Hotswap Shipyard Anchors for Pickup Rails

[Edymnion]

Working on my carrier/capital ship and I'm currently building with future updates in mind. Primarily at the moment I am building a small shipyard into the belly of my carrier that is just big enough to let it build it's own fighters so that it can replace any lost fighters/drones on the fly. Mostly this is just me building the bay and putting some orange hull in where I will later replace with shipyard modules once thats an option. Looks kind of like the belly bay of a Star Destroyer.

Thing is, when I say I'm building the shipyard and bay just big enough, I mean I'm only leaving a few blocks of clearance to either side. Its a ship, can't really afford to give it tons of space in there.

It would be very nice if I had the option of setting it up so that I could basically hit a launch button to eject the finished fighter out along a pickup rail until it cleared the main hull and then drop it off there in space under the ship. That way I wouldn't have to worry about collision checks as I try to fly it straight down to exit the bay.

Would also be quite handy for getting larger ships into shipyards to dock them for repairs if we didn't have to fly them far enough into the structure to reach the anchor with a docking beam, if we could instead shoot a hundred meter pickup rail out the back to dock to and let the rails move the ship in for us.

 

[terra mining corp.]

you can use launch and pickup rails to do this,what I want is the shipyard anchor to be switchable with rail so I can have anchors at different spots to fit all types of ship

 

[Scypio]

And you can directly dock to the anchor using a rail beam.

 

[Edymnion]

You can dock to the anchor using a rail beam, yes, I said that. But the beam has limited range, and if your ship is large and the shipyard is large, you have to get the ship half way in the yard before you're in range of the anchor, which means you have been flying several hundred thousand blocks inside the collision detection box of your station/whatever for a good ways at that point, which is a nightmare.

To my knowledge you can't get a ship to automatically dock with an anchor from a pickup rail, nor can you detatch from an anchor via logic.

Unless I'm just missing something?

 

[WeTitans3]

Wait, so Shipyards can go inside ships now? I thought they had to be stationary and attached to a station/planet/etc.

 

[nogg]

Wait, so Shipyards can go inside ships now? I thought they had to be stationary and attached to a station/planet/etc.

shipyards are a station only at the moment, but might be used on larger ships in the future

 

[Drakkart]

Wait, so Shipyards can go inside ships now? I thought they had to be stationary and attached to a station/planet/etc.

right now shipyards and factories are limited to stations planets or asteroids... does not make sense why this tech should not be available on ships.
the critical thing is haveing moving homebases but that is a different mechanic and thus a different problem nobody said we would want to homebase our flying carriers shipyards.

To solve the mentioned issue why not have a pickuprail right next to the anchor they have some area of effect with which you could achieve your task.

 

[Edymnion]

Wait, so Shipyards can go inside ships now? I thought they had to be stationary and attached to a station/planet/etc.

Devs have said that a Capital Ship update is coming that will allow us to designate one single ship as our faction capital, and that it will be allowed to have some previously station-only blocks.

We've seen suggestion threads where people asking for factories and shipyards on ships have been officially recognized by Schine.

2+2 means a lot of us are expecting to be able to put shipyards and factories onto the capital ships, so I'm building under that assumption so that I can retrofit those blocks in later.