Colour of planes for low altitude is unclear

[jorisrobijn]

I am mainly interested in VFR traffic, small airplanes. It struck me that I cannot distinguise between the colours of anything below 3000 ft. While there can be a lot of different altitudes in use below 3000 ft. I have once observed 3 planes flying above the same place on earth at different altitudes, all below 2500 ft! So I set my config to use bright red as the lowest altitude colour. Planes landing and taking off now are bright red, and green is shifted from 10000 ft to 5000 ft. In the config I used the following.

            h: [ { alt: 500, val: 1 },   // red
                     { alt: 1000, val: 30 },   // orange
                     { alt: 2000, val: 60 },   // yellow
                     { alt: 5000, val: 120 },   // green
                     { alt: 10000, val: 180 },   // cyan
                     { alt: 20000, val: 240 },   // blue
                     { alt: 40000, val: 300 },   // magenta
                     { alt: 60000, val: 360 } ], // red
            s: 100,
            l: 40,

This scheme also works well for airliners, it is very clear when the aircraft are descending or still climbing. See examples.

BTW, I noticed I couldn't set the colours and altitudes fully freely. Some combinations didn't yield good deep colours, and I had to change the altitude a bit up or down to get the specified deep colours. I also couldn't set a very low altitude. 500 is only barely low enough.

Would it be possible to set a scheme like this as default in the js code?

[mpentler]

I really like this colour scheme and I've decided to use it to better determine the routes on final and take-off from my nearby airport. I think the better granularity is ideal.

I'd support making it the default, but not sure if other people have comments or any possible problems with doing this.

edit: actually I don’t like it wrapping back around to red so I went for 330 at 60k. Tracks in ?ptracks don’t seem to have changed, but this is working great for 0-3k ft in the live view.