For those that don't know, forge welding is the process of taking two pieces of metal and heating them together in a forge, then hammering them together into a single solid piece.
Concept: Have premade sections of ships that can be attached to another ship and merged together to become a single entity.
Example: Say I'm big on Star Trek ships. Star Trek ships re-use a lot of the same parts, like nacelles. Nacelles are large and unwieldy to try and do via copy/pasting, as well as having to crank up single player build area large enough to copy the entire thing off to save to a template and then try to juggle it into exactly the right position with the paste. It would be nice to be able to have a blueprint of a nacelle that you could essentially fly over and dock to another ship, and then merge it into the ship so that they become a single entity as if you had built it that way.
Implimentation: Since this will likely require a lot of processing to modify designs, its probably not something to try doing on the fly. Instead, we can use the shipyard Deconstruct to Design function to do it for us.
Two new types of blocks, lets call them Forge Rails and Forge Dockers. They act like normal Basic Rails and Rail Dockers while in astronaut mode. However, when a shipyard is given the Deconstruct to Design command, any entity docked via forge docking gets saved as part of the base ship. The second core, the forge rail, and the forge docker then get deleted from the design. When you next load the design, they are a single entity.
That way we could have pre-made design elements (like hull design elements, bridge modules, systems, or even complicated logic) that we can spawn in, put together, and then run it through the shipyard to forge weld them into a single ship.
Concept: Have premade sections of ships that can be attached to another ship and merged together to become a single entity.
Example: Say I'm big on Star Trek ships. Star Trek ships re-use a lot of the same parts, like nacelles. Nacelles are large and unwieldy to try and do via copy/pasting, as well as having to crank up single player build area large enough to copy the entire thing off to save to a template and then try to juggle it into exactly the right position with the paste. It would be nice to be able to have a blueprint of a nacelle that you could essentially fly over and dock to another ship, and then merge it into the ship so that they become a single entity as if you had built it that way.
Implimentation: Since this will likely require a lot of processing to modify designs, its probably not something to try doing on the fly. Instead, we can use the shipyard Deconstruct to Design function to do it for us.
Two new types of blocks, lets call them Forge Rails and Forge Dockers. They act like normal Basic Rails and Rail Dockers while in astronaut mode. However, when a shipyard is given the Deconstruct to Design command, any entity docked via forge docking gets saved as part of the base ship. The second core, the forge rail, and the forge docker then get deleted from the design. When you next load the design, they are a single entity.
That way we could have pre-made design elements (like hull design elements, bridge modules, systems, or even complicated logic) that we can spawn in, put together, and then run it through the shipyard to forge weld them into a single ship.