An additive form of time warp for phase angles

[Balto-the-Wolf-Dog]

While I've not much involved myself in the forums I've been playing KSP for quite a long while and put my first aircraft on laythe back in 0.17, making routine milk runs henceforth. This is great, except it makes for a lot of switching over to a distantly orbiting buoy to wait on phase angles before ejection due to the altitude limits on time compression. All in all the system works, but it's terribly inconvenient and makes it easy to overshoot your ejection window. In my mind the ideal solution to the issue would be to allow instant warping to a particular date like one might set a clock ahead. Given that all entities not being directly interacted with are on rails, this should be no less doable than conventional time warp. It is worthy of note that this may be done in Orbiter through the editing of save files without fault, though orbiter also lacks an actual implemented tool for doing it to my knowledge. As far as balance is concerned, I don't see how it would be any different than standard time compression.

[vexx32]

I believe this is somewhere on the planned features list... or it should be. I know Harvester has said that it's something he's working on some time ago, though I've not heard much since then.

[Traches]

If you're okay with using mods, kerbal alarm clock will solve the issue of warping past your maneuver nodes. It'll even let you plan a node, set an alarm for it, switch to another ship for faster time warp purposes, and then when the time comes it'll drop you out of time warp, let you jump back to the original ship, and restore the maneuver node. It's one of those mods that should be part of the stock game TBH.

You can also edit your save file to fast forward time, much like you described in orbiter. Just google "KSP save file editing", there are several guides on it.

All that being said, I agree with you-- the altitude restrictions on warp are really a pain sometimes (though clearly necessary for several technical reasons.) For such a necessary mechanic, the stock game wouldn't hurt from timewarp getting a little sweet dev love!

[Superfluous J]

The problem is if you have a ship whose orbit intersects the torus defined by all possible SOIs of a moon or planet. Currently, these cause ejections or crashes of on-rails objects. In your proposal it would cause them to just not take effect.

Honestly I like your way better than the way it is now, but even more I like the idea of using math to determine when an on-rails ship would do its next SOI change and toss up an alert to you when that happens a la KAC.

I'm not smart enough to do that math, but I'm pretty sure it's possible.

[Captain Sierra]

How about this:

Add a special 'Phase Angle Alignment' mode in the map view (also accessible via the tracking station) where you can either manually time warp (with another notch on top of what we have now) or you can enter a specific phase angle and it will auto-warp (again with another notch of time warp adding a 0 onto the current max, specific to this mode or to deep space). You then press go and it warps you within a degree (a few days give or take). This blends current time warp mechanics with a much faster, more convenient way to set up phase angles. It is important to note that KSP should realy start using predictive collisions and SoI changeovers so that you can't warp through planets.