How about one giant door, or if you still want that lowering one at a time thing, like 4 doors. I don't know man, I shouldn't nitpick, but with so much effort put into this ship, it just seems like you should go hard in everything.
How about one giant door, or if you still want that lowering one at a time thing, like 4 doors. I don't know man, I shouldn't nitpick, but with so much effort put into this ship, it just seems like you should go hard in everything.
Don't forget that the plex doors benefit from 100% of the ship shields, and I added blast doors behind them for extra protection. So there's also a practical advantage to using plex doors.
Honestly though, I just can't be bothered with installing a rail door and dealing with all the issues that would inevitably arrise from it. Maybe once the ship is finished, that'll be part of the things I'll update.
I decided to redo the systems in the Reaper corvette (the one that goes in the large hangars). Turns out that I entirely rebuilt the thing, I'll probably be done with the systems tomorrow :D
So I'm currently faced with a dilemma, it's concerning the drone system. The current system is awesome, it's easy to do the initial drone load-up and to refill if drones get destroyed. However, that comes with a rather major downside: It takes around 20 minutes for the drones to get recalled, since they all have to dock 1 by one on one of the two pickup points (so 110 drones per pickup point).
I could modify it so that it'd have 44 pickup points, drastically decreasing the time required to recall the drones. However, the downside with that is that the system to replace missing drones would be SIGNIFICANTLY more complicated, and would require 44 wireless remotes to be linked to the station. (ok, there's an other way but the system would be pretty funky). There's also the fact that I don't want all my work to go to waste, since it took a really long time to make >_>
The more I think about it the more I know that I'll have to modify the system.... *sigh*
Oh yea, I forgot to mention, I completely refit the Reaper corvette that goes in the large hangars (Old corvette in the back, new in front/right):
Oh yea, and here's the fun part:
Yep, that's a turret :D
I'll release the updated version of the ship as soon as I get some small things sorted out (mostly systems). Still has that clear AI look. Let me know what you think!
Edit: Oh yea, I almost forgot to mention: I intentionally made it slimmer than the original, that way I'll be able to fit 2 in each hangar instead of 1, so 4 in total!
Edit: Actually, I'm pretty sure that setting fleet ships to idle also deactivates the turrets, so it wouldn't be an issue so long as I remember to set the fleet to idle while the drones and corvettes are in the ship. Kinda sucks, but it's better than nothing.
Edit 2: The drones derp out when they're set to sentry mode and ejected from the ship (they stop as soon as they leave the launch rail). So looks like I'm forced to use idle mode until they're launched anyways...
Now that pickup points are fixed I could actually test out the system. Turns out that getting 110 drones to load through a single pickup point takes for FREAKING EVER!!! (around 20 minutes). That's just not practical in-game. Therefore, I set out to modify the system to not only retain the ability to replace missing drones with a station (automatically), but also cut down on the recall time. The result was this:
(gif is 6x normal speed, it took around 1.5 minutes in-game)
As you can see, this is MUCH better. Like, I can actually play with this thing instead of waiting half an hour for the drones to load back up each time. What I did was give each column of 5 drones it's own pickup point. Now, you're probably wondering how the hell I can still replace missing drones easily. Well, like this:
There were two missing drones, and they got replaced.
That's just a rack floating on the right btw, a proper station would work the same way: By tossing drones into the pickup point. Basically, the drones get thrown from one "column" to an other with launch rails and pickup points, so they have the proper pickup point assigned when they get there. There's also logic to ensure that drones aren't sent to already filled columns.
That's at normal speed btw
I tested the system multiple times, it works flawlessly. Launching all the drones and recalling them so fast is really satisfying :D. Next thing I'll do is probably fill up the two tubes that are left at the front of the ship (with the doors) with mining drones, or something.
Either way, that's it for today! I hope you people like it ^_^
Now that pickup points are fixed I could actually test out the system. Turns out that getting 110 drones to load through a single pickup point takes for FREAKING EVER!!! (around 20 minutes). That's just not practical in-game. Therefore, I set out to modify the system to not only retain the ability to replace missing drones with a station (automatically), but also cut down on the recall time. The result was this:
(gif is 6x normal speed, it took around 1.5 minutes in-game)
As you can see, this is MUCH better. Like, I can actually play with this thing instead of waiting half an hour for the drones to load back up each time. What I did was give each column of 5 drones it's own pickup point. Now, you're probably wondering how the hell I can still replace missing drones easily. Well, like this:
There were two missing drones, and they got replaced.
That's just a rack floating on the right btw, a proper station would work the same way: By tossing drones into the pickup point. Basically, the drones get thrown from one "column" to an other with launch rails and pickup points, so they have the proper pickup point assigned when they get there. There's also logic to ensure that drones aren't sent to already filled columns.
That's at normal speed btw
I tested the system multiple times, it works flawlessly. Launching all the drones and recalling them so fast is really satisfying :D. Next thing I'll do is probably fill up the two tubes that are left at the front of the ship (with the doors) with mining drones, or something.
Either way, that's it for today! I hope you people like it ^_^
Finally had the energy/time to work on the ship a bit. I decided to modify the main engine cause the central section looks like crap (imo). Just letting you people know that the project isn't dead :p
Finally had the energy/time to work on the ship a bit. I decided to modify the main engine cause the central section looks like crap (imo). Just letting you people know that the project isn't dead :p
Looking nice. Logic on that drone setup must be a lot of copy-paste murder though.
Good work on it. But man, you've been working this thing for almost 2 years now, lol.
Looking nice. Logic on that drone setup must be a lot of copy-paste murder though.
Good work on it. But man, you've been working this thing for almost 2 years now, lol.
Yea, thank god for copy paste. I made one "tube" (so 1 column of 5) and copy pasted it to get the rest. I made the logic so that all the connecting blocks between each tube were side by side, so linking it up didn't take very loong. I had a bit of tweaking and logic to add but overall it cut down on the build time significantly. I'd still be linking up those logic gates otherwise, lol.
If I have some time and motivation I'll try to make a pack for people to easily make similar drone launch and recovery systems. The logic I used is fully modular already, so adding more launch tubes or stretching them out for more drones would be child's play.
That was the hard part, since I had to copy/paste the ring on a new entity and redo the entire cowling, the central section should be a lot simpler/easier to make.
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