Lorion

Awesome post and a very comprehensive complement to my thread with similar issues regarding the flight UI. I can second all of this. Regarding the color manager in the VAB: I think the fields with the selected colors take up way too much space. They are about twice as high as the color fields in the agency color picker.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. Since the mentionend navball mockup is from me, I can elaborate on it a bit. For some more explanation see my original post I doubt that the 3D ship in the SAS control panel really adds any value for new players. I think it's safe to say that even in its current form the navigation UI is not self-explanatory for a completely new user who has never seen a navball before. So a tutorial which explains the UI is needed either way. And when a user understands the navball (which is essential for the game) he does not get any value from the 3D ship because the ship's orientation is already shown with the navball in a much better way. But then again, it's only a guess and you can't be sure unless you do a real UX test. The displays for speed and altitude where simply adopted from the devs' UI iteration at that time. (I did the mockup before EA launch and in the original thread you can see a screenshot of the devs' UI at that time on which I based my mockup) So I didn't change anything there. The bars were indeed mode indicators which were apparently ditched by the devs which is fine I guess. Unit size is (or was meant to be) the same like in the current UI. And while I agree that 6 digits may be a bit tight, that's what we also currently have in the game. The top 3 bars are the mode indicator for the entire nav panel. It is indeed related to the icon right below it which represents the current navigation mode (Navball, 2D horizon, docking). You know that it does something different, because it changes the whole appearance of the navigation panel. (see the 3 pictures for the 3 modes. I also explained it in the original post.) The 2 icons beneath it are simple status icons (e.g. radio strength and heat warning) I admittely didn't put much effort into. It's a mockup after all However meanwhile, I think that the 2nd mode with the 2D horzion and heading tape is not really needed... Good point with the distance between RCS and SAS button. Actually, I tried to design it more for ergonomics than visuals. (But still, I wanted it to not look like garbage and especially take less space which was and is one of the major concerns.) For example, I thought it makes sense to have the vertical speed scale on the same side of the ball as the speed display (and not on the opposite side like right now). Also I introduced the navball modes to only show the important stuff for the current situation. If you are interested: In another thread (with the intent to cleanup the current flight UI) I made a new suggestion with less radical changes to the navball appearance.

There are currently clearly much bigger and more important problems than those related to the UI (mainly performance & physics) but I still want to take the opportunity to share here my current issues with the flight UI. This is no stylistic overhaul suggestion (since I have my doubts that the developers will consider significant art style changes in the near future) but rather smaller things which are relatively easy to fix. A lot of the UI elements are not properly aligned: most elements have a margin to the screen edge (and it is also inconsistent) while some elements are put right at the border of the screen. Either stick everything to the screen edge or give every element a consistent marign. Also especially in the lower right corner there are a lot of unaligned elements which is quite unpleasant to the eye. See the following screenshot with added guidelines and colored margins: Addionally, the stage button is bit big in my opinion. Why not take some space of it to integrate that arrow button? The time warp and game view panels in the lower center are too cramped considering they are shown in two distinct panels. Add a small margin in between. The deltaV readout for the individual stages is too close to the stage number. Seperate them better by adding the unit and amybe also a small divider. As often criticized, the new navigational instruments take up a lot of screen space. Especially the new SAS controls panel is just unnecessarily large. If the devs don't want to take the KSP1 route with semi transparent buttons, I suggest a smaller bar with the most important buttons (lock, prograde, retrograde, maybe also maneuver node) while all the other rather rarely used buttons are hidden in a drawer only shown when the mouse hovers over the panel. (But of course it should also be able to be pinned and kept open). In addition to the most prominent buttons mentioned the main bar should also show the last used button from the extended list. With that, the current SAS direction is always visible and it's easy to quickly toggle between the main directions and one additional dynamic direction. The navball is also quite massive. Two things I suggest here: Remove the heading tape. It's unnecessary because you already get that information by the navball itself. (It is basically a 2D tape.) Use that new free space for other stuff which allows my second suggestion: Push the orbital info panel a bit into the navball panel to save even more space. Also it would be cool if users are allowed to reposition all elements freely to their liking. The following screen shows how I imagine the screen to look like if all these things are integrated

I also really like the mockup of @Xelo. What's good about it is that the velocity scales are on the same side of the ball (in contrast to the current ui iteration). So I thought I could refine it a little. This is what I've come up with: Some things to highlight here: There are 3 modes: good ol' navball, 2D horizon (for planes, rovers etc.) and a docking mode (shoutout to docking port alignment indicator mod). The modes will replace the main navigation instrument and the panel at the bottom with the small scales so that only the important stuff for the current situation is displayed. Used the old SAS options. I don't really like the new round menu and don't see its advantage. I guess the idea is to help understanding the ship's orientation but the navball is already showing it much better and it just takes up more space. Removed that big pesky throttle knob (like already suggested). Let users just click (and drag) in the scale. (A smaller knob at the side or center may also look not too bad.) I also added buttons for full and no throttle (because I always forget the keyboard shortcuts for it and it may not be so easy to get to 0% or 100% with mouse clicks, at least without dragging). The height scale has another mode to display the distance to target (useful for docking) Only one leading minus sign for the ETAs in the bottom. Use common abbreviation "LVL" instead "LEV" Takes a bit less space than the current ui iteration. If you also consider the SAS options this design is of course considerably smaller. However, you are losing a lot of those "transparent margins". Nice to have: Since the design is relatively balanced it would also look reasonable when centering it. (I think it makes a lot of sense to push it to the side but I heard that it is planned to offer a ksp1-like option) One idea I had (but not sure if it's really well thought out) was to allow dragging the navball and heading tape in the plane mode with the mouse. This would not effect the ship but allow a user to better understand the position of markers. Releasing the button will return the displays to the current ship orientation. This would be useful to search for mission markers.