Minor adjustment to RCS toggling

[Red Iron Crown]

I find that sometimes, when docking, I would like to be able to use RCS for translation but not attitude control, which can be handled with reaction wheels. This consumes less monopropellant than using RCS for both. While I can toggle RCS on and off to accomplish this, it is a bit cumbersome.

It would be better, to my mind, to have separate toggles for translation RCS and attitude RCS. Or, for that matter, have RCS translation always on and only toggle RCS attitude control.

This would also be useful for landers, where I sometimes use RCS translation to avoid obstacles, cancel any remaining horizontal speed, or fine tune my vertical landing speed at touchdown, but I want to rely on reaction wheels and thrust vectoring for attitude control.

[Javster]

A bit like the control surfaces? Where you can select which you want to use it for?

[mythbusters844]

I agree on this. Maybe this could be toggled with action groups, or with an entirely new button?

[Red Iron Crown]

A bit like the control surfaces? Where you can select which you want to use it for?

Not exactly. I want to be able to use RCS for both translation and attitude, but not necessarily at the same time. I would like to be able to toggle off RCS attitude control while keeping RCS translation active.

[m4v]

If Squad is going to keep the torque that the wheels currently have then they should just disable attitude control with RCS, reaction wheels are just hands down better, they need no fuel, the torque is uniform in all directions and it doesn't matter where you place them.

The only reason we still use RCS is for translation, so it makes sense to make them work only for that kind of input, adding a toggle is redundant.

[Jouni]

Large ships turn much better with RCS than with reaction wheels. In principle, you could do the same by having a huge pile of reaction wheels, but that would make the ship structurally very unstable.

[Red Iron Crown]

I've had a lander topple over that I managed to stand back up with RCS attitude control, but couldn't with the reaction wheel. I suspect that with the NASA ARM pack it's going to be difficult to rotate an asteroid with reaction wheels only. I'm not sure that I want RCS attitude control to go away completely just yet.

Personally, I think the simplest solution would be to have RCS translation always active. IJKLHN don't get used for anything when RCS is off, so there wouldn't need to be any UI changes or new keybindings. Just have R toggle RCS attitude control only.

[m4v]

Large ships turn much better with RCS than with reaction wheels. In principle, you could do the same by having a huge pile of reaction wheels, but that would make the ship structurally very unstable.

I avoid making large ships due to part count, but I'll have to test that sometime. Is just a guess, but I think that the instability you have with RW is because you place them all together in a "huge pile" in a single place of the ship instead of evenly distributed along its mass.

[Jouni]

Reaction wheels work well with rigid ships, but not with modular ships or ships with many joints. Also, adding reaction wheels to a ship adds many weak joints to it, causing it to flex and wobble more when you turn it. Because of that, it's often preferable to keep the individual modules of a modular ship as rigid as possible, and only use a minimal number of reaction wheels in the ship. My typical ~200-tonne interplanetary ships usually have three large ASAS modules near the center of mass in the thruster modules, and a number of command pods in the payload section.

And of course, anything with reaction wheels and RCS turns faster with both RCS and reaction wheels than only with the reaction wheels. Because large ships are always too slow to turn, it's better to use the RCS if the ship has it.

[THX1138]

+1. I need to conserve my monopropellant for translation so need to limit SAS system to reaction wheels only. It's troublesome to have to keep switching RCS and SAS on and off to stop the SAS system dipping into my precious monopropellant.

[Making a new thread is not appropriate because that would make the suggestion seem like it has less support than it does.]