New Maneuver Manipulation Handle

[jonny]

As the maneuver node system is a core element of KSP I think there can be some improvements:

Currently the system gives very minor information about a planned maneuver there is the direction indicator on the navball which is only useful to align the vessel, but not really for planning, the dV required which again is only useful for execution of the maneuver. The only information for planning a maneuver is the resulting orbit.

A very useful feature would be a dV readout for each standard direction (prograde, normal, ...) e.g. hovering with the mouse over the "radial in" handle will show the dV in "radial in" direction, like hovering with the mouse over Ap maker shows the Ap height.

And there should be an visualization of the vectors in each of the standard directions. I think of arrows which scale in size depending on the dV in the particular direction. e.g. a maneuver with 30m/s "retrograde" and 60m/s "normal" creates a "retrograde" arrow and a "normal" arrow which is double the size of the retrograde one:

I think this will even help beginners to understand what the maneuver system does. And it will show if you are wasting dV because you accidentally dragged the wrong handle.

Of course a 5 m/s normal vector would be barely visible if the prograde vector is 1000 m/s. But this is ok because the 5 m/s normal vector would have a very small  impact on the resulting orbit and dV requirement.