Simple Crew telescope for viewing the surface.

[DBowman]

When you are orbiting a body it would be nice to be able to get a 'close view' of the surface of what you are orbiting - to help choose a landing site, or just 'admire the view'.

I imagine the map view has limited zoom because it's supposed to be a map not the territory. WOW has an engineering trinket that acts like a telescope. It ignores the draw distance & de-clutter algos and uses a very narrow FOV camera to limit rendered geometry and deliver a telescope view of distant places. KSP could technically do something similar so pilots could get a good look at the surface and pick some interesting place to set down.

Surface travel is very limited & 'flying around' is not very practical for most bodies - so this would add some desirable and engaging capability in a reasonable way.

I suppose once you have seen something interesting you'd want to be able to 'put a pin in the map' to mark it as something interesting to come back to.

[r4pt0r]

when in IVA you can zoom with the scroll wheel, you can also double click windows to get a better view.

[Seshins]

once zoomed in via mouse wheel you can also click and hold mouse 3 for an extra bit of zoom. I love doing this with the distant enhancements mod.

[DBowman]

Thanks, thats the kind of thing I had in mind. I took a quick look and will play around some more. I'll have to check out the DE mod also.

I wonder though, when in the 'iva window mode':

- they seem to 'zoom the sky box' or something, resulting in star splotches - it breaks the immersion, it would look better with the regular non iva mode skybox.

- the double click and regular 'look out the window' seem to have different orientations - almost like they were different windows altogether, is that on purpose for some reason I miss?

- is there more/finer surface geometry? ideally a telescope view would show you the finest detail surface geometry - might as well since it's 'there'.