Advanced Autopilot Idea

[Stevenator1]

Hello fellow Kerbonauts,

I had an idea to make a plugin, but I want to know if the community would like the idea, or find it usefull, before I dedicate hundreds of hours coding it.

The idea is a 'flight plan', or advanced autopilot of sorts. I have spent all day coming up with these ideas.

The idea spawned from the Ascent and landing autopilots of mechjeb. I want to make a deviation of autopilot that allows for custom user logic, allowing for completely computer controlled flights to the moon, etc.

Among other ideas, these are some of the actions and conditions that you could program into it:

Conditions

• 
  [li]Standard if/then loops (if altitude is greater than 70,000 cut boosters)[/li]
  [li]Instant if/then loops (will run whenever this condition is met, interrupting any current action[/li]
  [li]With the conditions of: altitude, speed, AP, PE, and all that other orbital information stuff; flight time, SoI change, fuel left in RCS or Fuel tanks, horizontal speed, etc.[/li]
  

Events

• 
  [li]Turn on or off thrusters by name.[/li]
  [li]Aim at direction (with options to just aim in that direction and stop controlling, or STAY aimed in that direction)[/li]
  [li]Activate stages[/li]
  [li]'Panic' or abort stages - stages to give your crew a safe landing at the expense of your ship.[/li]
  [li]Toggle RCS or SAS[/li]
  [li]Kill horizontal speed (with RCS or thrusters)[/li]
  

The list is rudimentary - only designed to give you an idea of the possibilities that this plugin could provide.

I think the simplest way to implement this design would be to create a programming language syntax that you could put into a text file in your KSP folder.

It would sure be one hell of an addon for the game, which I\'m not even sure are possible with the current coding ability in the game.

Thoughts?

[semininja]

It\'s possible; in fact, MechJeb\'s next version will include a console that uses command line inputs.