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A question about the Gimbal


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Hey everyone, I just had a quick question about the Gimbal, I\'ve figured out that the symbol on it that shows me my actual heading relative to the way my rocket is facing, but what do the two purple symbols and the other green one mean exactly?

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Hi Magmaros.

The two purple markers point towards and away from the launchpad, while the other green marker shows the direction directly opposite your direction of travel.

Hope this helps :)

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Gimbal is actually (kind of) the correct name for the thing we call 'nav ball', at least in the Apollo program. If you go watch Apollo 13 closely you notice the crew will yell 'gimbal lock!' from time to time. This happens when two of the three pivot axes line up causing the gimbal to lose the ability to track one degree of freedom.

Although to be totally correct, a gimbal is a device that drives the nav ball, that ball\'s correct name is 'Flight Director/Atitude Indicator'. The Apollo crews call it the 8-Ball.

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Off-Topic: I wish that the retrograde indicator color was not identical to the prograde one. Sometimes, despite the inscribed cross, I accidentally tilt my ships in the wrong direction, especially when it hovers over one of the white lines. Differentiating is somewhat hard.

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That\'s because they are different colours. If they look the same to you, there\'s something wrong with your monitor. Try adjusting the colour temperature, or get a program that will do it automatically so your eyes don\'t get burned out from a 9500K monitor at midnight. I am, of course, speaking of f.lux (Google it).

The prograde should be yellow, and the retrograde green. The colour difference is easily seen on my monitor, so if it doesn\'t show for you, there\'s something strange going on. Check you don\'t have any strange video card settings (unnecessarily high brightness/gamma settings, etc)

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Sure, I\'ll try that. I think the problem may come up again with other users, though. Maybe the pro/retro pair would be easier to differentiate if they were the same shape as the KSC/anti-KSC indicators?

Sorry for being off topic again. Maybe I\'ll put in a suggestion in the dev forum later.

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Yep, then we would get even more confused, as they\'d look too similar to the KSC indicator pair.

No, I think just altering the colors so they look slightly more differentiable would be acceptable. Say, prograde green, retrograde red/orange?

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If they look the same to you, there\'s something wrong with your monitor.

or color blind. monitor settings mean nothing when it is the eye itself that is at fault.

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Yep, then we would get even more confused, as they\'d look too similar to the KSC indicator pair.

No, I think just altering the colors so they look slightly more differentiable would be acceptable. Say, prograde green, retrograde red/orange?

Oh. They\'d have the same color yellowish color as they do now, just with more noticeable differences in shape. But yeah, altered colors would probably be better.

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I\'m thinking actually we should change the prograde/retrograde colors AND shape, but not to something like the KSP indicators, it\'d just be too damned confusing. Not sure what\'s suitable just yet, though.

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