Orbital Cameras

[MDBenson]

I know people have developed docking cameras and telescopes, I was wondering if anyone had any plans for a planetary recon camera, the sort of things like LRO, MRO and SDO use for photographing solar bodies. I know Kerbol isn't very interesting but the various anomalies and interesting items on the other planets make it sometimes worth investigating .

I know the arm cam on the Lazor robotic arms now is full-colour and has a pretty good zoom. Is it hard to disseminate this code and massively increase that zoom ability and add some fine steering controls? So maybe we'd be able to see Kerbal landers/colonies from orbit like LRO and MOR can? We could also createa SPOT-type camera that takes high res pictures of Kerbin too, but there isn't much to see at the moment . Also, there would have to be some provisio9n fot the LOD system to actually load the surface details when you zoom in.

What do you think?

Edited June 9, 2013 by MDBenson

[Nibb31]

You can use a telescope mode and point it to the ground.

The LOD depends on the distance, so I don't think you will ever get detailed terrain, but artefacts should be visible.

[Tommygun]

This is one of the telescope mods I used to get this image.

You can zoom in more, but it gets hard as your telescope does keep moving in orbit.

It would be nice if someone could write an additional plugin to allow you preset photographing based on longitude and latitude.

Then just photograph tracks along a given area like a real satellites does.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-18-4-zeus-space-telescope/

[tek_604]

Then just photograph tracks along a given area like a real satellites does.

Must admit, that's one thing I thought of a while back, as I actually do this as part of my job. It then made me think, damn, we'll need to know when we have terminator crossings, phase angles, angles to the sun.... In real life, this is easy; we have SPICE to work this out for us. We have no such thing in KSP. Someone should do it though

[Tommygun]

Must admit, that's one thing I thought of a while back, as I actually do this as part of my job. It then made me think, damn, we'll need to know when we have terminator crossings, phase angles, angles to the sun.... In real life, this is easy; we have SPICE to work this out for us. We have no such thing in KSP. Someone should do it though

I have used MechJeb's Smart ASS to help control the camera when taking surface images and have been wonder if Kerbcam could be used too.

Do you think code from these two mods working together could do this?

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/kerbcam/

[Sapphire]

A mod like that definitely exists.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/archive/index.php/t-12329.html

Through Google, I found this one, and it seems to work perfectly in my version (20.0.2). Slapped them onto a telescope of mine to test it out.

This is Duna as seen from high Kerbin orbit. So it definitely works. But as Tommygun said, zooming in more is harder because it moves all over the place.

Edited June 9, 2013 by Sapphire
I dun goofed the spelling!