Finding a ship in space -- is there a mod?

[Loren Pechtel]

Trying to find a rocket in space at ranges over a few hundred meters can be quite hard at times.  Is there any way to make them more obvious?

[themonk]

If you are trying to locate which direction a ship is when you trying to dock, you should have that ship "Targeted".  It will show on your NavBall.  Just center the NavBall on the target and then look along the nose of the ship and you will see where it is and will show the distance if within 20K.  No mod needed just make sure the ship you are looking for is Targeted.

[Loren Pechtel]

22 minutes ago, themonk said:

If you are trying to locate which direction a ship is when you trying to dock, you should have that ship "Targeted".  It will show on your NavBall.  Just center the NavBall on the target and then look along the nose of the ship and you will see where it is and will show the distance if within 20K.  No mod needed just make sure the ship you are looking for is Targeted.

No, I'm talking about trying to target it in the first place--the problem generally occurs as part of an EVA mission.

[Superfluous J]

Target from Map mode.

If it's too close to target in map mode, it should get a little icon/outline around it in regular mode. One trick I've learned to find what direction to go is to go into and out of map mode, and look for the moving icon as your view zooms into regular mode from map mode.

Note: At least one mod I'm running - and I'm going to guess it's Distant Object Enhancement - removes this gui icon/outline. If you have it installed and have no icon/outline, try uninstalling it and seeing if the icon/outline comes back.

[A_name]

Use map view, click on the ship > set as target.

[FancyMouse]

You're probably going to like KER's rendezvous tab which allows you to search ship by name and target it - I personally have rarely used stock mechanism once I found that.

[bewing]

I don't do mods, so I didn't figure I should be first to answer your question. But in stock, when you are doing a rendezvous, the ship you are rendezvousing with is either above and ahead of you, or it is below and behind you. If you just look at the orbits in map view, you can tell which quadrant to look in. And generally the orbits are coplanar, which means that it's quite a narrow stripe in that quadrant that you have to look in. Once you get that, it really narrows it down a lot.

Before I figured that out, I admit that when I went on EVA and was trying to get to another ship, I'd be looking around frantically for the little [ ] around the other ship. And often it was gray and hard to see. And I'd waste a lot of precious seconds looking around. But it takes a lot less time if you have it planned out in advance which direction you need to look.

 

[Palaceviking]

Point to note; if you press f4 it toggles the outline, if you don't realise you've turned the outline off then it can seem as though th target has disappeared!  

If you can't find it try tapping f4 a few times, maybe you turned outline off?

[Loren Pechtel]

9 hours ago, FancyMouse said:

You're probably going to like KER's rendezvous tab which allows you to search ship by name and target it - I personally have rarely used stock mechanism once I found that.

That sounds like an answer!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

There's also Haystack  that might be worth looking for.

 

Edited December 27, 2016 by Rosco P. Coltrane

[Loren Pechtel]

16 minutes ago, Rosco P. Coltrane said:

There's also Haystack  that might be worth looking for.

 

Yeah, that sounds like it will do what I'm after.