Function to anchor a ship while undocked

[Dr. Whammy]

This is a simple request.

Create a function that will quickly stop your ship's movement and rotation and attempt to hold it in position, using the power of its thrusters. This would be similar to thrust dampening in the trust management window but much more powerful. It would also persist in the same way dampening does; through exiting the ship, spawning in a BP of it, re-logging, etc.


How this feature would work:

When moving by any means other than its own thrust, (tractor beams, collisions, that weird cavitational bug that bumps away nearby ships, etc.) your ship would apply full brakes, rotational stop and reverse thrust to bring it to a full stop as quickly as the ships thrusters will allow.


Purpose:

- Prevent small-medium strength collisions with other objects from sending your unmanned ships and turrets-in-progress spiraling out of control. As it stands now, the existing dampening function is far too weak and often lets ships get several sectors away before they begrudgingly come to a complete stop.

- Compensate for heavy cannon recoil at the expense of the energy used by firing your thrusters.

- Restore the ability to make mobile non-station bases for a nomadic play-style. This used to be possible by using "anchor stations"; small accessory stations that you can dock a large ship to in order to provide basic station functionality (respawn, small factories or a shop) but usually not as extensive as a full station (shipyards, large factory arrays, warp gates, etc.). It is no longer possible to do this because only the parent entity of a docking hierarchy can have an active reactor and working turrets. You are also, limited to the parent entity's reactor regen in terms of shield recharge for the docked ship.

Edit: Ideally, this feature would render a ship completely stationary and immovable until sufficient force is applied to over-power its thrusters and knock it out of "anchorage". Please see post #4 where I go onto a little more detail on this.

Feedback would be appreciated.

 

[jayman38]

I'd prefer if we could give ships specific fleet instructions to remain at a certain point. That way, if they are knocked out of position, they eventually make their way (again, using full thrust) back to where they are supposed to be. Stopping as quickly as possible just isn't even enough.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

So basically, Space Engineers inertial dampeners? Yes, that would be very very nice.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

So basically, Space Engineers inertial dampeners? Yes, that would be very very nice.

Close. This system would essentially put your thrusters in an always-on state in order to maintain the ships position and orientation; possibly at the expense of increased power draw, even beyond what is needed to fire the thrusters.

You would issue a "maintain position" command in the thrust menu that, when activated, places an "anchor point" at your ship's core's current location and orientation. Your ship would then become immovable (up to a point) to all collisions, cannon recoil, tractor beams, planetary gravity, etc. Collision damage would still apply when active and the feature would turn off if you attempt to move the ship.

To keep things realistic, there should also be a threshold at which this feature is rendered ineffective and shuts off; reverting to regular dampening to bring the craft to a stop.

Examples;
- a star destroyer pushing a corellian corvette
- a ship with insufficient thrust to negate planetary gravity
- a ship caught in a black hole
- a ship rammed by another ship of similar mass at full speed
- a ridiculously overpowered charge cannon that instantly throws you backwards at high speed

jayman38,

For craft whose "anchorage" is "broken" by sufficient force; once the craft comes to a stop, your idea may work well by providing a location memory system that allows the craft to re-establish its anchorage. Members of that ship's fleet would maintain a position near the anchored fleet leader.

What do you think?

 

[jayman38]

Yes, it would be good to be able to establish an anchor point/fleet command centered on an object that can move (asteroid, other ship entity, etc.), as well as a point/sector in space.

 

[NTIMESc]

The general idea, of being able to "park" the ship without docking is great. I don't think it should be in the thruster menu, though, as that is more low level tuning of thruster performance. It should probably be in the navigation window, and be bindable to a hotkey. Another option would be to have it built into the Rail Docker with a right-click to park the ship.