KER Rendezvous Tools 1.0.2

A single Kerbal Engineer Redux companion plugin containing two field-tested rendezvous advisory instruments:

• WIND — Launch Window: live target geometry, sea-level pass prediction, target-plane launch timing, launch azimuth, and a rising-horizon heuristic.
• PLNE — Plane Match: signed target-plane offset, relative inclination, normal velocity, short-term plane prediction, and an atmospheric manual bank cue for SSTO ascent.

Both modules are display-only. They never steer, throttle, stage, control SAS, or change time warp.

Requirements

• Kerbal Space Program 1.12.5
• Kerbal Engineer Redux 1.1.9.5

Required migration from the standalone builds

Delete these old folders before installing the combined suite:

GameData\PlaneMatchKER
GameData\LaunchWindowKER

The combined DLL deliberately refuses to register its KER tabs if either legacy standalone assembly is loaded, preventing two periodic injectors from fighting over WIND and PLNE.

WIND scope

WIND provides generic geometry and launch-opportunity timing. It does not have a vehicle ascent profile and does not promise a synchronized insertion and velocity match.

Informal test flights produced close spatial intercepts with different launcher families, including approximately 10 - 2 km with high relative velocity. The separate Relative Speed row exists so a close flyby cannot be mistaken for a dockable rendezvous.

After liftoff, forecast rows remain tied to the launch site while live range, range rate, relative speed, elevation, and azimuth follow the active vessel.

Long-horizon GOOD search

WIND now searches future launch-site target-plane crossings for the first strict heuristic opportunity:

target rising
and
absolute target elevation at the plane crossing <= 5 degrees

The search is incremental, evaluating 32 future plane windows per rendered frame, so long waits do not freeze the game.

It reports:

Next GOOD @ Ref
Target Orbits to GOOD
Body Rotations to GOOD
GOOD Window #
GOOD Branch / Azimuth
GOOD Elev @ Plane

The search examines at most 8,192 future plane windows. This is intentionally large enough to cover the 40–100 Kerbin-day waits observed during development.

Countdowns are formatted as absolute universal-time hours rather than assuming a 24-hour day. Body Rotations to GOOD is the local-body-day equivalent; on stock Kerbin, one rotation is one six-hour Kerbin day.

A conservative full-geometry recurrence check can stop the search early when the launch-site direction and target orbital state repeat. If no strict GOOD has been found, WIND retains the closest rising candidate discovered so far:

Best Rising @ Ref
Best Rising Elev
Best Branch / Azimuth

SEARCH LIMIT REACHED does not mean that no later GOOD can ever exist. It means that none was found inside the deliberately bounded 8,192-window search.

PLNE scope

PLNE is an atmospheric flight director for manually flown shallow-ascent SSTO spaceplanes. It helps reduce expensive post-insertion plane changes. The bank cue is inhibited in vacuum and at inadequate dynamic pressure; orbital telemetry remains available.

Safety

The suite:

• does not write FlightCtrlState;
• registers no fly-by-wire or autopilot callback;
• does not control SAS, staging, throttle, or time warp.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. This suite directly links against Kerbal Engineer Redux, whose source is distributed under GNU GPL version 3 or, at your option, any later version.