Suggestion - Torque Visualiser

[ROldford]

The physics toolkit in KSPEdu is very good, but it's missing one thing: torque visualisation.

I've used KSP with Infernal Robotics to investigate torque with students, and it works pretty well. You make a satellite with 2 fuel tanks and 2 small engines, each on the extendible piston part from IR, so you can change the force radius to change torque, and change the mass radius to change the moment of inertia. (You can also cheat to add or remove fuel from the tanks to change moment of inertia also.)

This would take more work to do in KSPEdu, but even without IR parts, a way to see/measure torque would be very helpful. I think something similar to the force visualiser part would work well.

Thanks!

[MarkZero]

Hmm, what would be a good way to visualize torque. Or would you want to simply visualize forces causing torque (forces applied to a certain point on a craft)?

[ROldford]

It would essentially be a copy of the force visualiser, but the vectors would follow the axis of rotation for each torque. To make it easier to visualise how the vector direction matches the torque's rotational direction, I'd have the vector arrows spinning. (I just realised that faster spinning could represent more torque!) I'd also love to have an angular velocity graph option in the flight recorder, but I don't know how that would work in 3D.