Land Vehicles-Hear me out

[EffectivePawn]

I was flying my giant cruiser around and found a desert planet. I didnt want to get too close because then my ship would not be able to get airborne again. So I got out, floated ever so slowly to the planet, and set about to collecting cacti. I hated it. I want to be able to zoom around and use salvage cannons to harvest things, like a mining truck. Then I thought, if they add hostile mobs or pirate planets, my rover would get attacked, so I would need AMC cannons on the rover. These thoughts lead to this:

A new core that allows you to create a Land Vehicle that is fully customizable.

I know wheels could be a challenge, so how about tracks? add a track block and the more you have in a line, the faster you can go. Or have a hovercraft, like a Sand Skiff from Star Wars that uses thrusters to float one block off the ground. Ships can tilt on StarMade so when going up hill (only one block difference allowed) the craft can tilt to show it is climbing. They can be as large as you want with the same limitations as ships such as power, thrust, mass, etc. Players can roam around and harvest things, fight wildlife or pirate rovers!

To get on and off the planet, players could make platforms that only have power modules and thrusters with a docking module for the rover. Players would dock the rover to the platform and the craft would take off and fly to the capital ship and dock inside a hangar. To be able to get lift and everything so you can leave the planet, players will have to limit the size and weight of their rovers.



Just an ideas I thought was interesting. Heck, this could lead to players making race tracks on their space stations and having players compete in chariot races lol. Let me know what you guys think!

 

[Charlie_]

..anyone else check the /data/config/ files? There\'s a whole bunch of declared wheel and land vehicule physics or something. Don\'t think it\'s any more than that, but hey, it was planned at some point, it seems.

 

[MikeV37]

Make a small shuttle that have a larger thrust to mass ratio. Then use to to fly around the planet.

 

[Insanity Ape]

That what MikeV37 said, or you can just try to roll your ship so it falls off the planet

 

[Comr4de]

Is planned*

 

[CorneliousCrowe]

I think Schema plans to add larger planets to game, with gravity physics on both sides. It would be sweet to have a tracked vehicle (wheels are for chumps) that could move over the rocky surfaces. The tracks could be made from standard blocks, with \"end pieces\" which are simply sloped versions of themselves, to keep it simple. I think the way to program them would be to make them clip into things, and then push themselves out of the block away from the center of gravity. This way your rover is always above the blocks when stationary, and would be able to move downhill and up hill. I also thought it might be cool to have docking blocks on the vehicles act as trailer hitches, allowing for severate parts of the rover to move independantly. A limitation for this might be length vs mass, where longer objects would need to be broken up in order to move over the terrain effectively. Another solution would be to have deeper treads so that more clipping can occur over a longer section of the vehicle.

Standard arrangement, where < > symbolize end pieces and O are the main tread blocks.


For longer rovers, a tread like this might be neccissarry:

 

[Wavelength]

Unless what Cornelious said about bigger planets is true, then there really shouldn\'t be land mobs. x3 The planets are WAY too small for anything like that.

 

[Charlie_]

Let us rejoice for the eventual puny land crafts we can obliterate from orbit!
Plus. With the way planets look atm, driving on a lot of them would be quite impractical. It\'s not like you can\'t walk to the other side in less than 5 m either..

Maybe then we\'d see the appearance of huge anti-orbital land platforms. Then again, why wait for land vehicules to do that.

 

[Hierarch]

This would also help moving around in titans, like my planed 12km long ship, it would take me forever to move around the ship unless i have a vehicle and i prefer not to have things that float moving around my ship like a fracking monitor from halo.

 

[MikeV37]

That problem has occurred to me as well. How well does the collision system detect nearby blocks?



Could you make a rail system like

XXX

XOX

XXX

and have a 3-4 block train inside of it rolling from side to side?



Or will the collision system glitch out and die?

 

[Hierarch]

Havent tested that though a rail system was planned origanally

We need a new post on rails also

 

[EffectivePawn]

I am pretty sure they are planning to add larger planets, and they are definitely addings structures and wildlife to the planets. I have been taking with Schema about the planets and he is adding possible cities and other strcutures to planets, so we may be looking at hostile mobs on the ground, and not everyone has a planet-buster. I reckon I could use a small shuttle to mine the planet\'s surface but if planets get larger, a rover would be much more fun, not to mention racing the buggers. If anything they could be used to transport goods like animals from the surface to your ship (once they get added, along with hunger) I feel like land vehicles would be a nice touch to the game and maybe even give way to more features. If they add the oxygen necessity, not all planets will have oxygen so if you wish to explore the structures being added, then you will need a way to move around, and your rover would have an oxygen supply while driving it. I think my idea is a bit ahead of the game development.

 

[Insanity Ape]

I\'ve said this multiple times in other thread when they spoke about vehicles, the chance for tanks would be awesome. Attacking bases with tanks especially if the planets are bigger could be something to look for, I wonder if you can make one look like a mobile suit like this one. Placing long Missle pods on the shoulder and instead of arms they would be turrets, the turret docking module would at like the elbow, and the forearm would be long Cannons.

 

[Winterhome]

All of my land based vehicles don\'t actually have thrusters. Why? Because they\'re cubic or have paddles.
I rotate them to launch myself across the landscape in the most nausea inducing manner possible.

Was considering making a line of tanks with a fairly low thrust to mass ratio using hardened hulls, power, shields, and missiles - but honestly, that\'s too much of a pain :P

 

[H0II0W]

welll honestly i dont think land veichles would be good for this game 1 planets are small and u can travel across them in a very short amount of time easier just to keep spare cores around not hard at all.

 

[Nootau]

I thought of another use for tracks. What if a spacestation could have a gravity generator which applied gravity not just to astronauts but also vessels within a given area? This would allow ships on stations to be used to litterally be cargo transfering machines and allow better storage of fighter crafts as you can shelf them without needing to space them greatly for a docking array.

 

[EffectivePawn]

and adding a rover build block could be a stepping stone to more features based around planets. Say they add farming so you can get food for your faction. Why not have a rover with a harvester or something so you can harvest the wheat fatster? If we add rovers, we can have land-based warfare against pirate structures. Maybe a new gamemode where teams fight over one planet using only rovers. Giant race tracks spanning multiple sectors so you can drive your rover and have a death race-like thing going on.

 

[King Chameleon]

Man, I just want a bicycle.

 

[CorneliousCrowe]

Yes definitly for the land based combat. I actually just noticed how much the combat system would resemble Halo (high jumping, personal shields, etc) And i think this would be an excellent addition. It should not be a different game mode, simply a way to set up a really cool location where players can be \"stranded\" on a planet by a mother ship and are forced to duke it out to the last man standing. Or factions could battle over territory rich with resources.

And I looove the idea for farming and harvesters. These could be like cannon arrays, only each facing would be downward and would function as an output. They would \"suck\" up farmable items, which perhaps could be replanted by a seperate array? This allows for automation later in the game using the Bobby AI, but early on the player would need to gather the resources by hand.

 

[KuramaFox]

Said block would push the ship they are on away from other objects that are close to them (like a planet surface). Stick some on the bottom and you have a hovercar. Much less messy then dealing with wheels, particularly for the concept of going up shallow hills (\"stair\" hills don\'t work well for wheels, but a block that pushes the ship away from a surface will just suddenly be closer to it and push up some more).



I suppose you could also use it to make \"space bumper cars,\" since the block would also push away from other ships. For the sanity of the game engine, it would ignore Newton\'s third law though, and would ONLY affect the ship its attached to (it would not have any effect on the other object). So if you came close to hitting another ship and the block was able to push you away from it before you hit it, the other ship would remain stationary.



Give the block a push range of 3, and a push power that differs based on how far it is from another object, and it works well enough. This way, you can also build \"tires\" under them if you want some.



While we are at it, lets add ladders. When landing on a surface, be sure to bring ladders. That is what Kerbal Space Program taught me, and my limited experience with trying to land on planets here also suggests it could be useful.