Better (longer) orbit and maneuver prediction

[Schnobs]

I like to use Scansat as a planning aid in "precision" landings. It presents me with my future trajectory relative to the surface while taking the planet's rotation into account, and lets me see that on top of a fine-grained map with biome overlay and altitude data. This is just great. It allows me to hit even rather small biomes on the first try.

On very eccentric orbits the trajectory prediction breaks down: the "dots spaced by time" scheme becomes pretty useless if you spend almost the entire time near AP while the planet does several revolutions below.

Still, one sees the projected Periapsis, which is far and away the most useful piece of information; even without a trajectory plot one can make an educated guess about the direction of approach, which more often than not is good enough. However, Scansat only predicts the PEs for one maneuver into the future. If the PE can't be moved to the desired position with a single maneuver, one is stumbling in the dark.

Pretty please: could Scansat be made to show the final orbit (PE/AP) after all maneuvers on the flight plan have been executed? It would be extra-super-double-neat if this would also work while one is still outside the target body's SOI, planning the approach.

Not as important, but would be nice: an alternate way to display the trajectory that's still intelligible on very eccentric orbits.

[Ruedii]

I'd like to give my feedback on this:

A transparent line would be a major improvement to the dotted line. This probably could be implemented in the transition to the new GUI tools.

[DMagic1]

Rendering the orbits as lines is something I tried when I switched the grid overlay to line renderers. The RPM maps use it too. But I don't think they look too good, and there are some issues at the edges of the map.

Orbits with high eccentricities still have the same problem, the points are spread out so far that the orbit lines become misleading.

The real problem is that increasing the number of orbit calculations can start to slow things down. It already calculates 50 points for the last orbit and 50 for the next. Adding more orbits or increasing the number per orbit would make things worse. This is something technogeeky tried a long time ago, it's possible that performance has improved since then, so I'll check it out again.

[Schnobs]

Thanks for having a look at this. I was afraid that it would be a performance thing; also, I'm not sure if the full groundtrack for the entire orbit is necessary for any purpose. Near high AP, it only amounts to a number of parallel lines anyway.

For landing, it would suffice to have a direction indicator near PE; for biome-hunting, a longer stretch would be very helpful. I don't know where it should begin or end... "halfway around the planet" perhaps? That's a comparatively short piece of orbit, but it covers a lot of ground.

However, if I may be so bold, I'd like to remind you that my first and more important wish is that Scansat should take all maneuvers into account and display the final orbit (or at least it's PE, no matter if anything happens with the groundplot). I don't think the intermediate orbits need to be rendered at all.