Show future trajectory, used for landing, orbits, missiles, etc

[Exo-U]

What if a modder or dev created perhaps a block called "Guidance block" to display your future path in the game world, along with showing what will happen when your ship is affected by gravity. Similar to Kerbal Space Program. This would be an amazing addition to the game and opens many possibilities.

1. Possible orbits - High speed craft usually don't work well in Space Engineers but it would be a great thing to try. I've always attempted to get to orbit but its very difficult without any guidance tools.

2. Landing trajectories - Imagine already knowing where exactly you're going to land 5 minutes before you even touch the ground! That would be a very cool addition.

3. Bombs - Perhaps you could integrate the flight path code to work with the coding block, which could maybe show the pilot where the bombs are going to land and you could program the bombs to target a grid or a player and guide themselves to whatever you want.

4. ICBMs - AKA: the big scary rockets that could destroy humanity as we know it, similar to the bombs, we can target a grid or whatever, and the rockets can go high up, and try to get its trajectory (calculating with gravity and speed) and strike the target.

5. Getting your bearings - For when you have no idea what direction your ship is going.

6. Survival Aspects - It could be an expensive thing to make, or make it take alot of power depending on how far you want the path to calculate or show. It could have its own block or use existing ones. Perhaps there could be different blocks of it for different tasks? (Large ones for capital ships, tiny ones for guidance bombs or missiles, both having pros and cons)


How it would look: I think it could show a line (in 3d space), and every meter or so there would be a small dot.
A different colored trajectory could mean the intensity of gravity. White=0 Red=<1g
(Maybe opacity could be used to show speed?)
Note: most likely will just be a straight line, only curves will be made from gravity interference.


I think having this be in the game would be an extraordinary addition and would open opportunity for our incredible handsome modders out there to make amazing ships and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

This post is on the Keen SWH fourms as well (with colorful pictures and Dushan :D)
http://forum.keenswh.com/threads/show-future-trajectory-used-for-landing-orbits-missiles-etc.7389989/

[Gaby49]

Nice idea +1

[DonKynos]

it would be cool if programmable blocks had this feature, as well as LCD glass. and custom ingame huds. you could create some cool targeting systems

[4onen]

We've got projectors that can project 100000000+ kg ships down to the level of scratches on armor blocks. Can't see why us space engineers couldn't make this. +1 to this idea.

[ZettaHex]

Yeah I second this, or rather 5th it? There definitely needs to be something that tells you trajectory based on thrust ang gravity, its already built in to the engine as its already calculating the trajectories for physics, but idk how hard it would be to build into UI. I'm thinking something that serves similar to KSP, but only while you're in gravity- outside of gravity then a pointer telling you your velocity vector would be nice. +1 for Ghostly