Someone told me I was trying to turn TransX into a "monkey-push-button, Monkey-go-to-mars end-game"
:lol:
Perhaps Steve was just bored with developing for Orbiter by then. Other than that, as I'm an author of an autopilot myself (initially for Launch MFD), I understand his reasoning and agree with it. What you requested isn't super easy to do. Even though we have those "standard" autopilots in Orbiter working perfectly, they are not exposed to public, although it would probably only take a very little effort on Martin's site, by exposing a parametric function OrientTo(VECTOR3 tgt), which is probably already used internally, only with 4 predefined vectors - pro/retro-grade & normal/antinormal. It would be better to ask Martin for this first.
As for the problem of reimplementing the autopilots everywhere, this is just what is happening, and nobody is willing to write a library that centralizes the AP. Very few people even use libraries, let alone writing them. So I understand Steve's frustration even more.
Other his points are a matter of taste to me.
The auto-center does a great job of holding the vessel at the proper orientation, but it's not efficient at orienting the vessel into position in the first place. It uses quite a bit of RCS thrust, and it will "overshoot" the position and then have to backtrack.
It's PID based - not a perfect one. As such I think that it still does a great job, by being operational even under 100x TACC. You can use 10x TACC to get it on point faster.
Throughout the burn, the auto-center keeps the X perfectly in the center... Awesome! ... until you get down to about 200 m/s. At that point, I feel like I really need to back way off the main engines to allow the auto-center to do its job. But even with the main engines backed down to just 10% or so, it still slips off to the side.
But here's the biggest issue I see with it at this point. Since I'm still doing the burn manually, if I over shoot the burn by even 1/10th meter per second, the auto-center wants to turn the vessel "backwards" because now the green x is technically straight behind me. So there should be some kind of logic to turn off the auto-center when the burn is complete.
I've resolved the issue by cutting main engines after the burn is considered complete (dV starts increasing). If you want to disable to Auto-Center, then just disable it. After all, you might want to correct that 0.1 m/s error, in case you were trying to rendezvous with a satellite.
-I had the spacecraft oriented prograde ( with the default Orbiter AP "]" ) and I entered a pure prograde burn of 3000 m/s. When I disabled the AP and pressed "Auto-Center™", the spacecraft changed its orientation to "Horizontal level" and centered the green x in the target view.
It's not that big a deal, it just seems unnecessary.
I have to cancel the rotation somehow. Whether the target bank is 0* like now or 90* like in prograde AP is also a matter of taste, but the rotation has to be canceled. I could work on it somehow to only cancel the rotation's
velocity, and not target a given rotation angle, but this requires time and tuning (more time). Maybe later.
-One thing that I believe would be useful is to disable the default autopilots while the auto-center is on. Again, just a detail.
Point. Fixed and attached.
-The larger ships (XR5 and Arrow with almost full load) took a while until centering the x but that's to be expected as they are pretty sluggish when fully loaded.
It's enough if they just work and it's not such a sure thing when it comes to PID controllers, unlike the analytic solution based standard Orbiter APs.
I have not tested any tail-sitters yet.
From what you've described, I deduct that they won't work.
