Ian Doncaster said: You can already approximately do this - from ~3km up, outside of masslock, point about 45 degrees up and charge FSD for low-wake, then boost. As soon as you enter orbital cruise mode, dive to just 1 degree above horizontal. You'll then accelerate gradually to 2500m/s - either eventually rising into full orbital cruise if you get high enough, or dropping out to normal flight if you dip to point below horizontal.



It's a little bit faster than you suggested and the height window is slightly different, but it's not far off. The major difference is not being able to point the nose downwards at all ... which a transitional mode like this might solve quite nicely. Click to expand...

Rather, climb to orbital cruise height where you enter SC, nose over to around 58 degrees down and drop until you enter glide, level off to around 6-7 degrees. You can glide at 2500mps for extended periods, I have travelled hundreds of kilometres like that. The advantage of doing it that way, POI's don't show up at all in SC whereas from around 35-40klms up POI's do show in glide, you can tell when you are the right height for them to show by the sudden jump in the altimeter, what us surface surveyors call "the tick". I usually descend until just above the tick height for the body then level out, travelling from around 40km high to around 7 or 8km, it's a simple right angle triangle calculation to work out the distance. For a start height of 40km and an angle of descent of 7 degrees you are looking at a distance travelled across the surface of around 260km at 2500mps.You can avoid blank spots in your survey by angling backwards at around 50 to 55 degrees as you climb to orbital cruise before nosing over, that gives you full coverage in most situations although of course testing is always useful just to make sure, I usually do this with a known fixed POI.This method has been discussed extensively in the surface features thread in the exploration subforum. For any bodies over a few hundred kilometres in radius this is a far faster method of surveying than normal flight at 1,000mps, and as mentioned does how up the surface POI's. Of course you sometimes get kicked out of glide by a mountain or other feature but thems the breaks, it's still faster for larger bodies.