The Kerbal Space Agency - Flight Tracker v3 w/Better ground plots, telemetry, navigation & more!

[Drew Kerman]

Capt Desson has revealed a new hobby of his, building and launching small-scale rockets. He's not an engineer by trade, but has always been naturally gifted in building and fixing things so he decided to give rockets a try. We've agreed to keep track of his exploits here in this flight log. Who knows? Maybe something more than just fun will come out of this someday...

Although disappointed by the results of his last attempt at a two-stage rocket, Desson has forged on with some new ideas he hopes will improve the flight characteristics. For one, he's upped the thrust a bit. Second, he's angling the fins so the rocket spins up after launch and is assisted in staying stable, given that it has no control surfaces. Finally, the launch stand has been tipped a few degrees east to help guide the rocket along a proper flight path. He's now also been officially sponsored by Umbra Space Industries, makers of the rocket parts, to get some working designs the public can make use of.

[Drew Kerman]

After Du-SCAN completed its biome map of Duna the mission scientists were able to confirm that Duna I had explored the upper reaches of all distinct biomes on the planet. Rather than swoop in lower for more observations however it was decided that we would first use our high orbit for a cheap transfer to Ike, Duna's dark and abnormally-large satellite. The craft was established into a highly elliptical polar orbit to allow studies both near and far over the entire moon over a short period of time. However the stay over Ike was extended well past original expectations when KSA operations were suspended for 4 months. Finally after 6 months, 895 orbits and 25,77,829km traveled around Ike, we brought Duna I back to Duna - but our time around Ike was well-spent and gathered copious amounts of data and even discovered a new moon!

Read More

[Drew Kerman]

[URL="http://www.kerbalspace.agency/Flights/body.asp?db=bodies&body=Kerbol-System"]Click here to visit the Flight Tracker[/URL]

Version 3.0 brings the awesome:

Fixes:

[LIST]
[*][B]Ground plots now handle map edges properly[/B] - a much nicer algorithm now cuts off lines at the edge of the map in all instances before they wrap across to the other side and doesn't care if the craft is moving in a prograde or retrograde orbit
[*][B]Time synched between JS and VBscript[/B] - the methods used to get the time elapsed from a certain date in javascript and vbscript can return results that differ by as much as 20-30 seconds. The offset is now recorded on page load and applied throughout all operations involving calculated elapsed time, favoring the result given by vbscript's dateDiff()
[*][B]Current event always recognized[/B] - it is now properly recognized when coming from a past event to an event from the Next Event(s) list (ut query string included in the URL) whether this event is in fact the [I]current[/I] event (the event you would get if you removed ut from the URL). This is important as before the flight tracker assumed any inclusion of ut in the URL was indication of viewing an event that occurred in the past
[/LIST]
Changes:

[LIST]
[*][B]Greater timer accuracy and monitoring[/B] - using a method proposed online the code no longer uses setInterval() for timed callbacks but instead calls itself with setTimeout() after it has processed and monitors the time it took to carry out its operations and when it needs to call itself again to remain on time with whatever interval it is set for. This not only keeps things accurate when users are viewing the page, but if they tab off and the page's CPU priority is reduced, when they come back they will see things catch up to the current time
[*][B]Quick event jumping[/B] - The [<]Prev and Next[>] buttons that only went forward/backward a single event at a time have been replaced with drop-down list boxes that contain the [I]entire[/I] history of the vessel to make it easier to go back in time for vessels that have been in operation for a while. Future-planned events and maneuvers are still implemented when available in the Next Event(s) drop-down list and shown via tooltip or if on a touchscreen via an alert. Any future-planned event is shown only when viewing the current event for that time, and not any past events
[*][B]Asynchronous orbital data calculation[/B] - Orbital data calculation is now wrapped in an inline function and batch-called every millisecond instead of run as a single loop. This takes slightly longer for large orbits but has the benefits of no longer locking up the browser entirely waiting for it to complete, shows a snazzy loading bar and makes it feasible to expose the option to render all 3 orbits for craft with very long (100,000s+) orbital periods
[/LIST]
Addition:

[LIST]
[*][B]Real-time video and telemetry streaming[/B] - this deprecates the original launch telemetry functionality that auto-updated the entire page every 15s with new data (still viewable on older craft). Now, the page stays loaded and JQuery updates telemetry data, which is initially read from a database that contains values for a set interval (0.5s, 1s, 5s, whatever) and then linear interpolation fills in the rest to be played back at up to 30FPS. FPS throttling allows the page to lower the FPS if it detects the launch time is falling behind real time, keeping older devices in sync during live launch streams. Video can be created to load at any point before the launch and play through to any point during the launch and supports all three major HTML5 formats. Video captions are supplied for devices that cannot play video inline. Mobile/tablet users are warned of the video size they will need to download. Once a launch occurs it can be viewed again in archive mode that allows the ability to seek through the telemetry data. A post-launch survey collects user data and feedback to help improve the system. During a live launch the main twitter timeline will be displayed so tweets pushed out during the launch are shown (within 30s) and users can interact directly through the widget
[*][B]Sketchfab model viewer support[/B] - unfortunately this is a very premature feature as the Sketchfab KSP exporter remains in beta status at the time of this release and is not capable of handling modded craft files very well. Where avaiable, the Sketchfab icon will appear over the craft description box and allow the user to switch between the 2D image/description and the 3D model viewer. The craft model can also change from event to event as the craft changes configuration
[*][B]Dynamic pre-launch map[/B] - the event prior to launch telemetry can now hold a dynamic map that shows the location of the launch site as well as basic information about it
[/LIST]

There are also 40 other minor fixes/changes/additions in the [URL="https://github.com/Gaiiden/FlightTracker/blob/master/README.md"]complete change log[/URL].

Enjoy!

[Snark]

Locked at OP's request.