Selectable Centre of Thrust in VAB/SPH

[Astraph]

Hello,

Just a small thing that keeps bugging me while designing spaceplanes. I constantly have a spot of bother determining whether my spaceplane would wobble outside of atmosphere due to CoM/CoT differences. Since the game always displays CoT as a sum of all engines' thrust vectors, the most important one for me (rocket booster's) is all the time deviated due to turbojets being placed slightly above (or below) the plane's horizontal axis.

Of course, I can remove the turbojets and check then - but since I tend to design quite heavy spaceplanes (which in turn require 5-14 turbojets), removing those engines reduces the ship's mass by quite a percentage - which in turn disturbs the CoM, which in turn...

Therefore, let me suggest an option to select engines that would be used to calculate CoT indicator. It might be done simmilarly to Action Groups tab - with an option to select a couple of engines and mark "Use this to calculate CoT" option on the options panel.

What do you think?

[RSwordsman]

I've actually wished for this myself. The COT ball should default to all, but you should also have the option of selecting a certain group of engines on the craft and recalculating for just those, or more simplistically, calculating all in a particular staging level. That would make life a lot easier for SSTO designers.

[Tank Buddy]

Great idea, and here's a mod to help you in the meantime: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/35996-0-22-RCS-Build-Aid-v0-4-For-balanced-placement-of-RCS-GUI-added

(Link to spaceport is at the bottom of the first post)

I'm not big on mods, but this one is not game-breaking and is a great help.

[SilverWarior]

I love your idea.

And I would like to extend it to the Center of mass (ability to see how center of mass will change through staging or even through fuel usage) and Center of lift (staging)

[vexx32]

I have a hunch that this feature might be included as part of the tweakables coming in 0.23. Fingers crossed, eh?

[wafflemoder]

Love the idea, had the same problem while designing a VTOL