Orientation of Instrument

[SSTLPete]

Can a feature be added please that for certain instruments they only gather data if they are orientated in the correct direction (i.e. pointing at a planetary body). Or a more advanced option is that the centre of the scanned area is not directly under the current position of the instrument but at an angle in relation to the angle of pointing of the instrument and the planetary body.

SSTL have released a satellite mod that is compatible with SCANsat and this feature would make it a lot more realistic.

[DMagic1]

KSP doesn't really have any mechanisms to support this kind of thing. As soon as you turn on time warp, or leave the vessel to do something else, the vessel will remain in a fixed orientation. So you would have to manually point the scanner the direction you want, then keep it there in real-time.

You could construct scanners on rotating platforms that always point at the surface, though that would somewhat defeat the purpose of this idea (if it always points at the surface then why would it matter?), but otherwise this just introduces a bit of realism where it doesn't really benefit the gameplay.

The off-center scanning is an interesting idea. But it would be hard to integrate with the current scanning system. The math to determine the vessel location at every scanning interval needs be kept as simple as possible because these intervals can be processed 10s of thousands of times per second depending on how many scanners are active and whether or not time warp is active. So introducing some kind of offset or other complications would seriously affect performance.

[RWOne]

If you wish to simulate that, you could use mechjeb, using smart ass, advanced, for example you select the instrument on the sat, and can ref the planet orbit, down then execute, the sat would then align where that instrument is pointing to the planet and MJ will keep it that way adjusting throughout (I believe, at least I use it to keep orientation of station panels to Kerbol).