moar ideas for improved fuel management

[herbal space program]

Working through the frustration of trying to create a VTOL space plane that stays balanced throughout its flight, I've been thinking quite a bit about how to make fuel work better in this game. Although I understand this has been discussed a lot before, there was one more thing I wanted to suggest before giving up because it seems particularly easy to implement.

How about letting us set each tank's draining priority number in the stage hierarchy under its tweakables? As I understand it now, tanks within a given stage are drained in the order of furthest from the motor to closest. Simply allowing us to set that order rather than have it be always pre-determined by the physical arrangement of the tanks would make keeping things balanced immensely easier. It would be better still if we could assign two tanks the same priority within the stage so that they would drain simultaneously. I apologize if I am beating a very dead horse here, but something like this just seems so dirt simple to implement and IMO would improve the gameplay experience so much that I feel it bears some harping on. Anyway, I would love to hear whatever anybody else might have to say about this question or what the devs plan to do about it if anything. Thanks!

Edited October 24, 2014 by herbal space program
Prargraphs!

[Capt Snuggler]

first off, paragraphs!

second, what you're describing is very similar to This

Its a good idea. people will say it can be done with a complex system of fuel lines but this method would also allow auto-refueling when you dock with a fuel station/truck.

I'm in favor of this.

fuel lines would still have there place for use with radial tanks and bridging fuel cross-feed gaps and asparagus staging.

[herbal space program]

Yes, it looks like that mod does exactly what I was thinking about, and thanks for posting it. Nonetheless, I think this is an issue that really ought to be fixed in stock and I hope the devs take it on soon.