Help:Part Categories

Prior to Registry software release 1.0 around May 2006, each part had a single "Type" such as "terminator", or "RBS" selected from a small list of part types. The letter in the part number was supposed to match the part type. This had two problems: First, many parts seemed to belong to more than one type and, second, other parts seemed to belong to no existing type. When the user clicked on a part icon in the icon bar, she was taken to a table that held all the parts of that type. These tables became too long and undifferentiated.

The strongest solution, not taken, would be to eliminate part types and categories all together and use a text search instead. This would leave the program without a format for the resulting table. It would leave authors with no way to author information about a category of parts.