blakemw

Depending on how early you mean.... I actually usually do get LV-N before going to Duna. Often you can pick it up with a test contract, so if "early" is 160 science nodes and some 300, then my favored stack looks exactly like this: https://kerbalx.com/blakemw/LV-N-Lander-with-Launcher (Twin-Boar w/ solids, Skipper, LV-N). The Twin-Boar gets the thing mostly into orbit, the Skipper handles the remaining and does the ejection burn maybe some capture burn too. The LV-N lander is for hopping all over Ike and finally hitting a couple of biomes on Duna before going home. With even lower tech, well I don't see why you would, there is plenty of science from Mun/Minmus to unlock the good 160/300 parts and Gilly is also an easy target. But basically Skipper w/4xThumper -> Poodle -> Terrier. Something like that should be enough to put 2 Kerbals on Ike and Duna and bring them home. I wouldn't want to do it without the 2.5m parts though of course anything is possible. Duna requires less dV to land on than the Mun does. Coming home then requires about 2000m/s from the surface of Duna, more or less depending on streamlining and TWR.

Yep, they do create a significant amount of drag. Of course that's often not a serious issue: when you DO need max deflection is probably at low speeds (unless your goal is to undergo midair RUD) and drag is basically nothing at low speeds. An example of when I like high deflection is when I'm using steerable tail fins to correct a rocket's trajectory in case of emergency (i.e. playing hard career, no reverts): ideally the rocket is following an ideal gravity turn and so the fins have zero angle of attack, but if it the rocket is tipping too slowly or too fast it might need to be rather forcefully corrected and then maximum leverage is good drag be damned - it's only for emergency anyway and otherwise less drag and less weight is all good. Another example is spaceplanes with big engines and small wings which might need a large amount of pitch to successfully not go off the end of the runway and into the ocean (basically using the engines to help counteract gravity!), but once they get up to supersonic speeds the little wings are providing enough lift and the control surfaces need virtually no deflection. The final example is when I'm flying planes on that acursed planet Duna because apparently I'm masochistic, when landing a plane on Duna and getting it to stay on the ground both more downforce and more drag is highly desirable, so maximum deflection is only good (and in fact when I've looked out the window of airliners, the spoilers they deploy on landing seem to have a very high deflection, even more than you can get in KSP with any part).

Okay there are basically three engines worth mentioning in MH: Wolfhound: A very OP vacuum engine, it is somewhere between a LV-N and a Skipper in its performance, almost as heavy as a LV-N (2.5t), but with much more thrust (375kN) and much less ISP (412), but still much more ISP than other vac engines, it is also extremely cheap (1680). It essentially make the Poodle totally redundant (good riddance I say) and the Skipper largely redundant as a second stage engine. Basically with the Wolfhound you wont use the Poodle anymore and you will use the Skipper less. You might also use it when once you would've used several LV-N's, but of course, an LV-N still gets much more deltaV out of a given amount of fuel so you could say it competes with the LV-N but doesn't replace it. The Wolfhound is fairly low powered for a 2.5m engine and is very fat, so if you don't like clipping it's hard to fit a bunch of them to an engine plate (i.e. it has a poor power to cross section ratio). It's super draggy but that only matters when it's not shrouded (i.e. if you use it as a Spaceplane engine, it'll produce a notable amount of drag, but it wont matter as a second stage in a serial staged rocket because it's shrouded). Next up is the Skiff, which is basically a straight-up upgrade to the Reliant or Swivel (technically it's a 2.5m engine, but it's too weak for a 2.5m stack and the actual nozzle is quite narrow and it comes in a 1.25m variant, it's good for bundling on engine plates). It's lighter (1t), more powerful (300kN) has better ISP (330) and barely any more expensive (1500 funds). But it's a high tech engine, so you'll still use the Swivel or Reliant before you've unlocked the Skiff. I never used to use Reliant/Swivel anyway once I had higher tech so I don't mind the Skiff. It doesn't exactly replace any engines I would use: except maybe Aerospike or Vector, even then it has normal impact tolerance (6m/s) so doesn't directly compete in that regard with other small high tech engines. Finally is the Cub, which is a Vernier engine which unlike every other radially mounted engine doesn't have a significant ISP penalty. It only produces 40kN of thrust, but with an ISP of 320 (270 ASL) - it weighs the same as two Puffs and produces the same thrust as two Puffs, but with +70 ISP. It is horribly expensive per unit of thrust (costing 1000 funds) so unlike the previous two engines it's not exactly a "better and cheaper" type deal but if you need a small-medium vernier engine you wont feel bad paying for it. Then there are a bunch of engines which are either equivalent to or worse than vanilla engines in their performance but do tend to look more realistic. Naturally they are slightly different sizes and stuff (except the Kodiak which is exactly the same in every way to the Reliant, except it has very slightly worse ISP, is slightly draggier, has a worse alternator and is slightly more expensive - it's better than a Reliant in literally no ways though not so much worse you'd feel bad using it if you like the looks). The other engines at least have different thrust levels or sizes or something, like the Cheetah basically has the weight, power and performance of two Terriers while being a little more expensive than two Terriers and targetting the 1.8m stack size (though it has a variant allowing it to be used in a 1.25m stack). Notably there are NO good launch engines added (except some 1.8m options which on-par with vanilla engines and fit a 1.8m stack), the Twin-Boar remains the cost-champion, and the Mammth/Vector the power champions. The Skiff is usable as a launch engine but has fairly poor ASL ISP (265). The Mastodon is a 2.5m launch engine which is just embarrassingly bad in every way, its ISP is crap, power density is poor, it is as expensive per unit of thrust as a Vector (!!!!!!!!!!), there's just no reason you'd use it in career - I could go on about how bad it is, it costs more than fully fueled Twin-Boar, while having worse ISP (!!!!!) and much less thrust - okay it has a crappy alternator and more gimbal, but those are hardly reasons to use it when you can get much more power for much less funds with other engines.

How a free return works is you start with a transfer orbit with an apogee higher than the moon's orbit (by maybe 20-30%) - this will get to the moon's orbit significantly faster than a hohmann transfer - then you do a gravity assist at the moon that lowers the orbit so that perigee intersects the Earth's atmosphere - having the right amount of surplus velocity when encountering the moon for the moon's gravity to bend is key, if you have too much surplus velocity it'll bend it into a retrograde orbit rather than simply lowering the orbit. Getting a low perilune is a matter of precise timing, aka tweaking the manoeuvre node for a while. I can't comment on the heat shield thing except that in RSS/RO it's hard to make everything work as it should, I think I just ended up turning down reentry heating a bit in the difficulty settings.

Fun fact: "Swept wings" is a tailfin (according to its placement in the data) which is why it has number more consistent with tail fins. Though since it's fixed it should use L/M ratio of 10. There's one other interesting property: that is "max deflection", when combined with the control surface area it determines the amount of leverage the winglet/elevon can apply. Cost is also a useful property for career. The BigS wing and strake are the most OP wings because they have the same lift and drag as other wings of the same weight, but they have integrated fuel storage. But they're also really expensive. In actual flight testing all wings of the same weight perform within half a percent of each other in terms of life and drag (this is curious because in the data there are actually some drag parameters which are set differently, but they must be ignored but the aero model).

Exactly, NTR exhaust is actually a bit cooler than that of typical chemical rockets (which is how the reactor doesn't melt) and ALL of the ISP advantage comes from using low molecular weight propellant and not needing a high molecular weight oxidizer to make it hot. Hydrogen is the only good NTR propellant. Helium, Ammonia and Methane can work poorly but still slightly better ISP than LH/Ox rocket. Pretty much anything else is going to be worse than a good chemical rocket because the exhaust is cooler, with the only advantage of a NTR being that it can actually heat up certain kinds of propellants (i.e. plain water or nitrogen), this is a potential ISRU advantage but not an ISP advantage. There might be some theoretical NTR designs that could get better performance out of plain water than a LH/Ox engine, but the problem always is that using a high molecular weight propellant AND having high ISP means it's going to be reactor-meltingly hot. Any design that CAN get that hot would likely require extremely specialized propellant to not just explode or fizzle.

Exactly, a combination of extreme TWR and streamlining. But you only need that TWR for like the first 20 seconds to get it moving fast. This initial kick can be provided cheaply with lots and lots of hammers (or thumpers), you can easily get a TWR of like 3.0 this way, it's wasteful to use LF engines to get a high TWR but with solids the nozzle isn't the expensive part, it's the solid fuel, so burning lots of solid fuel really fast is just fine. I sometimes actually use designs along these lines, like starting with a Twin-Boar core with a TWR of 1.0, then I add Hammers or Thumpers until the thing has a launchpad TWR of like 2.5. It's very economical, doing so can increase the cost of the rocket by like 20%, but increase the payload by like 50%. Using solids to give a good hard kick off the pad is great.

This is an example of a rocket which can do 2800m/s to orbit: I put it in orbit with 1544m/s leftover, a dV to orbit of about 2760m/s. Heating actually becomes the most major problem at this point, turn off heating and it can do like 2600m/s.

It depends a lot on the launch TWR and the ASL vs Vac ISP of your engines. Like for example the Swivel has rather bad ASL ISP vs Vac ISP, a reasonable Swivel rocket can easily take 3600m/s to get into orbit just because it makes significantly worse use of fuel when low in the atmosphere. This is not saying whether or not the Swivel is bad as a launch engine (though it is), just that a large difference between ASL and Vac performance strongly distorts the dV to orbit which is measured in Vac dV. In contrast, an engine like the Twin-Boar has a practically flat ISP curve, meaning it almost makes equally good use of fuel at all altitudes. The next factor is launchpad TWR. A rocket with a TWR of 2.0 will require about 200-300m/s less than a rocket with a TWR of 1.2 - again this isn't to say it's better to have a higher TWR, it requires going very engine-heavy, but it does result in lower dV to orbit numbers (not necessarily lower cost per kg to orbit though). The cheapest way to get a high launchpad TWR is adding small SRBs like Hammer or Thumper, and actually happens to be pretty economical. Next up is streamlining, which is very important if you're going to make good use of a higher TWR. Every m/s lost to aerodynamic drag is another m/s to orbit. Streamlining is usually a fair investment, though in challenges to launch mass as cheaply as possible streamlining usually isn't used because it's cheaper to buy more boosters than to add more streamlining parts. But if you want a consistently low dV to orbit, then streamlining is great. It should be noted that popping the fairing and thus ditching that weight mid-ascent usually isn't properly accounted for by dV estimators so fairings are another distortion factor. Finally is trajectory, which should simply be "as horizontal as possible, without getting trapped in the atmosphere", generally a gravity turn that involves pitching over right after launch and leveling out somewhere around 30000m. If you optimize for all of these factors you can get into orbit for about 2800m/s! In practice though, the most economical rockets tend to do it for between 3050-3300m/s if using solids to give a kick off the pad, or around 3300-3400m/s if using liquid only.

It's possible to click on an antenna and set it to "allow partial", this allows the transmission to be made regardless of how little EC storage there is, even with absolutely minimal EC production you can just timewarp a few hours/days to complete the transmission.

The numbers I found experimentally for Heat Shields is that for normal usage you only need ablator for aerobraking velocities of over 5500m/s. If playing sensibly it's quite hard to be going this fast when hitting any body other than Jool, and if you're being sensible you'd just get a gravity assist from Tylo. When returning from Moho or Jool to Kerbin, craft tend to be going almost this fast so having ablator can be good security but shouldn't be essential. But if using mods then it's possible that ablator is more important. But mods can allow recharging ablator, most trivially is to use hyperedit to cheat more ablator in, but I seem to recall there are 1 or 2 mods that actually have a proper way to recharge ablator.

Aerobraking efficiency has much to do with how much you want to game the KSP aero/heating model, most notably the fact that vessels are transparent to drag when it comes to surface attached stuff. Simply packing in surface attached stuff (into a location fully protected from heat!) is by far the most effective way to shift the center of pressure, for example when I don't feel like being realistic I just shove lots of radiators into a service bay, for drag-on-demand. Another fun fact is that nozzle exhaust only needs a pinhole to pass through, so you can essentially make heat-shielded engines by overlapping heat shields in a way that leaves a pinhole for the exhaust. Not only that but if you want to to even crazier with the exploiting, engine exhaust is only blocked by the OUTSIDE of a part, if you place an engine (like a vector) so that its nozzle is INSIDE a heat shield its exhaust can still exit through the heatshield: the result, a heat shielded engine that is still able to fire! Suffice to say this technique is stupidly good for aerobraking. So in KSP it's easy enough to make fantastically well shielded craft, which go in the direction you want, and even with discretionary drag if you like so you can launch them as SSTO from Kerbin/Laythe. Doing so in a way that is realistic is another matter entirely though one can try to rationalize things likes engines offset inside heat shields, since real craft have had holes in heat shields for thrusters.

My very simple philosophy for Tylo, Eve and other high gravity worlds is that you're almost always better off with more thrust. When dealing with microgravity ditching weight as you go along is very effective at extending deltaV, but this works terribly in a strong gravity field if you're ditching engines as you go along. If you can work out a way to ditch empty tanks, that's fine, but often you're better off keeping the engines to mantain a higher thrust. Actually in practice the best thing to do tends to be to just use a powerful engine, like instead of doing asparagus stage with 5 aerospikes (900kN, decreasing), instead you just have a single Vector and maintain that 1000kN of thrust at all stages. On that evil planet Eve, a single-vector design beats the pants off of aerospike asparagus (if the vessel is streamlined enough to be able to largely ignore the atmosphere), it's like, half or as third as heavy for the same payload to orbit. Even on Kerbin, often it's better to keep engines than to ditch them. Also I managed to find a pretty concrete answer to how much TWR an ascent stage should have to minimize overall lander weight. The Apollo Lunar Ascent Module had a TWR (local lunar gravity) of 2.12, and I bet that was seriously number-crunched. This number ought to be around an optimal for minimizing gravity drag while not carrying too much weight of engine and it should be reasonably independent of actual gravity strength. It comes pretty close to the middle of my experience guestimate of 1.8 to 2.5. (But fun fact is the deltaV from Lunar surface to Lunar orbit is about the same as from Tylo surface to Tylo orbit: 1870 vs 2400 or so).

Spread Angle (when used in symmetry) actually increases parachute efficiency, 2 radial chutes with max spread angle are about as effective a 3 with 0 spread angle. If you're using radial chutes it's a free optimization to max it.

One huge caveat is while it's possible to get by with a TWR of 1.2 on Tylo, you're going to get some pretty horrendous gravity losses on the descent and ascent and you DO NOT want those gravity losses on Tylo! Now on *Kerbin* we tolerate those gravity losses because we don't have to launch the fuel to Kerbin's surface! The fuel you are burning at the launch pad has been delivered through a grand total deltaV of 0m/s, fuel is cheap at the launch pad. That's why we're even happy to use crappy, heavy low ISP solid fuel, because we didn't have to lift it anywhere. Now, if on Kerbin we want to build the lightest rocket to launch a given tonnage (rather than the cheapest rocket), we actually go for a much higher TWR, probably at least as high as 2.0 and maybe even higher (and we use streamlining so we can ignore the atmosphere). This eliminates a great deal of gravity losses and the rocket will consume significantly less fuel - maybe half as much. It will be more expensive because it is engine heavy and engines are expensive, but it'll be very much lighter. So returning to Tylo, in this case we've had to deliver the lander to *frigging Tylo*, through a deltaV of oh, 6000m/s. We had to deliver the fuel to frigging Tylo orbit, the fuel for ascent further had to be delivered to friggin Tylo's surface. We're going to make that lander as light as we can! And that means reducing fuel tonnage by going engine-rich and largely eliminating gravity losses. There is more scope for low TWR when launching from Tylo using fuel gathered using ISRU on the surface, sure in that case the fuel isn't being lifted from anywhere, but in particular, when using orbital fuel you'd want a TWR at touchdown/liftoff in the range of 1.8-2.5. This is actually true whether it's a single stage or a separate ascent stage.

One of my hobbies is making Tylo Hoppers: A ship capable of landing on Tylo, refueling using onboard ISRU, taking off again and landing again. In other words the tanks have enough fuel to do an ascent and descent without refueling in orbit. This is borderline possible with chemical fuel for a rocket consisting of a vector engine and large amounts of fuel, so if you don't need single-stage-to-orbit-and-back capabilities you actually have a fair amount of margin and you're not completely crazy wanting SSTOAB capabilities. For my SSTOAB designs I do not use LV-N's, I mainly use Vectors and just lots of LF/Ox, maybe an Aerospike or Poodle for when most the fuel mass has been burned off. Since you need pretty extreme deltaV the key is performing a good constant altitude burn. You don't need much TWR when landing, about 1.8 is enough. With my designs, they take about 2600m/s to get into orbit when fully laden, and about 2400m/s to land from orbit, when most the fuel has been burned off. If I were to use a mostly LV-N powered design I'd probably still have LF/Ox engines for the landing and takeoff to minimize the weight of LV-Ns, they can still perform most the of the ascent and descent burns (maybe TWR of 0.4-0.5 on LV-N's, about 2.0 for the LF/Ox engines) but more deltaV would definitely be required since the drymass is much, much higher when using LV-N's. Actually LV-N's are pretty horrendous when you need TWR so I'd be tempted to not use them at all, and just ramp up the fuel haulage to tylo orbit, I assume it's coming from Pol or Bop and big tankers can be landed there. I haven't tried making the orbital refueling version, which is obviously different because you can't consume propellant in quite such volumes, but if SSTOAB is doable SSTSAB should be too. EDIT: Just tried a SSTSAB, using a Vector LF/Ox design: dV in orbit when fully fueled: 5399m/s w/ Tylo Surface TWR of 1.17 dV on surface: 2851m/s (2548m/s used for descent) dV in orbit after ascent: 527m/s (2324m/s used for ascent) I felt it had too much deltaV (my feeling was that 5000m/s would be enough) and was gratified to have quite a bit leftover once in orbit. The trick really is a Vector can do it easily if the fuel fraction is really high.

Fair enough, if the vessel is long enough thrusters become more mass-efficient, but even then mainly only if you can discount the propellant consumption. Vernors consume ~0.92 units of LF/Ox per s, and each unit of LF or Ox weighs 5kg, so using 1 thruster for 45s would be 0.21t of propellant consumed, with maximum rotation rate (using both pitch and yaw as SAS modes tend to) 4 thrusters would fire basically the whole time: about 0.84t of propellant, with an economizing strategy it'd be something like 0.21t consumed, though the rotation would be a lot slower. Either way you can *very* quickly afford the mass for more 2.5m reaction wheels - you could probably add 4 more 2.5m reaction wheels for the mass the Vernors consumed and they'd rotate the vessel in the same 45s. I'm aware that there are some cases it makes sense to use Vernors, like I sometimes use them on my heavy landers on the top of booms to resist flipping over on a bad landing (they'll only burn for a few seconds), and they can be mass-efficient on Falcon 9 style boostback boosters since they are only used very briefly. But for purposes like a space station reaction wheels are just insanely powerful and vernors are almost never mass-efficient - for almost any station 4 large reaction wheels is between adequate and overkill and they are about the same weight as a complete set of vernors and don't consume propellant (and also don't have problems with asymmetrical placement or SAS being silly and burning opposing thrusters simultaneously).

Nah, reaction wheels are more powerful pound-for-pound. But don't take my word for it, try it out in game. Make a simple vessel, let's say a big fuel tank with a token probe core. Copy the vessel and couple them. On one of them add 4x Large Reaction Wheels (0.2t each). On the other add 10 Vernor thrusters - 4 for pitch, 4 for yaw, 2 for roll. Both setups involve 0.8t of reaction control hardware. Then cheat the setup into orbit, decouple the two vessels and compare in terms of rotation speed. What you should find is that the one with Reaction Wheels can do a 180 slightly faster. This is despite not using propellant. Reaction wheels are more bulky but they're more powerful. Okay, technically, if you only need one of yaw, pitch or roll, and don't need the others, then RCS thrusters might be able to beat reaction wheels (nor including propellant) since reaction wheels can't be dedicated to one axis of rotation - actually RCS can even allow rotating in only one direction (but how to slow down other than time warp abuse?). But in general reaction wheels are OP and beat the pants off RCS.

The make good cores for certain kinds of things, especially the shorter ones. Big landers, bases and such. Also if you have a payload for a 5m fairing, they can make pretty good boosters. It might involve a little clipping but you can pack 3-4 Twin-Boars into a 5m engine plate. Nice for big SSTO, my favorite kind of rocket. With rotation, the closer something is to a sphere the easier the time reaction wheels have rotating it, so the big dense tanks are actually going to be easiest to rotate (especially the one which is as tall as it is wide). You can just add like 8x 2.5m reaction wheels, that's what I use to rotate Class E asteroids.

Structural tube seems to have drag issues. So sadly, if you want to use structural tube you should put it in a fairing or it'll cause massive amounts of drag. edit: To elaborate. Sometimes the game won't recognize the ends of structural tube as being connected, and so treats it as a draggy end (this is probably when the game, for reasons known only to itself, decides to connect the tube using its inner node rather than outer node). So in some cases merely using structural tube can result in excessive drag. But you might be okay using them as pure structural components. However AFAICT structural tube NEVER shields its content from drag so they are no kind of substitute for a fairing or cargo/service bay. If you're using the inner nodes of the tube and care at all about drag, you'll be needing to put the whole thing inside a fairing.

Everyone should be familiar with real life examples where you get an approximation that won't be accurate. Say you're using Google Maps and want directions from A to B, Google Maps will give you an estimated travel time and distance - the distance is actually precisely correct, but the travel time is based on some assumptions. Or if you're driving a modern electric car it'll give you an estimated range, although the driver will know that the estimated range isn't actually how far they can drive because it depends on speed, whether you're going uphill or downhill and so on, but it's still a really useful guide. DeltaV is actually a precise number because it's produced by an equation - I mean yeah, atmosphere messes with the first 500m/s or so, but not by a very large amount, you might lose like 50m/s to the lower atmospheric efficiency, it's really not much. But how far that deltaV will actually take you, well that depends on how you use it. Some will be lost to aero drag, gravity drag and so on, you can massively multiply it via gravity assists, or waste it doing radial burns. It's not complicated. There's an exact number produced by a formula, deltaV, and then there is how far it'll take you which depends on how you use it. Lots of parallels in real life, should be perfectly intuitive to most people.

The difference between Vac and atmospheric DeltaV is *for the most part* inconsequential. In fact usually deltaV charts just give the vacuum deltaV requirements even for launch from places like Kerbin and Eve, and make certain sensible assumptions about what engines people are using, like these dV numbers would be wildly wrong if you tried to use vacuum engines (in fact 3400m/s is quite wrong for Swivel, due to the Swivels abysmal ASL performance), and are bit exaggerated if you're using ASL engines with a flat ISP curve, but they are good enough as a guide. What's more by the time you're over 10km on Kerbin it is basically a vacuum for ISP purposes. OTOH atmospheric TWR is more important than Vac TWR because it's what determines if your rocket can get off the launchpad. It's not a huge deal having only the Vac TWR though because it's a super simple calculation to adjust for, you can just subtract 5% for good launch engines, up to 20% for bad launch (but still launch-capable) engines and be close enough for purposes of getting off the pad.

The new engines are a bit of a mixed bag. The Wolfhound is ridiculously OP - one of those cheaper, thrustier, more efficient type deals. The Cub is significantly better than other radial engines, but is also much more expensive. The Skiff is a little bit better than low-tier original engines: like if you compare Skiff and Skipper/Reliant, the Skiff rocks. It's pretty comparable to high-tier engines. Fairly cheap. The Cheetah is exactly the same as original engines except a little pricier. For if you want two terriers worth of thrust but don't want two terriers. The Bobcat is comparable to original engines, it produces ASL thrust quite cost-effectively and is a different power - for if you want 400kN rather than 240 or 650. The Mastodon has one of those "worse and more expensive" deals going on. It's okay in Sandbox because who cares, but a frugal career player would probably use other engines instead. The Kodiak has identical stats to the Reliant, except is more expensive. In practice, it produces ever so slightly (around 0.5%) more thrust ASL, and it produces 2-5x as much drag which tidily negates all the thrust advantage and then some. The nice thing to say is the Reliant is a fantastically good engine (other than lack of Gimbal) so even though Kodiak is worse than Reliant and so there's literally no reason to use it, it's still better than many other engines.

What irks me most of all, is in the training missions often you get this kind of helpful readout added into the help boxes, like I think for landing on mun it gives you an easy to read vertical speed readout, perhaps true altitude. I can't remember exactly what. I do remember after doing the training mission I tried it in a normal game and was like "what? where is my readout?", so after a little googling I installed KER and never looked back.

I'm also strongly of the opinion that the game should have: DeltaV and TWR by stage both in the VAB (always) and in flight (after mission control upgrades). Should show VAC only, not ATM. Vertical Velocity as a digital readout not one of those analog logarithmic scale speed-o-meter things - it's hard to read. Horizontal Velocity - get rid of the analog thing for vertical velocity and the horizontal velocity could fit in the same space. True altitude over terrain and not only in certain IVA cockpits but as a digital readout. It can be a toggle like Navball mode. And I don't really insist on the vertical/horizontal speed things, it's just that since vertical speed is already taking up space in the UI it could be an easy to read digital readout instead. Speaking of toggles. When in Surface Mode, we tend to care about vertical velocity, horizontal velocity and true altitude over terrain, when in Orbit mode we tend to care about Periapsis, Apoapsis and altitude above sea level. I'm just saying, there's potential here. The altitude and vertical velocity thing could be transformable like the navball between showing stuff we care about when taking off/landing/flying, and stuff we care about when in space.