Surface mode SAS to maintain ground attitude (mostly for spaceplanes)

[goduranus]

One of the most tedious activities during the launch of a space-plane, is manually compensating for the curvature of Kerbin when the plane is accelerating at near-orbital velocities, where you have to keep nosing down to keep the plane in atmosphere as the surface of Kerbin recedes.

I'd enjoy spaceplanes a great deal more if there were feature that maintains the plane's attitude with the ground.

The most logically implementation would be a "SAS Surface Mode", that activates when the player chooses to display surface velocity. When a player wants to look at ground velocity, keeping attitude with the ground is generally more useful than keeping attitude with the orbit. Also, having one button switch the SAS mode and the velocity mode, would reduce interface clutter.

Edited June 9, 2014 by goduranus

[robopilot99]

Absolutely exceptional suggestion!

[Mitchz95]

I think such a feature would fall into the realm of "autopilot", which they're not planning to add.

Besides, what's the fun of staring at the computer waiting to reach orbital velocity?

[BudgetHedgehog]

Well, that and if you end up having to take into account the curvature of Kerbin while flying to space, it might be time to re-assess your aircraft design.

[Kasuha]

One of the most tedious activities during the launch of a space-plane is IMO convincing SAS to hold your pitch at all. I set up some pitch, it falls down. I always have to set up higher pitch repeatedly until SAS finally settles on something resembling what I wanted. Then I fix my roll a bit and pitch falls down again. Sometimes I'm about to eat my keyboard when trying to steer a spaceplane.

Spaceplane SAS would definitely deserve some attention. And yes, maintaining surface-relative pitch would be a nice touch.

[breakthrough]

So would this need an exception for vacuum? I don't rightly know if this would be a hindrance when lifting off from Tylo for example.

[Vaporo]

This would be a great use for the Advanced SAS unit.

And since we're on the subject, how about Advanced SAS also holding your ship on the course of maneuver nodes. It almost has to be implemented in the stock game because of ion engines, even with the recent buffs.

[MR4Y]

This would be a great use for the Advanced SAS unit.

And since we're on the subject, how about Advanced SAS also holding your ship on the course of maneuver nodes. It almost has to be implemented in the stock game because of ion engines, even with the recent buffs.

Even though that's technically assisted piloting, it will be interpreted as an autopilot.

[MKI]

This is more an Autopilot thing than a change to SAS.

Even the OLD sas didn't guarantee you keep your altitude, it just kept an iron grip on your craft. I feel more changes to SAS as a whole are needed. As currently the control part panel is pretty thin, and all of them more or less do the exact same thing. Tweakbles and more parts for different functions should help players assume better control over designs of control ;P

For instance SAS modules that work better in atmosphere, with stronger pulls for spaceplane designs. It wont make much sense physics wise, but it could add a better dimension to SAS.

[KaBob]

I would love to have this feature and I don't believe it at all qualifies as autopilot. When they say they don't want autopilot they mean they don't want you to just be able to plan out of a mission/maneuver and then hit go. All this would do is reduce the ridiculous amount of micromanagement that currently goes into flying planes, similar to how the existing SAS keeps you from having to micromanage your ships rotation.

[JMBuilder]

Technically, you could say standard SAS is a form of "autopilot." This would be a very handy feature to have, autopilot-ish or not.