Artificial Gravity Landing Pads

[Blodge]

I’ve seen a few people on the forums having issues with making general purpose landing pads that any ship can land on. This was talked about the most shortly after the docking update when you could no-longer dock any shape of ship provided it fit inside the old-style docker’s bounding boxes.


I’ve thought of 2 solutions to this; one simple but limited, the other with potentially additional uses.


1) Allow ships to activate gravity blocks with the Core beam. The whole ship would then be placed in the gravity field of the block in the same way a player is. You could place a gravity block in the centre of your Landing Pad/Hangar Bay, orient yourself level with the pad, shoot the block and then let gravity do the landing for you.

2) Create a new block called a Gravity Emitter. When activated, it creates an invisible box above it (say 7x7 metres in the X and Z planes and 3 in the Y plane) and anything inside the box (Players, Ships Asteroids etc.) are pulled “downwards” towards the block. One could then place a number of these across a Landing Pad/Hangar floor and any object coming within 3 meters of the surface would be pulled downwards.


I can already think of a few pros and cons for each idea (such as what happens when a heavier ship tries to “land” on a Gravity Emitter attached to a lighter structure) but would like to hear everyone else’s thoughts, please.


PS: Please don’t use the “Not enough spare block IDs” argument as a con.

 

[TrickyNicky27]

I get your point, but there is already a magnetic docking system for rails in the game, and there are pickup rails that can be used to emulate that same effect. I imagine that you're talking about ships just being able to fly into a hangar and land without the need of rail blocks.

 

[Ithirahad]

Ultimately what he's talking about is ships being able to fly into a hangar in the first place when a ship is moving, so that you can land on a dock or whatever. Currently your mothership has to be sitting still to do anything inside a hangar that isn't on rails.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

This would allow for easy alignment to a ship that is moving.
I can see this being useful in structures like Dyson sphere's and tube structures like Babylon 5 style stations.

Plus you could just use it as a general purpose gravity plating system for all structures without having to mess with manually activated gravity or trickery using tons of logic and area activation.
[doublepost=1484084657,1484084450][/doublepost]Option 2 I was referring to.

Oh yeah, the simplest solution for me would be to add this functionality to the existing block with on by default to bring new and fun features to existing structures. Naturally allowing for the logic control to turn it off, with also having a dependency on power to keep it running.

 

[Blodge]

Yes, I was thinking primarily of creating Star Wars style Hangars that you can just fly into and easily get aligned with the gravity. I also thought the Gravity Emitter could be used to help simulate rotational gravity effects on things like rotating ship sections, Halos and Ring Worlds. They could also be used on the outside of Space Stations or large space ships to create exterior surfaces a Player can safely walk along.

 

[Blodge]

Well, I guess the lack of argument indicates people like the Gravity Emitter idea

However, I was hoping for some critical feedback on how to implement this to test how robust the idea is. Some problems I can think of:

What happens if a ship with high mass flies into the gravity emitter field of a ship with low mass? Instead of the high mass ship being pulled "down" towards the low mass ship, should the low mass ship be pulled "up" instead?

What happens if a Ship/Player moves between 2 overlapping Emitter fields? Or ends up inside two separate fields at the same time? At what point should one field start impacting the object and the other stop?

Should the strength of the gravity field always be the same (like with the current Gravity blocks) or should it vary with the mass of the ship it's attached to?

 

[Nickizzy]

Well, I guess the lack of argument indicates people like the Gravity Emitter idea

However, I was hoping for some critical feedback on how to implement this to test how robust the idea is. Some problems I can think of:

What happens if a ship with high mass flies into the gravity emitter field of a ship with low mass? Instead of the high mass ship being pulled "down" towards the low mass ship, should the low mass ship be pulled "up" instead?

What happens if a Ship/Player moves between 2 overlapping Emitter fields? Or ends up inside two separate fields at the same time? At what point should one field start impacting the object and the other stop?

Should the strength of the gravity field always be the same (like with the current Gravity blocks) or should it vary with the mass of the ship it's attached to?

Attached to stations, so they can't pull eachother. If possible I'd like it if overlapping fields would combine, like in space engineers, and it work as long as some part was in the field(?).

Also, you could link fields together so they all were part of one field and you wouldn't have 5G landing pads.

 

[Blodge]

Attached to stations, so they can't pull eachother.

Good thinking! Making it a station only block is a great way to avoid most of the complications of having a block which is able to emit gravity also be able to move about It would mean you couldn't have a "free" landing pad on a large ship, but I guess most Carriers are designed to carry a specific type of ship anyway. Space stations are definitely more likely to need some kind of generic landing area that can accommodate a variety of ship shapes.

If possible I'd like it if overlapping fields would combine, like in space engineers, and it work as long as some part was in the field(?).

Also, you could link fields together so they all were part of one field and you wouldn't have 5G landing pads.

The problem with combining overlapping fields is what happens when they overlap like in the below pic?


This kind of overlap would be necessary for things like Halos to work.

Perhaps it would be better to have a system similar to the original docking mechanic which allows you to extend the field in the X and Z axis by linking "booster" blocks in the desired direction? This would allow a Player to turn gravity off and on using logic over a large area by only having to activate the main Emitter block and not link to all of the other blocks which are emitting the same field.

 

[SkyHawk024]

I can get behind this idea, personally I would be using it both on space stations and ship hangers. The over lapping gravity at different angles would be a problem but at the same time pointless because the developers do not have to make them as a sloped block i'd like to see this feature in a future update with great enthusiasm as I tend to build custom ships without docking features and it would make things easier to be able to actually land in a station or hanger bay of a ship.

 

[kiddan]

I would love to see artificial gravity to this extent in-game. Two things that come to mind, however:

• Collision detection nightmares need to be prevented or lessened. This can be done in a few ways, be it ignoring ships above a set mass, only attracting ships that are between 0.5 blocks and the max range (essentially holds entities with auto dampeners), or snapping affected ships to any block in the effect area until the ship receives pilot or foreign collision input.
• Gravity pads should attract two entities towards each other unless one has more or less mass, allowing docking, a form of suction, and possibly repulsion. The passive stop and/or explosive effect would prevent ships from pulling or sticking to you, a reasonable boarding/power trade-off.

 

[jayman38]

I hope magnetic blocks are still planned for this game's future. Gravity in this game just isn't very good, and certainly not good enough for docking purposes. It would be better to have a block that allows a ship to magnetically attach itself and align itself to any structure, whether it's another ship, an asteroid, planet, station, or anything else. Effectively, a magnet block is just like this gravity block, but in reverse: it goes on the "child" entity, to attach to a "host" entity.

Structures should get optional gravity-everywhere blocks, where any entity coming into the structure's field-of-influence, get full gravity effects, to start falling down in relation to the structure. Lots of people have wanted that structure-wide gravity field ever since I've been in the game.

The game doesn't take mass into account when calculating interactions, so smaller "host" structures will not be pulled up when larger structures enter the gravity field. The larger structure will be pulled down by nature of the game's design. Exceptions could be programmed in, but something will inevitably be missed. Even if nothing is missed, it will create a bunch of extra code that will cause the landing process to be even laggier than it is already.

tl;dr: Bottom line: a magnet block will be superior to a small-area all-entity gravity field block in almost all circumstances. Of course, that doesn't mean that both kinds of blocks can't be developed, but I'd rather have the priority be on magnet blocks first. Schine likes to make multiple things that share similar game mechanics, so these two similar kinds of blocks might come out at once.

This game mechanic might get more attention if it can be applied to more things than just docking. What else can it do? Can it influence the new proposed power update? Can it do something fun to NPC characters and animals? Can a chamber full of these blocks give a ship antigravity? Etc.

 

[Valiant70]

2) Create a new block called a Gravity Emitter. When activated, it creates an invisible box above it (say 7x7 metres in the X and Z planes and 3 in the Y plane) and anything inside the box (Players, Ships Asteroids etc.) are pulled “downwards” towards the block. One could then place a number of these across a Landing Pad/Hangar floor and any object coming within 3 meters of the surface would be pulled downwards.

HOLY HAX THAT'S A GREAT IDEA!!! I want this to completely replace the current gravity blocks because this makes sense and the current gravity blocks make none at all.

 

[Blodge]

HOLY HAX THAT'S A GREAT IDEA!!! I want this to completely replace the current gravity blocks because this makes sense and the current gravity blocks make none at all.

Glad you like the idea!

I don't think this should replace the existing system entirely though. The current Gravity blocks are very useful if you want a consistent gravity field throughout a whole structure. Imagine how many emitter blocks you'd have to place on a large Station or Titan ship just to make everyone fall in the same direction?
Also the current blocks are great for making gravity lifts which would be more complex with the Emitters.

 

[Edymnion]

I like the emitter idea. Star Trek multiple times have mentioned gravity plating being underneath the deck floors in order to generate the artificial gravity.

Currently for my ships and stations, I'm very careful about putting gravity blocks connected to area sensors across doors so that it automatically turns on/off as you enter/leave a ship/station, but that has it's limits.

Good example, try making a train or tram car in a station. Just a flat platform on a rail with a button to make it quickly move sideways. The car will move out from underneath you instead of carrying you along. Trying to mix and match area sensors to transfer you to the docked entity's gravity just gets wonky and potentially puts you in zero G if you do it wrong. Emitters of some kind under the rails or in the floor of the rail car would help that greatly.

 

[Madman198237]

Sorry, but I'm not going to read all the replies, so I don't know if this was mentioned at all---how about allowing a ship to "align" to another ship with the use of a core block beam, but it only works IF the second ship is faster in all dimensions that the target ship. Basically, the "aligning" ship would stay oriented the same relative to the bigger ship---just like astronaut mode, but without auto-rotation.

Basically, picture a ship spinning in space. There is a smaller ship orbiting that ship, so that, according to a person on the spinning ship, the smaller ship is NOT MOVING. The smaller ship CAN move when aligned in this way, but only to a point---get too far out and you won't be able to keep pace with rolls and stuff.

This would also allow for ship-to-ship BOARDING.

Dangit, I might have to go make an actual suggestion for this mechanic. It won't be for a couple of hours, though.