Mod Request - Airplane Cruise Control

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

So I have to get up from a flight a lot. I would really like a mod that would hold a plane at a certain altitude, speed, heading, etc. Could someone make this?

[flywlyx]

MJ has spaceplane autopilot. Do I make a mistake?

[meyerweb]

There are a few out there.  I prefer Kramax Autopilot, which works fine for me in 1.0.5, but PilotAssistant (on which Kramax is based) is also good, and a lot of people like MechJeb.

 

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

16 minutes ago, flywlyx said:

MJ has spaceplane autopilot. Do I make a mistake?

No, that's an auto land

Kramax AutoPilot is a waypoint thing, no? I want, for example, "Hold heading 180 at speed 175m/s and 5000M ASL (Avoid terrain like mountains)

[meyerweb]

1 hour ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Kramax AutoPilot is a waypoint thing, no? I want, for example, "Hold heading 180 at speed 175m/s and 5000M ASL (Avoid terrain like mountains)

You can feed it waypoints, or you can tell it to do mostly that what you said—you can definitely set a heading and speed, and have it stick pretty precisely to both.  That’s how I usually fly with it, and almost always how I send my spaceplanes to orbit.  (Also how I land them, at least until I finish my kOS landing script.)

The way I usually avoid mountains is to set a sufficiently high ASL to miss them all, but you can also set a radar altitude to hold.  That means your plane will wander up and down along with terrain height changes, but set it high enough and you’ll avoid always terrain altogether.

[AG5BPilot]

1 hour ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

No, that's an auto land

Kramax AutoPilot is a waypoint thing, no? I want, for example, "Hold heading 180 at speed 175m/s and 5000M ASL (Avoid terrain like mountains)

The same MechJeb spaceplane dialog box with the autoland controls also has controls for heading and altitude hold.  Actually, a bit more than that -- you can dial in the desired altitude and heading and it turns and climbs or descends to the desired settings.  While it won't fly itself to a waypoint, I use the heading reading from Waypoint Manager's on screen display as the input into MechJeb and use that to fly aircraft long distances (with physics warp).  It will happily fly right into the side of a mountain, however, so you still need to be careful about CFIT.

Edited April 15, 2016 by AG5BPilot