Better Docking

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    Alright, here's an idea about docking.

    The current docking system is, as we all know, broken and flawed. When you go to dock a shuttle to your mothership, it docks, and ends up facing backwards, forcing you to change to a turret docking unit to make the thing face the right way. When trying to dock a turret, you have to CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK all friggin' day long in hopes that it will eventually not give you a "target not compatible!" message. The system needs improvement.

    The idea I have is this:

    Scrap the idea of a "docking area" altogether, and have a block which can be attached to any point on a ship (And face any direction) that can essentially "tether" itself to another like block on a station, or another ship. This block could be universal across ships and turrets, and simply allow any ship docked to it to pivot freely, much like a Turret Docking Unit does currently. When a ship is docked, it can fly away, say, two blocks before being pulled right back. This "tether" system could be universal for both ships and turrets.

    To make it a bit more interesting, you could make a ship of, say, over 2000 mass able to break the tether, and require a second unit. It could go up in 2000-mass increments as such, so that a 10k mass ship requires 5 docking units, and a 50k mass ship requires 25. If desired, docking units could also consume a fixed amount of power per second when active.

    I think most people would agree that this system would be MUCH better than the current one...
     
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    • Legacy Citizen
    i like the system there is now, especailly since you can now toggle between turrets.
     
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    My biggest frustration with the current system is the fact that you have to have hundreds and hundreds of inconvenient Docking Enhancer modules in order to dock a large ship to your station, and the sheer amount of these you need gets cumbersome, especially when playing vanilla, and having to sell fourteen shops out of docking enhancers in order to get enough for your station.
     
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    Basically, you build a ship that\'s nothing but a 10x10x10 chunk of whatever block you need (in this case, docking enhancers) attached to a core, save it to the catalog, and buy another one.

    I\'m assuming (hoping, even) that that exploit will be patched in the future, however.