Keeping orientation

[Anonymissimus]

Is there something like a gyroscope in oolite ? In real space travel, they are used to keep orientation of satellites and such, or to align the hubble telescope to a given star etc. In oolite, it could be used e.g. to find one's way back to the "invisible witchpoint" in interstellar space once that orientation has been lost because of running away, combat etc., because you would remember the orientation of your flight vector while flying away from the witchpoint with respect to the fixed orientation of the gyroscope in space, while the ship is turning around it.
Or it could be used to follow a search pattern around the sun in some system, keeping a reasonable distance of say 1000km in order to find hidden things like off-lane hermits. Because of deep space pirates, there's a mass locking ship from time to time, forcing to leave and forget which circle you were currently following around the sun. And even without deep space pirates, it's very difficult to orientate the circles you follow. You'd have to run around the sun maybe 4 times or so, looking out of the side window, following a ball-shaped search pattern.
From a realistic point of view it is very strange that there is no such standard equipment in oolite, it's as important as IFF scanner and such. I'm pretty sure that almost any real-world aircraft or space craft should have such an instrument.

[ffutures]

There's an OXP for some of this - Waypoint Here. You can set several waypoints in a system, e.g. the location of a wreck, the navigation system will then point to them until you've used all of the waypoints - I think it's five before you have to clear them and start again.

[Anonymissimus]

I know. Depends on the advanced compass, so useless in interstellar space. And is primable so should be avoided. And I don't know how it would help to find back the current cyclic course around the sun when following a search pattern.

[Bogatyr]

I know. Depends on the advanced compass, so useless in interstellar space. And is primable so should be avoided. And I don't know how it would help to find back the current cyclic course around the sun when following a search pattern.

I know it's not what you're asking for, but just FYI: playing broke adder, an ASC is just not an option for a long time. Locating and finding your way back to important locations like rock hermits and mining communities is an important skill to develop. I started doing this the old fashioned way that sailors have been using for millenia: navigate via the stars! In particular the orientation of the sun and the planet relative to the ship and to the item whose location you want to remember. I'm also getting better and better at scanning "empty space" with the naked eye.

[Anonymissimus]

I have the impression that scanning empty space with eyes strongly depends on the graphics quality, settings, card and so on. The difficulty of a game should not depend on the hardware or your purse. (One of the reasons why I hate commercial browser games.)
In theory you need 3 fixed points in space to find back to a certain location, but there are only 2 (without ASC). I did it a few times by recording the distances to planet, sun and witchpoint. These are three vectors, combining 2 yields a circle, 3 a coordinate in space.

[Norby]

[wiki]Telescope[/wiki] can target the witchpoint, Sun and planets anywhere in the system.
In interstellar space the only way what I know is if you use developer release (or trunk) and press shift+F to see your exact coordinates, where 0;0;0 is the witchpoint.

[Bogatyr]

I have the impression that scanning empty space with eyes strongly depends on the graphics quality, settings, card and so on. The difficulty of a game should not depend on the hardware or your purse. (One of the reasons why I hate commercial browser games.)
In theory you need 3 fixed points in space to find back to a certain location, but there are only 2 (without ASC). I did it a few times by recording the distances to planet, sun and witchpoint. These are three vectors, combining 2 yields a circle, 3 a coordinate in space.

A large monitor and decent graphics card that can run shaders shouldn't be required to play the game, but it sure makes it a lot more fun. Especially a large monitor, helps with the immersion (and yes, naked eye navigation).

p.s. there are techniques that can help in any graphics resolution: look for pin-points that move when they're near the edges of your screen. Background stars never move. I used this back in C64 Elite days.