Hot Spot is a MIT-licensed Kerbal Space Program mod that displays better thermal data. It currently supports the following metrics:
- Temperature
- Thermal Rate
Hot Spot can display three kinds of temperatures:
- Skin Temperature — The temperature of the exposed surface of a part.
- Internal Temperature — The temperature of the interior of a part.
- Core Temperature — The temperature of the core of a part (for those parts with cores such as ISRU parts).
Thermal rate is the rate at which thermal energy is added or removed from a part. It is measured as energy per unit time, i.e. power. Positive thermal rates indicate a part is gaining thermal energy, negative thermal rates indicate a part is losing thermal energy. There are multiple kinds of thermal rates:
- Internal Thermal Rate — The change in thermal energy due to reactions/processes occuring within the part itself.
- Conductive Thermal Rate — The change in thermal energy due to being in contact with other parts.
- Convective Thermal Rate — The change in thermal energy due to being in contact with a fluid, like the atmosphere.
- Radiative Thermal Rate — The change in thermal energy due to the emission or absorption of light.
- Thermal Rate — An aggregate value of the four previous rates.
- Skin to Internal Thermal Rate The change in thermal energy due to transfer from the part's skin to its interior.
- Internal to Skin Thermal Rate The change in thermal energy due to transfer from the part's interior to its skin.
These metrics are can be displayed in one of two ways:
Hot Spot will add the metrics to the right-click context menu of all parts. Both the current and maximum temperature of a part are displayed and the unit can be changed between Kelvin, Celsius, Rankine, and Fahrenheit. Thermal rates are always displayed in units of Kilowatts (kW).
Hot Spot will also replace the stock Thermal Debug Overlay with one displaying the metric of the user's choice and will replace the standard black body color gradient with one that is more intuitive.
The color gradient used for temperature is as follows:
- Purple (0K)
- Blue (273.2K)
- Transparent (287.5K)
- Yellow (373.13K)
- Orange (0.67×Maximum)
- Red (Maximum)
The Maximum value depends on the scheme used:
- Part Absolute - The maximum temperature of the current part.
- Vessel Current - The maximum current temperature of any part in the vessel.
- Vessel Absolute - The maximum temperature of any part in the vessel.
The color gradient used for ideal temperatures is as follows:
- Purple (0K)
- Blue (0.8×Ideal)
- Green (Ideal)
- Yellow (1.2×Ideal)
- Red (Maximum)
Where Ideal is the part's "ideal" temperature, e.g. for resource converters its the temperature at which conversion is maximally efficient, and Maximum is the maximum temperature for the current part.
The color gradient used for thermal rates is as follows:
- Purple (Vessel Current Minimum, if negative)
- Blue (0.1×Vessel Current Minimum, if negative)
- Transparent (0)
- Yellow (0.1×Vessel Current Maxmimum, if positive)
- Orange (0.5×Vessel Current Maxmimum, if positive)
- Red (Vessel Current Maxmimum, if positive)
Hot Spot's CKAN identifier is HotSpot. It may be installed from the command line with:
> ckan install HotSpot
It can also be installed from the GUI.
- Download the distribution package from GitHub.
- Extract the contents of the archive to your KSP directory. This should create an
HotSpotdirectory under the<KSP>/GameDatadirectory. - Follow the installation instructions for all dependencies.
Right-clicking on parts will display enabled metrics. Pressing the TOGGLE_TEMP_OVERLAY key (F11 by default)
enables metric overlays. Dynamic configuration can be done by pressing the Hot Spot button in the application
launcher.
More features of Hot Spot can be configured by creating Module Manager patches against the default settings stored in
<KSP>/GameData/HotSpot/Configuration/HotSpot.cfg. How to use Module Manager is outside the scope of this README,
please see the Module Manager documentation for more information.