"Lock" feature in space center

[Tortoise]

People have space-stations and stuff that they never want to get rid of, and when you go into the space center theres always that risk that you'll not be thinking right, and accidently press the button which stops tracking it, and despawns that craft.

There should be a "lock" feature where maybe you type in a password, or get an extra confirmation to stop tracking that craft.

[Tery215]

how is a name including "DO NOT DESTROY" plus a warning sign for whether you want to destroy it not enough?

Edited April 27, 2014 by Tery215
changed isn't to is

[Tw1]

This has come up several times if I recall. It might be overkill for the stock game, but sounds like it would be a useful thing for a plugin to try. If you use F5 frequently, then you can get over accidental deletion that way.

[FenrirWolf]

Isn't there already an extra confirmation when you try to despawn a spacecraft?

[Tortoise]

Isn't there already an extra confirmation when you try to despawn a spacecraft?

That's just one confirmation. I was requesting an extra confirmation for special crafts.

[vexx32]

I don't know, I'm pretty sure one confirmation should be plenty. It's a pretty solid system, really. I've never once deleted a craft by accident. I've hit the button by accident, but the confirmation has always been enough to make sure I didn't delete/untrack anything I didn't want to.

[zeel]

It seems like a simple little button to "lock" that disables the end flight button for that craft would be perfect. You wouldn't be able to select end flight until; you unlocked it.

[Sirrobert]

I'm sorry, but if you delete a big station THROUGH the confirmation window, I can't feel sorry for you.

This is what they call natural selection. Suck it up

[xrayfishx]

People would destroy their space stations even with the double confirmation if they're playing late at night and are perhaps enjoying a beer while doing that. I can't recall deleting anything important myself, but I never terminate any flights so I never even touch that button.

[Jouni]

Elementary UI design guidelines: If it's technically possible to undo an action, then it should be made possible by implementing the undo functionality.

[Dodgey]

At what point do you stop compensating for a persons lack of attentiveness, at some point you have to take responsibility for your own stupid mistakes, we all do.

[r4pt0r]

would you like to close the program without saving?

are you sure?

are you sure you are sure?

are you sure you are sure you are sure?

if you ever arent sure about a deletion, click fly instead to double check, or set up a fresh f5 before your orbital cleanup

[Jouni]

People make mistakes all the time, but good software allows fixing those mistakes afterwards. Competent software developers adapt their software to the reality, instead of claiming that the reality should be something else than it is.

Constant warnings and confirmation dialogs are a sign of bad UI design. There is generally no need to ask the user whether unsaved changes should be saved, as the program can just save the changes somewhere and restore them when it's started again.

Spending much effort on avoiding mistakes is usually inefficient. That effort is often better spent on making the inevitable errors less dangerous.

[Sirrobert]

People make mistakes all the time, but good software allows fixing those mistakes afterwards. Competent software developers adapt their software to the reality, instead of claiming that the reality should be something else than it is.

Constant warnings and confirmation dialogs are a sign of bad UI design. There is generally no need to ask the user whether unsaved changes should be saved, as the program can just save the changes somewhere and restore them when it's started again.

Spending much effort on avoiding mistakes is usually inefficient. That effort is often better spent on making the inevitable errors less dangerous.

There is a limit to how much you can protect people from themselves. If you are to stupid to click delete instead of fly (or just double click), than you deserve it.

Learn from your mistake, and don't do it again.

To compare this suggestion to Microsoft Word:

Deleting is like hitting the red X in the top. Word will ask you if you want to save your document. If you hit don't save (in KSP, you hit yes, you really want to delete), than your document is GONE.

No, you can't get it back. Because you told the computer not to save it. The best you can do, is go back to an older save, and lose your progress since that point

[TMS]

"End flight" dialogue all over again.

One confirmation is fine. The reasons for making an error on the first confirmation (habit and haste) wouldn't be prevented by the second.

I don't think I've ever deleted a flight unintentionally.

[vger]

At what point do you stop compensating for a persons lack of attentiveness, at some point you have to take responsibility for your own stupid mistakes, we all do.

Yeah, only the most powerful people in the world have such security measures. The john doe's, even though statistically should be less intelligent, don't get such undo measures.

[Jouni]

There is a limit to how much you can protect people from themselves. If you are to stupid to click delete instead of fly (or just double click), than you deserve it.

Learn from your mistake, and don't do it again.

Protecting users from their mistakes is not about protecting them from their stupidity, but from your laziness and hostility. When a user makes a mistake that results in unnecessary data loss, the fault is primarily on the developers. At the best the data loss was caused because the developers were too lazy or too busy to do things in a better way. At the worst the developers are intentionally hostile toward the users, leaving traps for them, because of some misguided beliefs about how things should be.

The whole point of learning from mistakes is that you should not be afraid of making mistakes, because mistakes are harmless in general. Schools traditionally taught you to avoid mistakes, but that should be a thing of past. Some schools still do it, but they are bad schools, because they are teaching you how not to be successful. If you learn the attitude that mistakes are bad and should be avoided, you also learn to play it safe, choosing the path of low risks and low rewards.

Of course, there are some mistakes that are genuinely bad, but for most people in the developed world, those situations are rare.

To compare this suggestion to Microsoft Word:

Deleting is like hitting the red X in the top. Word will ask you if you want to save your document. If you hit don't save (in KSP, you hit yes, you really want to delete), than your document is GONE.

No, you can't get it back. Because you told the computer not to save it. The best you can do, is go back to an older save, and lose your progress since that point

That behavior was justified decades ago, when disk space was expensive. These days, the default behavior is to save the changes on quit, if the document has been saved before, and only ask for confirmation when the document is new. When the user reopens the document, the changes are there, but the user can choose to revert them and restore the document to a previous intentionally saved state.

[zeel]

You are all looking at this from the wrong angle. Assuming that adding confirmations is the way it would work, and that this would not help anything.

My suggestion is much better: Add a little padlock icon to every ships little box in the list. Clicking the icon toggles it from locked to unlocked. If it is locked then when that ship is selected the "end flight" button will be grayed out with a lock symbol over it. You will not be able to use the end-flight button. IF you toggle the lock to unlocked it will allow you to end the flight with the normal confirmation.

Why is this better? Well for one it's less annoying than multiple confirmations, for another it makes accidentally deleting the wrong craft difficult since one would need to accidentally click a tiny lock icon, and the end flight button, and confirm - which are all in vastly different parts of the UI. Someone simply going through deleting craft they do not need would not accidentally click through on removing a locked craft, since the end flight button wouldn't work, they would need to actively go and unlock it to be able to end its flight.

[Sirrobert]

Protecting users from their mistakes is not about protecting them from their stupidity, but from your laziness and hostility. When a user makes a mistake that results in unnecessary data loss, the fault is primarily on the developers. At the best the data loss was caused because the developers were too lazy or too busy to do things in a better way. At the worst the developers are intentionally hostile toward the users, leaving traps for them, because of some misguided beliefs about how things should be.

The whole point of learning from mistakes is that you should not be afraid of making mistakes, because mistakes are harmless in general. Schools traditionally taught you to avoid mistakes, but that should be a thing of past. Some schools still do it, but they are bad schools, because they are teaching you how not to be successful. If you learn the attitude that mistakes are bad and should be avoided, you also learn to play it safe, choosing the path of low risks and low rewards.

Of course, there are some mistakes that are genuinely bad, but for most people in the developed world, those situations are rare.

A MISTAKE is accidently clicking the delete button, when you wanted the fly button. That's what the confirmation protects you from. So we are already protected against mistakes.

Deleting a craft, and than thinking later 'o crap, I should not have deleted this', is your own fault. YOU deleted it. If you're not sure, don't do it.

And you don't learn from mistakes, if the only mistake you make is a mistake you have no reason to be afraid of. You only learn if you had something happen to you, that you don't want to happen anymore. If the computer just fixes it, you have no reason to learn. Because it's not something that needs solving.

That behavior was justified decades ago, when disk space was expensive. These days, the default behavior is to save the changes on quit, if the document has been saved before, and only ask for confirmation when the document is new. When the user reopens the document, the changes are there, but the user can choose to revert them and restore the document to a previous intentionally saved state.

Nope, word still asks if you want to save, and if you click don't save, IT DOES NOT SAVE. Yes, I just tested this in Word 2013.

If it CRASHES, than it'll automaticly load up the autosave the next time you open Word, but it does not keep that autosave if it doesn't need it (you telling it not to save, means it doesn't need to keep it)

[lajoswinkler]

You know what annoys me? When you prune the list of orbiting junk or anything else, and then if you do it fast, KSP sometimes things you've double-clicked the confirmation window, and it sees it as "Fly" command. Then it loads the scene, then you exit and it loads the KSC, then you load the tracking station. So stupid.

[Jouni]

A MISTAKE is accidently clicking the delete button, when you wanted the fly button. That's what the confirmation protects you from. So we are already protected against mistakes.

Deleting a craft, and than thinking later 'o crap, I should not have deleted this', is your own fault. YOU deleted it. If you're not sure, don't do it.

And you don't learn from mistakes, if the only mistake you make is a mistake you have no reason to be afraid of. You only learn if you had something happen to you, that you don't want to happen anymore. If the computer just fixes it, you have no reason to learn. Because it's not something that needs solving.

Life doesn't have to be that hard, and it's very counterproductive to make it harder than necessary. Learning from suffering is an extremely bad and slow way to learn anything. To make it worse, people often learn completely wrong lessons from hardship, because the primitive parts of a human brain work that way.

The best way to learn is to try things and take risks. If you happen to fail, you learn that something didn't work, and you'll try something else the next time. The less consequences there are for a failure, the more risks can you afford to take, the more will you fail, and the more will you learn. On the other hand, if there are significant consequences for a failure, you can afford making less mistakes with an acceptable risk level, so you'll also learn less. For example, people using quicksaves in KSP in an intelligent way learn things faster. They keep repeating the hard parts until they can handle them, while people who don't use quicksaves spend more time repeating the easy parts after a failure.

In general, it's better to concentrate on what's possible and what works, instead of who deserves the blame or what feels morally justified. If it's possible to design software in a way that even the most stupid user mistakes rarely result in any lasting damage, designing it so will make it better.

Nope, word still asks if you want to save, and if you click don't save, IT DOES NOT SAVE. Yes, I just tested this in Word 2013.

If it CRASHES, than it'll automaticly load up the autosave the next time you open Word, but it does not keep that autosave if it doesn't need it (you telling it not to save, means it doesn't need to keep it)

I wasn't talking about Word (which I haven't really used in the last 10-15 years), but software design in general. It's quite possible that Word, being an old product, is still based on obsolete design principles.

[Amaroq]

@Sirrobert - I've at least once deleted the wrong craft via clicking on a different craft, but (through user error) not having the click register. The (formerly selected) craft remains selected. Then I click delete, & confirm because I think I'm confirming for the craft I just clicked.

When this happens, it is of course the longest-running craft in my save-game that has trouble.

In fact, its happened to me just often enough that I make sure the first craft in my save is a *flag*, which I can manually edit to put back in if this mistake happens again.

So, I don't think a request for "locking" a specific craft is unreasonable -- certainly anybody in a RemoteTech game wants to make sure that they don't delete any of their key communications-network nodes!!

...

That said, I find Kerbal Alarm Clock's built-in "auto-save" feature to be sufficient, providing me multiple rolling save-game points, so that at most I go back a couple of minutes if I have an error. So, until "lock" is made "stock", my suggestion to the OP is "install Kerbal Alarm Clock".

[razark]

Then I click delete, & confirm because I think I'm confirming for the craft I just clicked.

So you didn't bother to check that the craft you are deleting is the one you want to delete? That's the purpose of the confirmation pop-up, to give you pause to make sure you are doing what you intend.

I get tired of users not paying attention to the message that appear. I put those words in there to be read, because they give useful information.

That said, a little checkbox that makes a ship not deletable would be useful.

[Superfluous J]

If you're landing a base on Mun and just have a hitchhiker on landing legs sitting by itself, the game lists it as "debris" and there's no way to change the name. The spent stage that fell next to it and the landing leg that fell off my other lander nearby are also "debris" and also cannot be modified.

In the tracking station there's no way (that I know of, please let me know if I'm wrong) to determine which of those things listed as debris are my habitation module, and which are actual debris that I want to delete.

One, two, or 47 confirmation dialogues will work in this case. I need a way to set that hab module as something I don't want to delete.

[Jouni]

So you didn't bother to check that the craft you are deleting is the one you want to delete? That's the purpose of the confirmation pop-up, to give you pause to make sure you are doing what you intend.

I get tired of users not paying attention to the message that appear. I put those words in there to be read, because they give useful information.

That said, a little checkbox that makes a ship not deletable would be useful.

The problem in asking for confirmation is that it's done way too often. People first learn to expect the confirmation dialog, because it's a part of the normal workflow, and then to ignore it, because it's almost always pointless and redundant. The user should only be asked for confirmation, if he/she is about to do something exceptional, which may have significant consequences.

If the player is about to delete a viable ship with several kerbals as crew, he/she probably doesn't mean it, so the game should ask for confirmation and tell the reasons why it believes that the action was a mistake. If the object is classified as debris, the player probably means to delete it, so no confirmation should be needed under most circumstances. Confirmation should still be asked, if the game believes that the object may have been miscategorized accidentally (for example, if it has crew in it) or if it seems like a useful piece of debris (a non-empty fuel tank with a docking port is the typical example). Even when the object has been deleted, it should be possible to undo the deletion, if the player notices his/her mistake just a bit too late.