Has anybody made a space station with docked parts? I kinda want to make a wheel and spoke pattern space station. I've thought about doing this by docking segments of the ring to each other. This way my ship docks are face radially outward instead of confined to Starmade's grid. Has anybody done this?
I feel like it would work but there might be sever lag issues and problems with sections becoming undocked.
Yup, done that, never quite finished it. I ended up making use of "stacked" turret-axis connections to get "below 45 degree" rotation, and overlapping the oddball angle sections that met with plexdoors(open till moved into place, closed once they are already clipping).
pro/con: every section needed it's own area-trigger-fill(going into activation second time kills your gravity) tied to gravity for people to walk around the "outside" of the ring like a real ring-station would be. Even that is kinda glitch on gravity, and totally killed a lot of possible RP elements like doors or activation-blocks. Acted as an automatic "no weapons zone" to protect astros from handguns as a side-effect of the area-fill.
I suppose now-a-days the activation gates could do the auto-door functions and pressure-plates could serve others, while you could use green rail->basic rail conversion logic to do the clipping with "non door" blocks., but a floor and/or roof (walls of a "realistic" gravity ring) gravity is just easier with starmade. Probably the best option for the radial docks you're talking about.
I've helped with a modular "spawn station" to let players have a "faction room" for a recruiting office/dock, that's another benefit of docked/modular station pieces: more than one faction can control (parts of) it. You could in theory give multiple factions "reserved" docking points and/or areas that way, even if it's just control of a docking collar off the main rotator. Thinking a little more on it, you could have the docks at practically any angle using a turret rotator and clipping green-to-regular docks at an arbitrary point of a "main station" ring, then hollow out the main station's "wall" in that area to make the opening. It would certai9nly let you do more than the standard "6-faces-only(18 if you're crafty)" docking collars.
Oh boy, could there ever be Lag issues should something un-dock.
That right there is part of why the push to kill "internally docked reactors" was made. Every time one was damaged to the point of un-docking, the server it happened on nearly died. (and occasionally did die)
Yeah, that "lag' was mainly because people didn't fill their docked reactor rooms with plexdoors and leave them "closed" to force it into "already clipping, ignore collisions and just kick it out." Noobs using advanced tools improperly.