Construction Stage Invisi-Mode

[thetonestarr]

If you're familiar with Photoshop, it works the same way as the hide-layer button. Essentially, while constructing a vehicle, say you want to investigate an issue deep inside the core of a rather convoluted construction. You pretty much have to deconstruct the entire thing to get to it and work on it.

I suggest having a button on each stage to hide it so you can look at what's behind it. I know the problems that could be caused by allowing you to change things while certain stages are hidden - if it couldn't be worked out to auto-correct, then perhaps this could just be a "view-only" mode, to at least let people look at the innards of their ship before dismantling it.

The problem I have that makes this ideal is that when I put together large ships, and even more when I piece together one ship from multiple others, I tend to have stages that accidentally clash with each other. Right now, I've built a perfect lander, but the rocket I'd originally built to go with it was flawed, so I replaced it with a rocket I'd used previously that was enormously successful. However, now that I've done that, my stages don't match up quite correctly, and it's a bother hunting down the individual pieces to figure out where they go. If I could hide everything from my later stages, though, it would make things MUCH easier.

SECOND CONCEPT: I suggest this as either a supplementary idea, or as a replacement - it could function well either way. Have a feature (can be toggled on and off, perhaps) during construction that, when you go over to your stages and hover over a part, everything that's blocking it from view automatically becomes 60% transparent (give or take, of course, per dev opinion. Maybe there could also be a slider setting to define the transparency percentage?). This makes it easier to hunt down exactly which part you're hovering over, without having to constantly rotate the camera to see which part this is so you can put it in the right stage.

All-in-all, both these ideas greatly simplify the construction process and would make it worlds easier to correctly define which parts fall under which stages.

Thanks for reading.

[Vaporo]

^What he said.

Seriously, I have the same problem. I'll build a humongous rocket, then realize that I have to add two extra stages to the lander. So, I take the whole thing apart, fix my lander, and put it back together, but realize that I now have the stages mixed up because my new stages run into what were previously stages for the transfer vehicle. And that bug where a part gets separated from its symmetry group in the staging setup doesn't help.