Celestial Body Mapping

[TheEpicSquared]

So. Picture this. You start up a new career save, enter the tracking station and admire the cleanliness of Kerbin orbit. No satellites, debris, stations or abandoned Jool transfer craft. Speaking of Jool, you focus on the Joolian system, and what do you see? A perfect representation and map of every aspect of each and every celestial body in the Joolian system (and the rest of the Kerbol system, for that matter). Every ocean, every landmass, every anomaly, without any geographical satellites. What I think is that in a new save, you should not initially know the surface of a planet or moon since you have never been there. Makes sense, right? I think that instead, there should be those coloured dots (like when you zoom out really far in map view) - red for Duna, purple for Eve, and so on. The map view should remain this way until you can get a mapping satellite in polar orbit around the body you want to map, using some sort of stock camera (if a mod can do it why not the stock game?).

 

So what do you all think?   

[JPLRepo]

Try my ResearchBodies mod. I think that's what you are looking for until Squad make this stock.

 

 

Edited May 20, 2016 by JPLRepo

[TheEpicSquared]

1 hour ago, JPLRepo said:

Try my ResearchBodies mod. I think that's what you are looking for until Squad make this stock.

 

 

Thanks! I'll definitely check it out when I have some time

[Alshain]

2 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

Try my ResearchBodies mod. I think that's what you are looking for until Squad make this stock.

 

 

That looks like an interesting mod.  For your planned features, the body occlusion/graininess, you should consider integrating that with ScanSat's topographical scans if you can.

[JPLRepo]

1 minute ago, Alshain said:

That looks like an interesting mod.  For your planned features, the body occlusion/graininess, you should consider integrating that with ScanSat's topographical scans if you can.

That's the plan. Waiting for @DMagic to get back to me.

[Alshain]

Just now, JPLRepo said:

That's the plan. Waiting for @DMagic to get back to me.

Cool, I love ScanSat, but one of the things I hate about it is it's maps, I've always wished it could somehow overlay them in the KSP map instead of a separate window.

[DMagic]

@Alshain Do you mean overlaying the map onto the planet in map view? Like This:

 

[Alshain]

Just now, DMagic said:

@Alshain Do you mean overlaying the map onto the planet in map view? Like This:

 

Holy crap, I didn't know it could do that!

[JPLRepo]

Sorry I misunderstood. My idea is to use ResearchBodies to progressively discover and reveal the details of each Celestial Body.
To do this you would use TST telescopes, DMagic OS scanners and ScanSAT scanners to reveal the details of each Body.
@DMagic mentioned here potentially some starting point /codebase for it. I'm waiting for him to respond to a PM.

[DMagic]

@JPLRepo  Code's a mess; I'll get to it eventually though.

Edited May 21, 2016 by DMagic

[THX1138]

I like the idea. I think it would also be cool to discover a moon or planet that you weren't aware of/wasn't in the tracking station at the beginning of the game.

[JPLRepo]