Payload sealing

[Kasuha]

Here is my personal experience:

I created a lander designed for Tylo. It used kinda intricate staging system, three stages for descent, six stages for ascent. I saved it as subassembly so I could mount it to my lifter and send to orbit.

When loading the subassembly the staging was still there. I had to make room for it in the lifter's staging but that went all ok.

Then I lifted the lander on the lifter and docked it to my orbital station where I was constructing a new interplanetary ship. Later I docked one more part (fuel tank) to it and then separated the ship from the orbital station.

As of what I can say, there still were some stages at that point although parts from all the ship's components made quite a mess. I want to note that the last time I used any kind of staging on all that was on the lifter and it was only separating its own stages. I did not dare to even try to stage anything on the orbital station or the ship, instead I manually activated/deactivated anything that was needed.

When I parked near Tylo, I finally decoupled the lander from the ship. At that point I realized the game has completely screwed up its staging because everything was in one stage now. I had to spend some quite substantial time setting up the staging again.

The thing is, the lander's staging had no sense when it was docked to the lifter, the orbital station, or the mothership. At that point it was just payload and served no function. What I needed was that staging initially designed in VAB to be carried through all the phases of transport till I decoupled the lander from the mothership.

My suggestion is to design some way of "payload sealing" which would hide all staging and action groups of an individual structure, such as ship in VAB or subassembly. While sealed, this structure's parts wouldn't appear in the staging and its action groups wouldn't trigger by corresponding keypress. To activate them, you'd need to right-click on the structure and select "unseal payload" in the menu. Only after that, staging would appear and eventually merge with the current ship's staging and action groups would start reacting to keypresses.

It would probably also help if it was possible to seal a ship in space (e.g. when a lander returns and is about to dock to mothership) so its staging and action groups don't mix up with those of whatever it is docked to. I assume one level of sealing would be sufficient, i.e. it wouldn't be possible to seal a ship which already contains a sealed part.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Kasuha

[astropapi1]

I thought you were suggesting payload fairings and came here to give you that generic "they don't work with the aerodynamic sustem of KSP" response.

[edwardc]

I second this.

When I first started I made myself a landing practice craft. It was a rather simple rocket but had 4 landers, 4 rovers and 4 probes radially attached all with remote guidance units. The idea was to launch once and have multiple attempts at landing without killing Kerbals. (I don;t like quicksave, feels like cheating). The staging was a nightmare. This sealing system should also lock up monopropellant usage I think. All my lander's mini tanks were empty even though the main rocket had plenty. It was quite a pain refilling them all.

[Apollyon]

Maybe try using the KAS mod to magnetically (or through some other attachment means) tow your lander or other cargo that contains staging programming.

[UnthinkableThinker]

Completely supported, the mixing of stages when you dock is pretty annoying.

[Luis]

Staging does seem far too fluid, I agree. Docking works by merging ships but I can think of no circumstance where you would ever want the staging order of the docked subsystems to change. Each ship should have its staging sequence ring-fenced and locked together, so that you can move the entire subgroup within the staging sequence. Then when the vessels are undocked, the ships can recover their original staging sequence intact.

[Paul Kingtiger]

Brilliant suggestion. I'm wondering what would be the best way to implement it. I'm thinking the best way is to group stages (and have subassemblies automatically do this) and then allow right clicking on stages and stage groups to lock them, preventing accidental staging.

Using this system the stages in a group would have their order maintained even when you added subassemblies or docked with other craft. You could also drag and move a group easily to quickly arrange a craft in orbit.

[Frederf]

The one problem with this is what happens to sealed items if you have a craft A+B and dock it so it's A+B+C then undock it so it's B+C. The A+B sealing has to be broken since the new craft is smaller. The same with parts destroyed.

[Kasuha]

The one problem with this is what happens to sealed items if you have a craft A+B and dock it so it's A+B+C then undock it so it's B+C. The A+B sealing has to be broken since the new craft is smaller. The same with parts destroyed.

While I don't propose any particular ways to implement it, the idea is that any contiguous subgraph of the ship's tree structure could be sealed. Docking ports or attach points of a sealed part would still be usable so you can attach or dock other parts to the sealed part. Therefore you can have multiple sealed parts on your ship, either docked or attached as sealed subassemblies in VAB. You can unseal them while they're part of the ship, or after you undock/decouple them from the ship's body. If you break a sealed part by using a decoupler or docking port inside it - it would just split to two separate sealed parts just like how now staging setup splits if you decouple parts from each other.

Unsealing could be accessible from any sealed part.

Sealing would probably make sense only for complete ships/subtrees/subassemblies in VAB and for complete ships in space.

[Paul Kingtiger]

The one problem with this is what happens to sealed items if you have a craft A+B and dock it so it's A+B+C then undock it so it's B+C. The A+B sealing has to be broken since the new craft is smaller. The same with parts destroyed.

If you used the groups idea, then when you split A+B you would create two stage groups, A and B. Then when you attached B to C, you would have two groups, B and C. You could then delete the groups and create a new group.