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Attach a ship to another


Aesir

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Hi guys,
I heard NQ will think about an element which allow your ship to be "docked" to a station, like some kind of plug in/out system.
But wouldn't it be cool to have a a ship attached to another ? Like if you have a big one you may want to attach few smaller ship to it or any DCU construction. If you can even make the LUA script interract with different DCU it would be a whole new world of possibilities... Like automatic fuel reload or reconstructible ship, would be a great thing for the market as well as you may upgrade just one part of you ship very easily (let's say new thrusters) as long as they are provided by the same company or so ...

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Yeah this would be awesone, and useful. I can think of a lot of uses. Issues arise however with things like ownership, piloting, etc.. JC did mention it in a Q&A once, about the potential for gameplay but also issues. 

 

So, merging ships would indeed have huge potentional, but I wouldn't count on it for a while. 

 

Edit: here's where JC spoke about it. 

Quote

Small ships docking inside of larger ships is definitely a planned feature. However, docking two ships of the same size together gets a little bit more messy. With that feature, large layers and chains of ships could be created. At this point, which player is controlling the physics?

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By your ship powers combined we are Captain Voxel Ranger Zord!

 

Actually I was just thinking about this as means for say, making voxel based weapons such as large torpedos. Things that hit with remarkable power and are partially self guided once you set them to target. They would of course take up physical space on the ship rather than storage.

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1 minute ago, Darkarma said:

By your ship powers combined we are Captain Voxel Ranger Zord!

 

Actually I was just thinking about this as means for say, making voxel based weapons such as large torpedos. Things that hit with remarkable power and are partially self guided once you set them to target. They would of course take up physical space on the ship rather than storage.

That would be closer though to things being docked. You could achieve what you said (kinda) with the mechanics already planned, except for the fact that torpedos aren't supposed to do any physical damage, as physical voxels won't destroy each other for server reasons.

 

Aside from that, in this thread I think we're talking more so about literally merging two constructs into one, to basically add to the original construct, rather than just put on a temporary part.

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1 hour ago, ATMLVE said:

Aside from that, in this thread I think we're talking more so about literally merging two constructs into one, to basically add to the original construct, rather than just put on a temporary part.

That's right, it should not be opportunistic docking, but rather something "planned" ie: you expect your ship to dock or to be docked by a certain already defined other DCU. But it could be unique in the technical point of view, but still exist several exactly same DCU construct you can dock with.
For example, you may have a big ship having a smaller one docket bellow your wings, if your small ship get destroyed you can still buy or rebuild the exact same according to a template. But you cannot dock anything you want, it must be the same.
That could be a rule to eliminate the chaining issue maybe. Altho, you can just says as JC said, only dock a smaller DCU to a bigger DCU.
In anyway, your "main" ship should actually have as many configuration as you can dock things to it, meaning that a chain ship wouldn't be possible unless someone planed every configuration.

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8 hours ago, ATMLVE said:

 except for the fact that torpedos aren't supposed to do any physical damage, as physical voxels won't destroy each other for server reasons.

 

Are you sure about that, since a ship falling towards a planet to fast will encounter huge damages hitting the ground. It's the reason of the existence of an emergency unit that will avoid this scenario. So, this idea of catapult or torpedo might work. But I see another limitation, each dynamic construct has to be propulsed by an engine. Here the velocity of the tropedo might be to slow (due to limited speed generated by the engine) to really provoke damages to the target.

 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, John said:

Are you sure about that, since a ship falling towards a planet to fast will encounter huge damages hitting the ground. It's the reason of the existence of an emergency unit that will avoid this scenario. So, this idea of catapult or torpedo might work. But I see another limitation, each dynamic construct has to be propulsed by an engine. Here the velocity of the tropedo might be to slow (due to limited speed generated by the engine) to really provoke damages to the target.

Yes I am quite sure; I can't find the quote where JC talks about voxel to voxel damage, but as far as hitting the ground goes, in the July devdiary it was stated that impact damage only occurs on elements; voxels are unaffected. Later on, I imagine it will probably be that voxels are only destroyed when a moving object hits a static one, and even then the voxel damage only affects the moving one, to avoid the incentive of using them as weapons. 

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This is something I strongly want in game, docking ship to ship.  I don't think it would be that complicated.  You could simply have a toggle switch for docking that sets your ship to either Master or Slave mode.  In order to dock to another ships docking port,  just set your ships docking mode to Slave, the target ship must have theirs set to Master mode.  This will allow you to dock and surrender all physics, controls, etc to the Master ship.  If you don't want intruders to dock just turn off docking altogether and then nothing can dock to your ship.  Of course Pirates can hail you on comms and force you to allow them to dock by threatening to blow you up. I know it will require coding work but I think it can be done and should be implemented at least by full release, preferably sooner as it opens up a lot of fun possibilities.

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Attaching one ship to another would have implications for the flight physics. Which pilot seat will be the one that controls this new unit ? Which CU will govern the attributes of the construct ?

 

If you "attach" 10 fighters to each other, should the resulting mega-fighter still fly and maneuver like a fighter, or should it now perform like a battleship ?

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In Empyrion game it's possible to dock small ships to Capital ship, if you have privileges to do so. No ownership or control rights are transferred. Both vessels are controlled separately. 

As they wrote on their forums things become complicated when you want to have more hierarchy in docking - when you want to dock a ship, docked to another ship. I believe DU should definitely have possibility to build some carrier ships, as this is logical that one big vessel may carry many interceptor class vessels. But there should be size/class/mass limits for it. For example you should not be able to dock a construct that is few times bigger so some small ship. Also docking means stacking mass, but that should not be a big problem. 

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33 minutes ago, NanoDot said:

Attaching one ship to another would have implications for the flight physics. Which pilot seat will be the one that controls this new unit ? Which CU will govern the attributes of the construct ?

 

If you "attach" 10 fighters to each other, should the resulting mega-fighter still fly and maneuver like a fighter, or should it now perform like a battleship ?

 

On 05/10/2017 at 4:24 PM, Aesir said:

In anyway, your "main" ship should actually have as many configuration as you can dock things to it, meaning that a chain ship wouldn't be possible unless someone planed every configuration.

You have a main ship, you can dock things to it, it must be pre-defined -> 1 attach = 1 exact construct design to be docked on.
You want to dock 10 ships ? fair enough, you can, but you have to pre-define the behavior of your main ship for any combinaisons.

 

EDIT:

8 minutes ago, Miamato said:

But there should be size/class/mass limits for it.

also this, because one attach must have a limit of weight.

 

EDIT2: It wouldn't be very convenient if you want to do a mother ship or something like "automatic fuel swap" or any "small" module swap. It may have some rules like : if the attached DCU is 3/4 times smaller than the main ship then just set the attach to weight a certain amount, wether or not something is docked to it, in the scenario it wouldn't be very realistic as a mother ship would have the same weight with or without its drones, but that simplify the process a lot.

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To me, "attaching" and "docking" mean different things.

 

Docking:

In the case of a carrier, any fighter docking on it becomes an inert piece of cargo. The only implications are the added mass of the fighter that would have a tiny impact on the flight performance of the carrier. Simple and straightforward: anything docked on your ship is just a piece of deadweight, until such time as it undocks.

 

Attaching:

Two constructs are "joined", and become a new construct temporarily. All elements of both constructs remain potentially active, but controlled by the "main" vessel. I see many problems with that idea.

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2 minutes ago, NanoDot said:

To me, "attaching" and "docking" mean different things.

Agree. So in previous post I was talking only about docking. 

As for attaching constructs together - this may be cool, but would be hard to balance and maintain. But probably this may be easier if we have some special module that marks one ship as primary construct (this module contains information about initial vessel borders and design), also it should have kind of 'consumer attaching' spots/modules. The other ships design to be attached have 'attaching provider' spots/modules and special module that marks it as secondary construct (again this module contains information about initial vessel borders and design),. In this case control over all the system always is granted to primary ship, secondary ships lose control over systems, except turrets or some modules that can be operated by direct interaction (not from cockpit), that means primary ship just becomes bigger and have more modules. In other words, even if this vehicles can be operated separately, you should design them together or at least considering properties of each other. In attached state you cannot modify any of the vehicles, when you want to separate them - constructs are split according to information stored in primary/secondary determining modules 

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1 hour ago, Miamato said:
1 hour ago, NanoDot said:

To me, "attaching" and "docking" mean different things.

Agree. So in previous post I was talking only about docking.

You're both right indeed
 

 

1 hour ago, Miamato said:

As for attaching constructs together - this may be cool, but would be hard to balance and maintain. But probably this may be easier if we have some special module that marks one ship as primary construct (this module contains information about initial vessel borders and design), also it should have kind of 'consumer attaching' spots/modules. The other ships design to be attached have 'attaching provider' spots/modules and special module that marks it as secondary construct (again this module contains information about initial vessel borders and design),. In this case control over all the system always is granted to primary ship, secondary ships lose control over systems, except turrets or some modules that can be operated by direct interaction (not from cockpit), that means primary ship just becomes bigger and have more modules. In other words, even if this vehicles can be operated separately, you should design them together or at least considering properties of each other. In attached state you cannot modify any of the vehicles, when you want to separate them - constructs are split according to information stored in primary/secondary determining modules 

That's exactly what I tried to explain earlier, I guess i explain it wrong :P

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5 hours ago, NanoDot said:

Attaching one ship to another would have implications for the flight physics. Which pilot seat will be the one that controls this new unit ? Which CU will govern the attributes of the construct ?

 

If you "attach" 10 fighters to each other, should the resulting mega-fighter still fly and maneuver like a fighter, or should it now perform like a battleship ?

I guess you didn't read my suggestion because I explained who would have control.

 

As for physics all you have to do is add each ships mass and thats how the the connected ships will behave.

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... and you have to take care that a ship can't use both special modules at the same time. If so then a ship with a ship with a ship construction is possible and that will get rather complicated.

 

Joining structures to build super space stations should be an easier task.

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5 minutes ago, Oije said:

... and you have to take care that a ship can't use both special modules at the same time. If so then a ship with a ship with a ship construction is possible and that will get rather complicated.

 

Joining structures to build super space stations should be an easier task.

Of course, there can only be one active Master ship. You have to be set to Slave in order to dock, once docked you cannot change your status to Master, the system simply won't allow a change.

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