I miss the old ASAS...

[Merinsan]

Well, I kind of do. The new one is quite good most of the time, but there is one thing the old one did exceptionally well, and that was hold direction.

Today I had a ship that had to do two 1.5hr burns. The ship would drift constantly while I was making the burn, and I had to keep it on course manually. I had enough torque/gimbaling to hold direction, but SAS just didn't want to do it. To make things worse, physical time acceleration didn't work either - it just made it impossible to keep it on course. I had to nurse the burns all the way, for 3hrs.

About halfway through the first burn I was thinking to myself, Mechjeb would be so useful right about now.

Admittedly, the ship was wobbly (it was made from about 12 launches), but it was symmetrical, so it should have been balanced, but my point is if I can control it manually, SAS should be able to do the same.

In atmosphere, the new ASAS is good, and not having to press F all the time when turning is good. But out of atmosphere, you generally want to burn in one direction. Something to manage long burns in space (ie transfer burns) in stock would be good, or at least a way to get the old SAS behavior back for those long burns.

[leax256]

Well, I kind of do. The new one is quite good most of the time, but there is one thing the old one did exceptionally well, and that was hold direction.

I miss that thing Like I would miss a tumor.

[Guest]

I agree, the pre-0.21 ASAS was great. We should have access to fine-tuning controls so we can set the SAS how we like. I find, in most cases, that I want it "stiffer", but I also like the atmospheric behaviour of the 0.22 version. At least we don't have the 0.21 SAS anymore; that made space travel a real chore.

If you want something close to the old one MechJeb's SmartASS got me through the 0.21 times.

[RocketPilot573]

In my opinion the .21.1 SAS was the best, it always held attitude both on panes and rockets. But the current one just sucks... It shuts off when flying a plane, and doesn't hold attitude when turning. Remember how the SAS is supposed to let you turn one axis, but still hold attitude on the other two axis? It's doesn't do that anymore, it just turns off automatically.

[Merinsan]

I agree, the pre-0.21 ASAS was great. We should have access to fine-tuning controls so we can set the SAS how we like. I find, in most cases, that I want it "stiffer", but I also like the atmospheric behaviour of the 0.22 version. At least we don't have the 0.21 SAS anymore; that made space travel a real chore.

If you want something close to the old one MechJeb's SmartASS got me through the 0.21 times.

After 3hrs of burning, I gave serious thought about downloading MechJeb. I don't like the idea of MechJeb in general, ie I don't want to let the computer fly for me, but when I just want to go straight for 3hrs, there is not much flying involved. Prior to the transfer burn, I did 8 identical launches + dockings, for the fuel tanks, which I would still want to do manually.

I still probably wont get MechJeb, as I worry I might be tempted to use it for more things. I'll be looking at shorter burns with more stable craft in the future, by building bases/stations and mining Kethane, although Kethane mining kind of sucks since I need to stay focused on the ship.

[coolitic]

After 3hrs of burning, I gave serious thought about downloading MechJeb. I don't like the idea of MechJeb in general, ie I don't want to let the computer fly for me, but when I just want to go straight for 3hrs, there is not much flying involved. Prior to the transfer burn, I did 8 identical launches + dockings, for the fuel tanks, which I would still want to do manually.

I still probably wont get MechJeb, as I worry I might be tempted to use it for more things. I'll be looking at shorter burns with more stable craft in the future, by building bases/stations and mining Kethane, although Kethane mining kind of sucks since I need to stay focused on the ship.

The main reason I use mechjeb is so I dont waste considerable amounts of fuel as mechjeb can save a lot.

[Guest]

MechJeb allows you to blacklist modules, so you can have eveything but the SmartASS turned off. Anyway, was just trying to be helpful. It's pretty clear that SAS functionality will bring out some wildly different opinions, which is why I think it should be configurable.

[ferram4]

While I agree with regex that some type of tuning options would be great, the real issue is that SAS has no clue how much control authority it has to work with. Since SAS doesn't know how much control authority it has to work with, it either under-controls on sluggish vehicles or over-controls on twitchy ones and a huge amount of vehicle design has to go into getting just enough control authority so that SAS is useful.

I'd like to see some type of interface that PartModules could inherit from that would allow those PartModules to report the amount of control they can apply. Ideally, that could be reported in the form a vector specifying the force for a full roll, yaw or pitch deflection; the moments can be calculated based on where the parts are located relative to the CoM, and by using vectors you can account for yaw-roll-pitch coupling as well. By telling SAS what it has to work with initially the control system will be able to converge a lot faster than it currently can and certainly without the risk of oscillations on very, very high-maneuverability vehicles.