Optionally replace thrust limiter sliders with text input

[Broco]

Now that we have Relays in KSP, many of us want to establish a proper network. One way of doing so is placing 3 relay satellites with 120° distance to each other on the exactly same orbit. While this can be done quite well with the given 0.5 thrust for RCS on smaller orbits, it's pretty hard to achieve when you want to have let's say a 400.000.000 m orbit around Jool.

I just couldn't get a perfect 400M apoapis and periapsis with the 0.5 because it's still way too much thrust. I ended up editing the save file and set the limiter to 0.001, which allowed meter precision even in this huge orbit and I achieved my goal of a perfect 400M orbit.

But since this value already accepts floating point numbers, why not add a function that if you double click the slider it turns into a text input where you can manually set your thrust limiter?

Not as important as getting rid of the stutter but still would be a nice way of fine tuning orbits.

Edited March 8, 2017 by Broco

[cantab]

Well in my view the thrust limiter is already a bit over-generous. Real rocket engines can't throttle down to 0.1% of their maximum thrust.

[Broco]

4 minutes ago, cantab said:

Well in my view the thrust limiter is already a bit over-generous. Real rocket engines can't throttle down to 0.1% of their maximum thrust.

But then again, real rocket RCS fire precisely to the 10th of a second which you cant really do manually, wouldn't you agree?

[XLjedi]

Yes!   ...please do something to "fix" the thrust limiter sliders.   The 0.5% increments are extremely aggravating.  I would not mind having some "snap" areas at 10% increments that I can click on.  I find myself wanting to set these to 10% or 50% frequently, and then getting stuck with one that bounces back and forth between 51% and 49.5%.  Text entry would be OK, I'd even settle for a 1% or 5% increment, just get rid of this stupid granularity please.

[paulprogart]

1 hour ago, XLjedi said:

getting stuck with one that bounces back and forth between 51% and 49.5%.

Small tip:  if you rotate/move the camera and click on the part again you can get it to let you pick 50% (or whatever value you want) after usually 2 or 3 tries.  The UI controls are objects in 3D-space and the rounding occurs due to the projection onto 2D, so you just have to find a projection that works.

I agree it shouldn't work like this though.

[Chakat Firepaw]

Another potential improvement to the thrust limiter sliders would be the ability to bind them together.  Even if it was just a "bind" toggle to allowed you to add/remove engines from a single bound group.