Parking Break

[Stormraven]

I've been trying to build a kind of "parking break" that will allow me to safely charge my chain drive without worrying about taking off.
The (seemingly) simple answer I came up with was a docking lever. A 3 block entity that, when triggered via logic, will undock from your ship and get pushed over to a rail docker so that your entire ship is now docked to IT instead.

Unfortunately, this seems to blow the game's mind. It should be quite easy to set up, but I always seem to end up with either the toggle entity flipping out/ refusing to be docked to, Or my entire game just goes kaputs.

What is happening here, and have any of you found a way to make some kind of "warp break"?

 

[Sachys]

you could use an inhibitor and have it flip-triggered by the same setup as your chain - of course this would decharge the chain as well, but it would likely slam the brakes on.

 

[Nickizzy]

I've been trying to build a kind of "parking break" that will allow me to safely charge my chain drive without worrying about taking off.
The (seemingly) simple answer I came up with was a docking lever. A 3 block entity that, when triggered via logic, will undock from your ship and get pushed over to a rail docker so that your entire ship is now docked to IT instead.

Unfortunately, this seems to blow the game's mind. It should be quite easy to set up, but I always seem to end up with either the toggle entity flipping out/ refusing to be docked to, Or my entire game just goes kaputs.

What is happening here, and have any of you found a way to make some kind of "warp break"?

The problem is that an entity will not dock for four seconds after undocking as defense from auto dock problems.

 

[Stormraven]

The problem is that an entity will not dock for four seconds after undocking as defense from auto dock problems.

On the (rare) occasions I can get it to function at all, it will undock but then refuse to reattach. Ever. Even after the 4 seconds is up, it won't 'click'
[doublepost=1484867762,1484867505][/doublepost]

you could use an inhibitor and have it flip-triggered by the same setup as your chain - of course this would decharge the chain as well, but it would likely slam the brakes on.

My initial hope was to set up something that would allow me to run my chain drive in the background for a few minutes and get it FULLY charged without risking an unscheduled galactic roadtrip. XD

It would be easy if I could just do one way docking, undock, and GO, but the undocked entity would get left behind in the jump...
[doublepost=1484869366][/doublepost]I'm trying to make something like THIS: Shift your ship into Neutral with contact Docking [Not Future Proof]

 

[Sachys]

that makes more sense to me now! - sadly, i fear that kind of setup may be maming the issues (i doubt its application was ever intended). well, good luck!

 

[Stormraven]

Does anyone know if they ever actually instituted the "distance to restock" requirement?

 

[Tamren Shade]

Have you tried incorporating the new sensor blocks? If you set the sensor block to trigger at 95% jump drive charge, you might be able to tie that in with some AND blocks and a switch to turn off the charging until you're ready to charge that last 5% and jump. You'll probably need to incorporate an individual charge and jump system with every "cell" in your chain drive to get this to work properly.

 

[kingreol]

Jeskinaals xl chaindrive incorporates the sensor blocks. Have not used it, only concern is if it's more logic lag on servers

 

[Nickizzy]

For the docking thing, use pickup rails instead of counting on magnetic docking.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Hmm, I've had "issues" with pickup-rails too.

Needed to force-dock a same-faction ship to my station after fucking up with Symmetry. Forgot it was on, and wiped out the spot it had been docked to, and the player it belonged to was unavailable. (why yes, we set our ships to "personal" because we're paranoid asshats.)

Tried for literally an hour to get the little shit re-docked, finally gave up on getting it docked to the station, and tried forcing it to dock to one of my other ships.
It docked on the first try. -_-

Tried docking it to the station a day later, and it docked.

Literally the same dock set-up on both the station and the ship, but the station's first pickup-rail was just being a retard.
(and yet, a pickup-rail at the end of a shootout-rail never fails to work.)

 

[Stormraven]

Story of my life. XD

That sensor block idea sounds solid! One sensor per jump drive, all attached to the same wall of 20 activation modules... I could even make an "engineering" room where you could adjust the percentage values if you wanted.

Though now that I think about it, one sensor should work. Shut down the system the moment any drove reaches 95%. You won't get a full charge, but you can always have at least 1 jump ready... This calls for an experiment!

 

[Stormraven]

It works!!!

The setup to the lower left is a chain drive of my own design, which uses a web of randomizers to vary the tics and charge the drives.

To the lower Right is the sensor setup, which detects when any of the chained drives reach 95% charge. The upper right side is part of the "switch" setup. When a button in the main control room is pressed, a screen near the core states that the drive is now in charge mode and will not engage. The switch makes it so that as long as that button and the sensor are BOTH active, the drive will automatically shut down and a signal light will appear in the pilot's vision to let them know the break is on. Flip the switch and use the inner ship remote to start the drive again, and you'll fly off to the far ends of the galaxy.