Stress display (via colouring the parts in flight)

[Fifi]

I think feature which would colour parts indicating the construction stress could be a very useful idea. The more complex ships are sometimes too laggy to notice what's going on in time of linkage failures (or after, 100 of messages in the same second isn't helpful), so the option to enable marking parts in flight with colours describing their stress will be awesome.

You know, something like that:

[stretching] purple <-> blue <-> light blue <-> green [normal] <-> yellow <-> orange <-> red [compressing]

How it looks like (screenshot from a bridge building simulator I used to play some years ago):

I think that option could really be helpful and save a lot of Kerbals.

Thanks in advance for taking it into consideration.

[Themohawkninja]

Yeah, sometimes when the ship falls apart, you can't tell where it fell apart, so this would be fairly useful, as I end up just putting a dozen more struts on, which may be ten more than I really need.

What's that sim called? I love physics sims.

[Fifi]

@up: There was a lot of versions, I'm not sure which is the newest. Ponitifex, Bridge Construction Set, Bridge Builder. I personally remember Ponitifex 2 and Bridge Construction Set.

@topic: I forgot to notice it, of course this feature should be toggleable. ^^

[urablahblah]

I'm hoping this goes along with the vehicle schematics features. You could see what your vehicle looks like before and after, with stress points, dV, and TWR stats.

[ammonia_ocean]

I definitely like the look of this. It would help me a lot more than scanning through the post-flight report only to get some vague information that doesn't really help me.

[Kyne]

Would be a godsend for my larger interplanetary 'expeditions'. Support!

[imasquare]

I agree that assistance with assessing the stress and strain during build and flight would improve gameplay experience, I had similar thoughts on this aspect of gameplay myself.

After Squad has fixed the buggy physics emulation to the best of their abilities, I'd suggest Squad review this item. My thought is if the physics emulation is fixed to the point where ships don't wobble around so damn much we hopefully won't need this function so soon.

I'm not saying this feature isn't needed, but there is a game play pain point revolving around the wibbly wobbly ships that tear themselves apart for no realistic or reasonable reason - that should be resolved first,

[Mr. Scruffy]

While we are at it: Add the same for temperatures. So it would be a single 3-way-toggle button on the GUI: ´Overlay: None / Stress / Temperature´. Maybe a fouth state: Stages, colorcoding the parts according to which stage they belong.

[Alex_Leonardo]

OH... MY... KERB...!!!

This is exactly what we need!

I have to launch my ship more then TEN TIMES to figure out what is wrong. (My copy of the program takes 2 minutes to get from the VAB to the Launch pad)