Look upon my suggestion and rejoice! A simple way to simplify docking.

[FlyingDebris]

TIS I, THE GLORIOUS DEBRIS!

Fear not, mortals, I have come up with a solution!

Ok, so you all have probably had those moments when you make a docking port, only to have the ship not fit. So, you look at the port, and the blue box that surrounds your ship, and wonder "Gee, which dimension do I expand the port on?"

WELL I HAVE A SOLUTION

Instead of having the blue box surround the ship, leaving you to guess, have the box appear around the dimensions of if the ship had docked successfully. This way, all you would have to do is look at the two boxes, and see where the blue box is outside of the green one.

 

[Zedrackis]

Its not a solution, its just lazy. You could just put down a set of side struts at the corners to mark the size of the dock. This way you leave space for protruding turrets and leave the dock easy to move into and out of while still marking the correct size prior to docking.

 

[SgtFlexxx]

As much as I would agree with Zed, the only problem I see is that docking always originates from the core, making you have to accomodate for it's position in your ship. For example, if you have the core at the very front of the ship, then you have to double the length of your ship on the z-axis or else it won't let you dock, since it HAS to dock at the very front where the core is. If you manage to place the core directly in the middle, you're making your docking as efficient as can be because you don't have to double the docking length. I haven't docked anything in a while or played with it, but im pretty sure this is how it still works.

I think your suggestion is nice. However, it would be nice to get some actual LxWxH numbers for the docking area as well as your ship's bounding box.

 

[Daxwern]

I do think that for docking, the middle of the ship should be the point in which dictates how it docks, and not the core, because even the best of builders can not always know exactly where the middle of their ship will be when they start out.

As for the docking area, i think that a grid or number system should be added so that you can see by how much you need to expand the docking area so that your ship can dock. instead of having to keep guessing and mis-calculating most of the time.

Either or both ideas will probably help with docking, but whether they get added in one way or another is entirely up to schema :P

 

[sayerulz]

I'm going to guess that someone bumped this with a post that got insta-deleted.

 

[Lukwan]

As much as I would agree with Zed, the only problem I see is that docking always originates from the core,

(necro) Core no longer dictates docking position. This thread has been obsolete since the docking update. (rail dockers are the thing now.)