly's stages on the bottom always works if the sub-assembly is a lifter, but what if it's a lander? Granted, it's a major pain without mods to get landers as sub-assemblies anyway but hopefully that will be fixed eventually too

[Col_Jessep]

Hi 5th Horseman! Landers are indeed a problem. It would probably be best to keep their staging together and allow you to chose where they go. Although most of my landers are SSTO. Exceptions are my Tylo (3 stages) and Eve (12 gazillion stages) lander.

[purpletarget]

IHMO It does not really read to me as a bug.

Part of the problem with implementing something as complex as sub-assemblies is that there's no way to know whether the user wants the stages to be combined, or separate in the final result. When you add a sub, are the stages supposed to be earlier or later? If you're adding a lifter, it seems reasonable to assume the stages of an added sub would get added to the bottom. But if a user builds the lifter first, and adds a satellite or lander to the payload, that assumption would be incorrect for them.

So this is a case where the tool is provided and the user is required to figure out how to make it work for their style of play.

So the current implementation just takes care of the simple case. When you save a sub, the stage numbers for the components are saved as part of the sub. The engine that stages on 3, will remain a 3, and if the sub is re-added to a new ship, it will get put back into 3.

So the easy workaround for using lifter and payload subs is to save payloads as normal, generally lower numbered stages to trigger last, and to insert a bunch of blank stages (as 5thHorseman alluded to) to the lifters before saving them as subs. Add 10, if you never expect your payload to have more than 10.

Then the only part you need to be careful of is that if your payload has 5 stages, the extra blanks will get dumped when you add the lifter sub. So the lifter sub with 10 blanks will put the stage 11 into stage 6 of your combined vehicle. This shifting might cause some extra work and grief if you have multiple subs that you like stacking/expanding for different payloads (Core, then 1st boosters, 2nd boosters, etc) rather than a complete lifter systems from launch to delivery. Proceed with caution.

Note: The advantage to Col_Jessep's version above, is filling the "empty" stages with throwaway decouplers will avoid that shifting until you're ready, allowing greater control for the player.

Edited November 23, 2013 by purpletarget