Staging safety, and big red button

[-Velocity-]

Just a two little suggestions that would improve gameplay a bit IMO- how about a safety for the staging button (default- spacebar)? It would be sorta like a master-arm switch and could be toggled like the SAS/RCS. Beside the SAS/RCS display on the navball, when your rocketed is armed, a red "ARMED" text would appear.

There are many times where folks accidentally press space bar (it's right beside other buttons you use all the time), and accidentally stage their vessels. IMO, the staging button should get a safety switch. I suppose users could use a key combination to get the same effect though.

Another thing- how about physically representing the staging button inside the cockpit of a spacecraft with the archetypal "big red button"? It could have a transparent safety cover too that gets lifted on and off when the safety is enabled/disabled. When you press spacebar, the button gets depressed. It would add to immersion, and a single "big red button" fits the cartoonish Kerbal ethos, IMO. Perhaps if the safety switch was not implemented, that would be even more fitting of the Kerbal ethos, and the devs could make fun of this fact by having an empty hole in the cockpit labelled "Staging Safety Switch". But it's not usually a good idea to make fun of user's frustrations.

However, maybe the staging button should be green, and an abort launch button should be added that is red. That would also work

Anyway, on a sort of related note, I would like to see more information added to cockpits (such as the ability to see how much delta-V you have left on a maneuver) so that it becomes more and more practical to control your spacecraft from the cockpit. It adds to the immersion of the game to fly your craft from inside of it.

Edited July 12, 2014 by |Velocity|

[cpast]

You can already toggle a staging lock with Alt+L.

Big red button would be nice, but should really be for "abort". BRBs are basically always some sort of emergency stop - they tend to be easy to hit under almost any circumstances, which is good for an emergency stop/abort button but bad for most other things.

[Tex_NL]

[Alt] + [L] locks staging.

I will turn the blinking green stage light in the bottom left red. [space] will no longer trigger staging but you can still manually decouple by right clicking a part.

Type [Alt] + [L] again, the red stage light will turn green again and you can stage again as normal.

Edit: Ninja'd

[vexx32]

We've already got an Abort button. You can assign actions to it using the action groups layout, and the big red button pops out from the altimeter display at the top of the screen.

[moeggz]

What?? Alt-L does this! Praise be to the Magic Boulder! That's awesome will absolutely use that. And, OP, I like that idea a lot. Very 'kerbal' IMO. Green for staging and red for abort in comic sizes; yes please!