"Heat budget" indicator

[Snark]

I would really like to have an easy way of telling what the overall "heat budget" of a craft is: i.e., is the craft as a whole overall gaining or losing heat, and how much?

This would be useful for any situation where I'm skating close to thermal limits and need to be able to correlate my actions with their effect on heating/cooling.

Examples:

1. I'm running a part that generates lots of heat, and want to know whether the radiators are keeping up with it-- e.g. do I need to back off the throttle on the nukes? How much do I need to back off the throttle?

2. I'm flying really close to the sun, and need to be careful of my ship orientation so as not to get fried. If I turn the ship this way or that way, how does it do?

Right now, the only way to tell is to watch the overheat bars and/or thermal overlay for a long time, which makes it awkward to control and hard to judge. ("Gee, is that yellowy orange getting a little yellower, or a little redder?")

Ideally, the solution would be one that's informative, but simple and unobtrusive. Here's my idea of how one might implement this:

It's a simple positive/negative vertical bar graph. When you're net gaining heat, the bar rises up from the central line and is red; when you're net losing heat, the bar extends downwards from the central line and is green (or something like that). It would be located over on the edge of the screen where it doesn't get in the way.

It's displayed only when the thermal overlay is turned on, or when any "overheat" bars are being displayed, or both. That way, players who really like it can force it to display (by turning on the thermal overlay), and players who consider it an annoying distraction can force it to stay off (by turning off overheat bars).

[nikokespprfan]

Or maybe a thing on the navball.

[Snark]

Or maybe a thing on the navball.

I'd be wary of tinkering with the navball-- that's where people live, I think the bar needs to be really high about adding any additional clutter to it. I would love to see a docking port alignment indicator added to the navball in stock, but other than that I think it's plenty complicated enough already.

Besides, the navball is about navigation, and heat budget has nothing to do with that. It's a diagnostic tool, not a navigational one. Having something off to the side, that doesn't get in people's faces and is automatically turned off when they turn off thermo diagnostic tools, seems cleaner to me.