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More speed units


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Something that bothers me is that we only have one measurement of speed available, m/s is optimal for orbital speeds, but not as helpful for aerial flight or wheeled vehicles.

Air intakes, sensor nose cone and atmospheric variometer could display speed in knots and mach number while inside an atmosphere and rover wheels could have a speedometer that displays current ground speed in km/h or mph (last recorded ground speed if during a jump) when they're in use by right-clicking them.

Edited by Jack Mcslay
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I’m not sure I agree with this. Speed is pretty much irrelevant for a rover (unless doing some personal speed challenge) and same for planes really (unless it’s a space plane then m/s is important again). I think it could just serve to confuse many players without  having any real purpose (game wise) other than for personal amusement.

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1 hour ago, FruitGoose said:

I’m not sure I agree with this. Speed is pretty much irrelevant for a rover (unless doing some personal speed challenge) and same for planes really (unless it’s a space plane then m/s is important again). I think it could just serve to confuse many players without  having any real purpose (game wise) other than for personal amusement.

Adequate speed units are crucial in determining travel time. When I'm driving to a refueling station and it says '38km' it's far easier to estimate how long I'm going to take to arrive if the speedometer says '110km/h' as opposed to '30,6m/s' likewise with knots, as long as it's appropriately adjusted for each body.

And mach number can be useful for demanding SSTOs, which can overheat and explode if moving too fast as the mach number is the most straightforward way to predict when your aircraft will start overheating

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4 hours ago, Jack Mcslay said:

Adequate speed units are crucial in determining travel time. When I'm driving to a refueling station and it says '38km' it's far easier to estimate how long I'm going to take to arrive if the speedometer says '110km/h' as opposed to '30,6m/s' likewise with knots, as long as it's appropriately adjusted for each body.

And mach number can be useful for demanding SSTOs, which can overheat and explode if moving too fast as the mach number is the most straightforward way to predict when your aircraft will start overheating

I agree with the Mach number although in KSP it’s set around 300 m/s I believe.

Regarding the first point, where in the game would you need that information though? For things like transferring to planets, the game tells you (even by creating a node and it telling you the time till you reach the node). I can only think of driving rovers or boats or something.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just can’t think of anywhere I personally would use it.

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KSP has a way to track Mach number. Go into the Debug menu, go to Physics ->Aero, and click "Show Aero GUI"

Then it will show an AeroGUI window that looks like this: [Left side of the screen, ignore the Mechjeb windows]

sQe0EVi.png

It gives a bunch of useful information.

Edited by camacju
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A knot is a nautical mile per hour.
The nautical mile is one angular minute of the average Earth sphere.

On the Earth knots and nautical miles make sense to easily convert coordinates and distances.

On Kerbin the Earth miles and knots are useless, while the Kerbin angular minute would give another mile and another knot.
As Kerbin radius = 600 km, so its nm ~= 1852 / 6371 * 600 ~= 174 m.

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On 4/24/2021 at 2:12 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

I'm fine with km/h but it's a hard pass from me on imperial units. KSP should remain entirely with the international scientific language, aka the metric system.

I agree, it’s ‘rocket science’, it should be in metric. Most of the world uses it, including scientists and medical professionals in the U.S. Pretty much only the U.S. and possessions use imperial units.

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