Space Engineers

Space Engineers

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Orbital Autopilot and Map
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Tags: autopilot
File Size
Posted
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407.058 KB
Jun 2, 2018 @ 3:41pm
Sep 23, 2021 @ 2:40pm
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Orbital Autopilot and Map

Description
This script allows you to keep a ship in orbit around a planet and render an orbital map.

Instructions:

You ship will need a few components for this script to do its job.
The most important is a ship controller. This can be either a remote control or a cockpit. It must be named "OrbitController" for the script to find it. This block will define the orientation of the ship when orbiting a planet with the autopilot. The Up side of this block will point away from the planet, and the Front side will point forward.

The autopilot can be activated with the argument "toggleAutopilot". When activated it will attempt to allign the ship with the target orbit and then accelerate to the required orbital velocity. In order for the autopilot to work your ship will need a gyroscope and 1 thruster in each direction.

To select an orbit you can run the script with the arguments "forward", to generate an orbit based on your current direction, or "input", to generate an orbit based on the input variables. There are a lot of things you can change in the input section of the script, so I suggest you take a look at that.

The orbital map can be rendered by adding an lcd panel named "OrbitDisplay". This will display the planet (grey), the ship (green), the target orbit (light blue) and the current trajectory (magenta). If you add waypoints to the ship controller (if it is a remote control), these will be also be displayed (blue).

Extra stats and error messages can be displayed on an lcd panel by naming it "OrbitStats".


A Speed mod is highly recommended for autopilot functionality.
I suggest one of these:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=380168871
or this one:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=599536562
381 Comments
Come and See Apr 28 @ 9:05pm 
I also modified the script to transmit the 3d map of the satellites position to LCDs in my main base.
Come and See Apr 28 @ 6:40pm 
Nice mod when paired with Real Orbits. I put a bunch of satellites around my planet with ore detectors and they sniff out all the goodies.
SMooreAce Dec 22, 2023 @ 10:46am 
Google is your friend
FlightError Dec 10, 2023 @ 10:42am 
What is "planet SOI" I keep getting that error while trying to get it to work.
evabay Nov 10, 2023 @ 10:45am 
its set to that by default
Apticrok Nov 10, 2023 @ 8:16am 
set the display mode: text and image. Good mod!
evabay Oct 25, 2023 @ 11:26am 
i cant get it to display the orbit or stats on screens, i names them properly and i recompiled and ran the script multiple times and everything else works fine
Renener  [author] Nov 27, 2022 @ 9:59am 
There should be a line in the script where it looks for a block named "OrbitController". You can probably change that to whatever name you have in mind.
SMooreAce Nov 25, 2022 @ 8:15pm 
When you changed the name of it after verifying that it worked, did it stop working?
PATS3Y Nov 25, 2022 @ 6:15pm 
I forget if I or someone else has asked this before, apologies if so; but are you able to change the name of the OrbitController block to something custom?