How to improve the remote control feature of the docking beam

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

For those who didn't notice: You can activate/deactivate plex doors and lights (perhaps even more) with your docking beam. That is REALLY useful for opening a plexdoor-hangar-door to park your ship inside without having to leave your ship to open the door.

There is one problem with small hangars though. It can happen that your ship's core is still in the door while you try to use your beam to dock, which activates the plexdoor which gets your ship in it and then teleported away by the game to prevent FPS drop/lag.

A simply solution: Give it two firing modes. With left click you could dock, with right click you could remote control doors and such. This would make it way easier to dock in crowded hangars.

 

[Trinova]

I second this!

In addition, add a faction check since enemy ships can open hangars of your bases atm. While this isn\'t a problem on you home base it is a problem for carrier ships since the closed doors make your docked ships get protection from the the carriers shields. If the doors are open, your small ships might get killed while unmaned since opened plexi doors don\'t count as a barrier for projectiles and thus the area has no shields.

 

[Aryl]

I HAD NO CLUE DOCKING BEAM COULD BE USED FOR THIS.



THANK YOU STRANGER.

 

[Cee64E]

And it doesn\'t seem like it would be that hard to do either.... Gotta have a faction check though

 

[BigD145]

We need directional firing of said beam without turning the whole ship. This would probably fix your problem entirely and no new mode would be needed. You could just come into the hangar and position your belly perpendicular to the dock, then right-shift and look at the dock with your camera. You could also close plexdoors behind you without turning. Tie the docking beam to the camera view, please.

 

[Racr]

I can\'t even dock one of my ships because the beam isn\'t long enough, and it\'s nearly impossible to aim it through the bottom of the ship...

 

[BigD145]

Nearly impossible? Completely impossible. There is no directionality to the docking beam except straight forward of the ship block. Long or partially enclosed docking areas and long ships do not mix at all. Add plexdoors for less functionality. You have to at least get your ship core through the door before using your beam. The thing is, with a directional beam you only need to align yourself with the green box which you have to be able to fit in anyway to dock.



DIRECTIONAL DOCKING BEAM! NOW! DO IT!

Just connect it to camera view. Bam. Done. You could even closed the plexdoor behind you.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Greatly needed.

 

[validheadshot]

i second this! just spemt days building a massive ship i cant dock on home base, now i leave it floating in space

 

[lupoCani]

You have my full support on this. We really need a way to promote these ideas over the everyday warpgate, economy improvements and handgun suggestions.

 

[DrWhitePsyker]

Try Ctrl (or what ever you\'ve bound free cam to) and trying firing it then. It works for free-aiming of missiles, So I think it would work for the docking laser.

 

[BigD145]

right-shift

It does not work. That was the whole point of my original post.

 

[Kippeth]

When you consider this problem across all cases two other suggestions would solve your problems wonderfully.

The first is a camera fix. At the moment a rotated camera will still point towards the \"front\" of the ship. (So docking camers are out of the question at the moment unless you Right-Shift, Which kinda requires 3 hands.

The second is Docking block to Docking block connections. this allows you to place a specific location on your ship with which to dock to/from. so you can have a docking \'arm\" on your ship. and have better looking docking arrangements.