Action groups and staging editable and saveable in flight

[Kulebron]

When you make a more or less complex ship, it's possible to forget to put staging sequence wrong, or forget an action group when you remove and then put back a part. Sometimes you fix staging in flight, but that's not saved, and you'll need to go to VAB, open and resave the ship. Action groups are not fixable at all, and sometimes it may reveal quite late into flight.

This notably impedes playability, and these things should not be hard as stone after you put the ship in flight.

If every part has an ID anyway, and docked ships are stored in save file separately with root parts and part trees, action groups on them should be saveable too.

[juanml82]

Well, the fixes are for the particular vessel - changing stuff in flight doesn't mean another one of the same type of spacecraft will also need to change it that way. But regarding action groups, yes, we should be able to see them, and edit them, in flight.

[Diazo]

There are a few mods out there that allow things such as editing actions in flight. One of them being my Action Groups Extended mod, the other one I can think of off the top of my head being the Action Group Manager mod.

There are a couple complications I see in your post that make it not quite that easy.

1) When you launch a vessel, a copy of that vessel is created from the blueprint you made in the editor, but this is a one-way process from editor to flight. When you revert to the editor when testing vessels, the vessel on the launchpad is destroyed and the vessel you get when you return to the editor is a fresh copy of the vessel created from the last copy of the blueprint that was saved when you originally left the editor to go to the launch pad.

2) When ships dock, they are not saved. Rather, KSP combines all vessels that are docked into one big vessel with only a single root part. This is the biggest complication trying to handle data of any sort, not just action groups, on vessels in flight.

D.