Suggestion: VTOL capability

[FredMSloniker]

Would it be possible to add support for VTOL craft to MechJeb?

In order of complexity to implement and desirability, I can think of three ways to do it:

• Add a toggle that switches what MechJeb thinks of as the business end of the ship. Its current behavior is to point the front of whatever part you're controlling from (e.g., the nose of a cupola) in the direction you want to thrust; using the toggle would have it instead point the top of the cupola in that direction. Combined with action groups to switch whether the back or bottom rockets are active, this would allow VTOL flight.
• Add a six-button panel that lets you orient the ship with its front, back, top, bottom, left, or right face in the desired direction of thrust. This would additionally allow things like controlling a ship from a rear-facing 'turret'.
• Have MechJeb automatically determine the direction of the ship's thrust vector and orient based on that. That way I could, for instance, tell it to ascend with the bottom rockets active and have it start to go up, then turn on the rear rocket and have it bring the nose up accordingly.

I can sort of get the behavior I want by placing an OKTO2 on top of the ship and switching which pod I'm controlling from when I switch active rockets. However, the ultimate goal here is for me to be able to land a ship with a cupola on its side on the Mun while in the cupola view, and switching to IVA also causes control to switch to that pod. As I found out the hard way, this has deleterious effects on MechJeb's ability to land the craft, especially if one switches to IVA less than 500 meters off the surface. n.n;

[MafiaMoe]

This seems like a fairly specialized request. MechJeb is currently a rather blunted Swiss army knife. It gets the job done in most cases, but there is very little refinement and few special features.

That being said, it sounds like this is a request for just upgrading the "Landing Guidance"? I'm new to this project, but I'll take a look at the code and see what it might take to add this and #115 (suborbital "hops").

[chriscamacho]

how about if you want a cupola facing down with a docking port on the pointy end (ie final RCS only orbital stage is upside down)

try doing this and after launch your craft ends up heading for subterranean orbit...

On 19 June 2013 08:37, MafiaMoe notifications@github.com wrote:

This seems like a fairly specialized request. MechJeb is currently a rather blunted Swiss army knife. It gets the job done in most cases, but there is very little refinement and few special features.

That being said, it sounds like this is a request for just upgrading the "Landing Guidance"? I'm new to this project, but I'll take a look at the code and see what it might take to add this and #115https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2/issues/115(suborbital "hops").

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[MafiaMoe]

To make this easier would require playing with some deep code (possibly within VesselState.cs). I'm not quite versed enough to start changing code on that level, not knowing what kind of consequences it would have on the system.