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How to avoid the speed gauge from switching authomatically from surface to orbit?


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i have a spaceplane in the atmosphere of urlum. I am sending it to orbit. During ascent, I must hold prograde; drag increases a lot even for minor deviations. even doing my best by hand, i lose 20% more.

Then at some random point I get high enough, and the game randomly decides it should use space as reference. So it switches from surface speed to orbit speed.

THe problem with this is that urlum rotates at 400 m/s at the equator. Suddenly my speed gets 400 m/s added in the horizontal direction. This moves my prograde vector by 10-20 degrees. And the plane tries to realign with it, faster than I can manually stop it. By the time this happens, there is still enough atmosphere that the plane, now grossly misaligned with the airflow, flips and starts spinning randomly in the atmosphere, and before I can get control back, it's lost all its speed.

Is there some way I can tell the game that if I wanted to switch the frame of reference, I am perfectly capable of clicking on the speed display myself, thank you so much?

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7 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

and before I can get control back, it's lost all its speed.

Yeah the switching navball is a pain sometimes, a small tip when the switch happens you can tap once F to quickly clear/reset the SAS holding without disabling/enabling SAS when the switch happens to minimize some loss.

I can't remember but at the very start while you are ascending if you manually switch to orbit speed and then back to surface will it still change itself or it will keep the choice you made earlier, 

probably it will still change itself, been a while, just started my new career, i am so rusty.

Edited by Serenity
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17 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Then at some random point I get high enough, and the game randomly decides it should use space as reference. So it switches from surface speed to orbit speed.

It's not random, there's a setting for it.  Two settings, actually...  navballSwitchRadiusMult and navballSwitchRadiusMultLow.  The first sets when the NavBall switches when ascending, and the second when descending.  The units are in planet radii.  Urlum does not include these settings in its config, but since it uses a Jool template, it inherits Jool's settings.  These settings are, navballSwitchRadiusMult = 0.06 and navballSwitchRadiusMultLow = 0.055.  (In fact, all the stock celestial bodies use these same settings.)  Since Urlum has a radius if 2177000 meters, the NavBall switches when ascending at an altitude of 2177000 * 0.06 = 130620 meters.  If you want the switch to take place at some other altitude, you need to give Urlum a custom setting rather than use the default.  For instance, say you want the switch to take place at the top of the atmosphere.  The height of Urlum's atmosphere is 325000 meters, so in this case you want to set navballSwitchRadiusMult = 325000 / 2177000 = 0.149288.  The following patch should do it:

@Kopernicus:AFTER[OPM]
{
	@Body[Urlum]
	{
		@Properties
		{
			navballSwitchRadiusMult = 0.149288
		{
	}
}

If you want to change other bodies, you'd need to apply a similar patch.

P.S.  I don't know how to make it not switch at all (forcing you to do so manually).

Edited by OhioBob
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6 hours ago, OhioBob said:

It's not random, there's a setting for it.  Two settings, actually...  navballSwitchRadiusMult and navballSwitchRadiusMultLow.  The first sets when the NavBall switches when ascending, and the second when descending.  The units are in planet radii.  Urlum does not include these settings in its config, but since it uses a Jool template, it inherits Jool's settings.  These settings are, navballSwitchRadiusMult = 0.06 and navballSwitchRadiusMultLow = 0.055.  (In fact, all the stock celestial bodies use these same settings.)  Since Urlum has a radius if 2177000 meters, the NavBall switches when ascending at an altitude of 2177000 * 0.06 = 130620 meters.  If you want the switch to take place at some other altitude, you need to give Urlum a custom setting rather than use the default.  For instance, say you want the switch to take place at the top of the atmosphere.  The height of Urlum's atmosphere is 325000 meters, so in this case you want to set navballSwitchRadiusMult = 325000 / 2177000 = 0.149288.  The following patch should do it:

@Kopernicus:AFTER[OPM]
{
	@Body[Urlum]
	{
		@Properties
		{
			navballSwitchRadiusMult = 0.149288
		{
	}
}

If you want to change other bodies, you'd need to apply a similar patch.

P.S.  I don't know how to make it not switch at all (forcing you to do so manually).

nice to know there is a fixed value, always, for every CB.

my manual solution was, after seeing a couple of times that the switch always happened around 130 km, to switch sas from hold prograde to hold position at 129 km. knowing I can count on the value being always the same, i can do it other times too, with minimal losses

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