Numerical Fuel Gauges (unfinished)

[The_Duck]

I was messing around with this at the request of semininja but I didn\'t quite get it working completely. If anyone wants to grab this code and run with it, feel free; I\'m not working on it at the moment.

This plugin provides an alternate command pod. When you use it in your ship it will add a numerical readout to the info boxes of fuel tanks:

The only problem is that it currently disrupts icon grouping: none of the fuel tank icons will group together, even when they aren\'t in use or are empty. I\'m not sure why this is; I haven\'t figured out how exactly the icon grouping is controlled.

Download here and unzip in your main KSP folder to install. The source is included, but I\'ll paste it here for easy viewing since it\'s short.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

public class ImprovedFuelGaugePod : CommandPod
{
  Dictionary<FuelTank, VInfoBox> infoBoxes = new Dictionary<FuelTank, VInfoBox>();

  protected override void onFlightStart()
  {
    foreach (Part p in this.vessel.parts)
    {
      if (p is FuelTank)
      {
        //clearing and recreating the info box seems to trick FuelTank into using our info box
        //and this way we get a reference to the info box:
        p.stackIcon.ClearInfoBoxes();
        infoBoxes[(FuelTank)p] = p.stackIcon.DisplayInfo();
      }
    }

    base.onFlightStart();
  }

  protected override void onPartFixedUpdate()
  {
    foreach (KeyValuePair<FuelTank, VInfoBox> pair in infoBoxes)
    {
      pair.Value.SetMessage('Fuel: ' + (int)pair.Key.fuel);
    }

    base.onPartFixedUpdate();
  }
}

[semininja]

Ideas discussed so far: clearing the infoboxes only when the engine starts to draw fuel from a tank, clearing again when empty (to see if infoboxes will revert, allowing stacking again).

[OtherDalfite]

This looks pretty nice! Could there by chance be a guage to measure how fast your engine is consuming the fuel?

[semininja]

I expect that probably wouldn\'t be too difficult, although I\'m not enough of a coder to even start to tell you how.

Also, here\'s a part that does this, which you can add to any rocket you\'ve already built.

Source is included. Model credit to NovaSilisko, code credit to The_Duck.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46530390/ImprovedFuelGauges.zip

[OtherDalfite]

I expect that probably wouldn\'t be too difficult, although I\'m not enough of a coder to even start to tell you how.

Same goes for me. I imagine it may be a little tough to determine it by throttle. Anyways, just a question/suggestion.

[VincentMcConnell]

How about fuel percentage? That\'s kind of more important than a number that is going to be different out of the total for each tank...

[semininja]

The way I see it, the fuel percentage isn\'t really the important part, and it\'s pretty easy to estimate using the existing fuel bar in the gauge.

[Cepheus]

Looks pretty neat. Does it work with solids, or only with liquid tanks?

[semininja]

Judging by the code, it\'s currently set up to work with liquid tanks. It could probably be changed so that it also works with solid boosters, though.