Staging while two or more ships are docked.

[DeepOdyssey]

Hi.

Lately i've been tinkering with docking, and making large crafts while in orbit. Everything is fine, except it's...not fine. First problem. When you dock two ships, stages from both ships will mix together, so you need to recreate proper staging again, which is frustrating. Secondly when i finally finished recreating my staging, i quicksaved the game, because i had to move to the other ship for executing maneuver node. Then i had came back, only to see that my staging was not saved. It appears staging sequence won't save no matter what, wheter it's quicksave, moving from ship to ship, or just normal autosave.

As for the first problem, maybe you could add UI with staging and separate substagings[eg. two docked vehicles with two separate substagings]. This way stagings from both vehicles would not interfere with each other.

Sorry for my english, i'm not a native speaker.

[allmhuran]

Yeah, this can indeed be a nuisance and it would be nice if some intuitive solution could be found.

[stephm]

hi !

Completely agree with you and is the same thing for action group.

Docking a vessel with a set of action group and everything it's mixed, is very annoying too.... (and reset too)

Suggestion an option in docking

- dock as vessel

- dock as part.

option dock as vessel , separate all action groups and stage, accessible via function "control from here"

(control from here for docked vessel active staging and group for vessel etc.)

option dock as part the actions groups and stage are mixed with core station.

I have just the level to made a brick-breaker in java , so I imagine it's very difficult to realize for KSP.

bye !

[Random Tank]

My solution for that problem is to build the entire ship in the VAB/SPH, sort out the staging there, then take the ship apart, add it to launch stages, launch into orbit, assemble, and then the staging *should* be correct... But I'd also always activate engines on a built-in-orbit craft with action groups, not staging, as that will avoid any hiccups. (Just make every engine activate on action group 1 or something)

[mstrfalco]

Where is the action group/ staging information stored for a vessel? Is it in the quicksave? I've never really looked into this.....

[Kasuha]

Action groups are serious matter, they don't get screwed up by docking/undocking since assignment to action key is set up in each part, but if you don't design your ship's parts so their action groups don't overlap you're screwed.

Supposedly there's a mod that allows setting up action groups during flight, you might give it a try.

Staging is another story, it can often be resolved by adding a number of empty stages at the beginning or end of one of the two ships. Or you can just reconfigure staging manually, it's annoying but possible.

I touched this topic a long time ago with proposal to be able to "seal" action groups and staging of attached ship, I think it would help with "nested" ships such as interplanetary transports or probe carriers. Not so much if you want to build a complete functional ship in orbit.