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 two kinds of temperatures:

• Internal Temperature - The temperature of the interior of a part.
• Skin Temperature - The temperature of the exposed surface of a part.

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.

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 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 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.

1. Download the distribution package from Kerbal Stuff or GitHub.
2. Extract the contents of the archive to your KSP directory. This should create an HotSpot directory under the <KSP>/GameData directory.
3. Follow the installation instructions for all dependencies.

• Module Manager

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.