Staging on fly, and disabling deouplers

[Temeriki]

Isnt it a pain when after docking together your interplanetary ship in orbit and you accidentally hit space and decouple something that wasnt supposed to be decoupled for a while. Or after assembling this monstrosity of a ship you need to activate engines by hand because of staging weirdness. Wouldnt it be nice to disable stagable modules, or add and remove things from staging on the fly. I think so.

[Tw1]

I reckon staging could be redone. There would still be the on the fly staging sequence in the flight scene, but in the editors, it could be a more complex thing like in a tab, like crew management or action groups. Then you could have a more complex system, with features like somewhere to put the little action squares if you didn't want that part to trigger in the sequence at any time.

[Mitchz95]

I wouldn't mind something like this in a later release, but stage lock and actions groups do the job pretty well.

[Temeriki]

Action groups get messed up after docking two different craft.

[XOIIO]

I'd also like to be able to change action groups as well.

[Slouch]

You can re-order staging on the fly. I do it all the time, it's done in the same way as in the VAB/SPH. Changing action groups would be nice and has been suggested many times before though.

[Bobe]

I feel like there's too much trying to be crammed into staging. Personally, I only use space bar for the actual ascent stages. Once I'm in orbit, I typically do everything via context menus, unless the mission is simple enough (ie. release fairings, decouple payload, activate engine, etc).

I don't like seeing a stage list reaching through the top of my screen just because I have many components that can be activated. It should be optional whether or not you want something in the staging list. Typically the order of the stages isn't even what I intend to perform them in, but since the must be in there I have to at least make sure nothing will activate at the wrong time. Moreover, perhaps the staging could be separated into different groups, such as ascent, mission and descent, just so things are a bit tidier.

Everything else can be handled with action groups. While I use Action Group Manager, I strongly feel its functionality should be a core element of the game. The ability to manage your action groups after launch just seems like common sense, especially, as many have said, since conflicts arise after docking two ships.

[Temeriki]

I feel like there's too much trying to be crammed into staging. Personally, I only use space bar for the actual ascent stages. Once I'm in orbit, I typically do everything via context menus, unless the mission is simple enough (ie. release fairings, decouple payload, activate engine, etc).

I don't like seeing a stage list reaching through the top of my screen just because I have many components that can be activated. It should be optional whether or not you want something in the staging list. Typically the order of the stages isn't even what I intend to perform them in, but since the must be in there I have to at least make sure nothing will activate at the wrong time. Moreover, perhaps the staging could be separated into different groups, such as ascent, mission and descent, just so things are a bit tidier.

Everything else can be handled with action groups. While I use Action Group Manager, I strongly feel its functionality should be a core element of the game. The ability to manage your action groups after launch just seems like common sense, especially, as many have said, since conflicts arise after docking two ships.

This here is what I was referring too. Being able to add/remove things from the staging list, but while flying. Would help with building multi launch ships.

[Panic1]

That's exactly why I remapped the staging to the Tab key, and not the space bar. I often tend to press the space bar accidentally and mess up the launch, the Tab key is a bit out of the way.

[Atoning Unifex]

In regard to docking craft causing a merging of the stages, how about if staging is redesigned so that each craft retains a separate staging list, even when docked. It could be managed by having collapsible lists so that you only see the ones you want. There could then be an option to allow separate lists to be either merged (so stage 0 merges with stage 0) or stacked (so stage 0 gets added to the end of the other list and becomes stage x). This could be taken even further allowing existing lists to be split into two or more - allowing for the suggestion above of having different groupings for launch, mission and return.

I rarely come across situations where I wouldn't want something in the staging list, but it wouldn't hurt to have the functionality to remove items.

I also think action groups should be adjustable on the fly. In fact I would like to be able to add actions into staging so I can automatically raise landing gear or extend solar panels without having to use an action group, for example. Giving us more flexibility in how we configure our craft.