Less than map view

[ceauke]

Hi guys

I almost wanted to suggest to include staging and fuel levels in the map view but then I realised I need to ask the opposite.

It feels to me there's 3 important pieces of info on the screen:

1. Navbal: Shows what you're doing

2. Map view: shows where you are and your current orbit

3. Staging/fuel.

(the fourth is the eye candy: Looking at your rocket. But this hardly provides needed info)

Especially when I'm launching into orbit I pretty much need all three of those and you can not get them together.

Possible solutions:

1. (add to live view): Orbitersim has nice MFD's with gazillion numbers to check your orbit and also a simple line diagram to visualise the orbit. Do we maybe have something like that in Orbiter.

2. (JUST swap views, not hud): Can't you just swap the live view 3d with the map view 3d and retain the hud for the live view?

Another question: When you get into funky orbits, isn't there a 3rd view? The flat map projection (2d)? e.g. these tundra orbits. It's not easy to see the track of the orbit on the land if you dont have a 2d projection. Maybe I'm wrong, I can't even achieve those :-)

(tldr)

So after all that braindump: Why dont we have three views:

1. Live view

2. Solar system view (map view)

3. 2d Map view

And then depending on the view, there's some options of which hud elements you get.

[AbacusWizard]

I wouldn't say that looking at the rocket is just eye candy; it provides me with extremely valuable information such as whether any parts have broken off. :-)

I would very much like to see staging and fuel information in map view, though. During the later portions of a launch I'm usually watching map view; it's a little annoying that I have to keep switching back to main view to check if I need to activate the next stage yet.

- - - Updated - - -

Also I think mods like SCANsat provide 2D maps of the planet surface showing the satellite's orbit; it'd be nice if something like that could be integrated into stock.

[cpast]

You can get fuel information in map view: just click the resource pane button, and click "Stage Only" to just get the fuel in the current stage. The three things you can't do are look at the rocket/terrain (which I find to be nice for basic spatial orientation; it's much harder for me to fly just by navball, and obviously landing by navball without a radar altimeter is a bad idea); easily check altitude (you have to hover over the craft, you don't have the nice display); and actually stage or otherwise activate/deactivate stuff.